Denying the Holodomor

It is all too true that the novelty and mismanagement of collective farming, plus the quite efficient conspiracy of Feodor M. Konar and his associates in agricultural commissariats, have made a mess of Soviet food production. (Konar was executed for sabotage.)

But---to put it brutally---you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs . . .

There is a serious shortage food shortage throughout the country, with occasional cases of well-managed State or collective farms. The big cities and the army are adequately supplied with food. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

In short, conditions are definitely bad in certain sections- the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga. The rest of the country is on short rations but nothing worse. These conditions are bad, but there is no famine . . .full text

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The distress in our home has increased 100%. Oh Lord, we are helpless and destitute. Our hands are bound for ever. Oh Lord, please stop our tears!

We no longer have a bed for each person. We now sleep four to a bed, my husband sleeps on the table. Now we want to forget everything, then it won't hurt so much. Oh Lord, hunger is so painful. We ate rotten turnips for five weeks that my husband, little children and I went begging for. But now we no longer have any more left, and the sack is empty.

. . . We have been eating grass for the past two weeks. I even went to a little hill where a dead horse lay, and ate some of it.

My husband is ill, his body is swollen, my children are swollen. The doctor claims that the people will be dropping like flies, due to the hot weather. Forty people have already been buried every day in a neighbouring Russian village. A German village lays claim to fifteen dead per day. Whole families lay unburied on the paths of the steppes for weeks. No one cares. Cats and dogs are eaten.

An underground trade organisation has been formed in the nearby town of Armawir, where people are slaughtered and are turned into sausages and cutlets, to be sold for food.

Some of our neighbours in our village have desecrated graves by digging up bodies and pulling out gold teeth with pliers, to sell in Torgsin for products. The Bible says: The Ashes should lay in peace! Even the dead have no peace.

Why do we suffer so much? . . . Bread was taken from us, grain, everything that we call corn; different types of seeds, vegetables, everything was collected and taken away by the State.

All the potatoes, meat, eggs and dairy products. We have nothing! Oh Lord, where can we find help, who will pity us? Oh dear uncle, please find help for us unhappy people. Oh, pity us. Oh brothers and sisters, may the Lord put this letter into your hands. Please put your hands together to save us from starvation. Oh, help, help, please, please! Soon I will no longer exist, soon the flood of death will wash over me, I will die soon . . .full text

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"This correspondent is traveling through the principal grain regions to check reports published abroad that a new famine exists or impends . . .Thus far no famine has been found nor an indication of famine in the year to come, though many peasants must draw in their belts and eat food they do not like until the 1935 harvest . . .(I have feasted upon) milk from contented collectivized cows and honey fresh from the hives of Bolshevik bees." . . .more

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The present Russian famine is as bad as the great starvation of 1921, when millions died, according to Gareth Jones, private secretary to David Lloyd George, former British Prime Minister, who just reached here today after a long walking trip through the rural districts of the Ukraine.

Mr. Jones will deliver an official report in London to the Royal Institute of International Affairs tomorrow explaining the conditions in Russia and the reasons underlying them. He speaks Russian fluently and, while all foreign correspondents mostly were forbidden to visit the famine regions of the Ukraine, Jones was allowed to do so.

His report explains the dislike of the Russian authorities to having conditions in the Soviet investigated.

Mr. Jones saw famine on a huge scale and the revival of a murderous terror . . .(snip)

Everywhere I heard the cry:

‘There is no bread: we are dying!’ This cry is rising from all parts of Russia: from the Volga district, from Siberia, from White Russia, from Central Asia and from the Ukraine black dirt country. I saw a peasant pick up a crust of bread and an orange peel which I had thrown away in the train.

“Soldiers warned me against travelling by night, as there were too many desperate men about. A foreign expert who returned from Kazakstan told me that 1,000,000 out of the 5,000.000 of inhabitants there have died of hunger.

Hatred of Shaw.

“After Dictator Josef V. Stalin the starving Russians most hate George Bernard Shaw for his accounts of their plentiful food, whereas they are really starving . . .full text

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"Mass explusions are the only way to start on their vision of a new society. . .The whole bloodbath debate is unreal. What future could possibly be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now? . . .Americans are guilty of cultural arrogance, an imperial assumption, that ... our way of life would be better"--Anthony Lewis ,The New York Times.

"It would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior (mass executions) as national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."--Sydney Schanberg, The New York Times.

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SonWorshipper said:

Didn't I also read somewhere that it was the NYT that was denying the Holocaust as well? Who owns that paper, anyone know?

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