In the early 1930s, Stalin gave orders for "Kulaks," Ukrainian peasant-farmers to be liquidated as a class. Soviet authorities collectivized all Ukrainian farms, and then confiscated all the grain grown there.
In 1932-33, a famine occured, but Soviet authorities confiscated the grain for shipment to other Soviet Socialist Republics and for sale to Europe to get the hard cash to fund Soviet industrialization.
Around 3.5 million Ukrainians died in the resulting terror-famine, or Holodomor.
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty knew of the terror famine, denied the Holodomor was happening because it undermined his communist ideology. Duranty won a Pultizer for his reporting from Moscow.
Recently an archivist found some hard evidence of the Holodomor: A sample of Soviet "bread."
Oleksiy Sorokin was a 55-year-old music teacher and choir conductor at a church in Kyiv in 1932 when he wrapped one of the scraps in a note and hid it in his home. the NKVD found the bread and his notes and admitted them as evidence in Sorokin's trial for "disloyalty to Soviet society." Sorokin was convicted, shipped to Siberia, where he died. No record has been found of what happened to him. He just disappeared from the records.
Sorokin's note showed harrowing details of the Holodomor:
In 1932-33, a famine occured, but Soviet authorities confiscated the grain for shipment to other Soviet Socialist Republics and for sale to Europe to get the hard cash to fund Soviet industrialization.
Around 3.5 million Ukrainians died in the resulting terror-famine, or Holodomor.
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty knew of the terror famine, denied the Holodomor was happening because it undermined his communist ideology. Duranty won a Pultizer for his reporting from Moscow.
Recently an archivist found some hard evidence of the Holodomor: A sample of Soviet "bread."
Oleksiy Sorokin was a 55-year-old music teacher and choir conductor at a church in Kyiv in 1932 when he wrapped one of the scraps in a note and hid it in his home. the NKVD found the bread and his notes and admitted them as evidence in Sorokin's trial for "disloyalty to Soviet society." Sorokin was convicted, shipped to Siberia, where he died. No record has been found of what happened to him. He just disappeared from the records.
Sorokin's note showed harrowing details of the Holodomor:
Sorokin said:"Here is a sample of bread that was consumed by farmers in the spring of 1932. ... In Kyiv, we still have some bread and are not yet dying of hunger. But we don't have enough to eat. The hunger is terrible. ... The sample of the farmers' bread is attached. I don't know the ingredients of this bread. This sample is for you to know."
That is some political-economic system.Sorokin said:"In the spring of 1933, hunger hit all the Kyiv residents so hard that we used anything we could find for food. ... Instead of bread, we baked flatbread from acorns and potato peels with other additions. I've left that kind of bread for future generations so they would know. How terrible this hunger is! Horrible!!!"
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