Five thousand pages about the Holodomor

On 18 August 2006 as reported here (http://khpg.org/en/1155815293) the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) made public five thousand pages about the Holodomor (the Famine) of 1932-1933. These documents about the Genocide of Ukrainians appeared in print for the first time. They can now be read on the Internet.

The documents just published were previously classified “top secret”.  They include internal KGB [then GPU] correspondence, criminal cases, propaganda leaflets and diaries of witnesses. The only thing that the documents do not reveal is the names of those people involved in cases of cannibalism.

The Head of the State Branch Archive of the SBU Serhiy Bohunov believes that the documents will make it possible to determine the role of the DPU [State Political Department] in the Genocide. 

“They do not give the answers to all questions about the Holodomor. However they make it possible to gain an idea about the part played by bodies of the DPU in the Holodomor. They provide answers as to which instructions of Party bodies were received by DPU bodies, how their enforcement was organized, how they were carried out and how they reported on their activities”.

Historian Stanislav Kulchytsky comments that such documents were never previous published. The very fact that from now on anyone can gain access to the harrowing testimony from seventy years ago will have huge significance for younger generations.

“There are extremely interesting documents which demonstrate the mechanisms of the actions of the DPU in 1932-1933.  It was the structure of a dictatorship, parallel to the Communist Party – Soviet machine which had total independence and a direct link to the Kremlin. We can now see how it all took place, the mechanism for creating the Terror through starvation, and the result of this was the Holodomor.”

The Holodomor of 1932-33 according to experts claimed the lives of between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians. People who lived through this Genocide are still unable to hold back the tears when they remember that time. One of the survivors was Nadiya Rohozyanska, who in 1933 was six years old. She recounts:

“Everybody kept themselves to themselves, my mother bolted the gate, and screamed that we mustn’t go beyond that gate because they were eating children out there. That was terrifying. And how many they buried who were still moving. Why?  So that they didn’t have to come again. Today he’s still moving a bit, and tomorrow they’ll have to come again. There weren’t any horses, or a cart, or people to take them. So those who were still alive were dumped on the same cart and flung in the grave”.

In 2003 the Verkhovna Rada recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide. 25 nations of the UN prepared a joint statement in which they name the Holodomor in Ukraine the result of the policy of a totalitarian regime. The heir to the USSR, Russia, does not consider itself to blame for the artificially-created Famine in Ukraine. The Russian Ambassador in Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin wanted even to advise Ukrainians to ask for apologies from Georgia. After all that’s where Joseph Stalin was born.