“Only a Socialist bureaucracy can create shortages in a fertile country.” – Jean-Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish, 1983; p. 319
Putin is personifying his hero Joseph Stalin by creating another Holodomor. He is using his pipeline to create similar results in Europe that Stalin obtained against Ukraine. Biden is creating the same energy-based Holodomor by shutting down America’s oil and gas producing capabilities, financially-based by bankrupting Americans, and economically-based by implementing draconian quarantine policies that ruined American society for the foreseeable future. California’s policies are just a pre-cursor to the Biden Administration’s plans for the rest of America.
The Holodomor (‘to kill by starvation’) was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor famine was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. Some historians conclude that the famine was planned and exacerbated by Joseph Stalin in order to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.
Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR, and as a result was hit particularly hard by the famine. A joint statement by the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million died. The famine’s widespread impact on Ukraine persists to this day.
Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means “death by hunger”, “killing by hunger, killing by starvation”, or sometimes “murder by hunger or starvation.” It is a compound of the Ukrainian holod, ‘hunger’; and mor, ‘plague’. The expression holodom means “to inflict death by hunger.” The Ukrainian verb moryty means “to poison, to drive to exhaustion, or to torment.” The perfective form of moryty is zamoryty, ‘kill or drive to death’. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, published in 2004, described as “artificial hunger, organized on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country’s population.”
From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in towns were drastically cut back, and in winter 1932–33 and spring 1933, people in many urban areas starved. Urban workers were supplied by a rationing system and therefore could occasionally assist their starving relatives in the countryside, but rations were gradually cut. By spring 1933, urban residents also faced starvation. At the same time, workers were shown agitprop movies depicting peasants as counterrevolutionaries who hid grain and potatoes at a time when workers, who were constructing the “bright future” of socialism, were starving.
Evidence of widespread cannibalism was documented during the Holodomor. Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was “not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.” The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. The Soviet regime printed posters declaring: “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.” More than 2,500 people were convicted of cannibalism during the Holodomor.
According to Natalya Naumenko, collectivization in the Soviet Union and lack of favored industries were primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and evidence shows there was discrimination against ethnic Ukrainians and Germans. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce.
In Ukraine, collectivization policy was enforced, entailing extreme crisis and contributing to the famine. In 1929–30, peasants were induced to transfer land and livestock to state-owned farms, on which they would work as day-laborers for payment in kind. Collectivization in the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainian SSR, was not popular among the peasantry and forced collectivization led to numerous peasant revolts. The first five-year plan changed the output expected from Ukrainian farms, from the familiar crop of grain to unfamiliar crops like sugar beets and cotton. In addition, the situation was exacerbated by poor administration of the plan and the lack of relevant general management. Significant amounts of grain remained unharvested, and—even when harvested—a significant percentage was lost during processing, transportation, or storage. In the summer of 1930, the government instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. Food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years imprisonment.
Under the collectivism policy, farmers were not only deprived of their properties but a large swath of these were also exiled to Siberia with no means of survival. Those who were left behind and attempted to escape the zones of famine were shot. There were foreign individuals who witnessed this atrocity. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British journalist, described the peak years of Holodomor in these words:
“At every [train] station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering icons and linen in exchange for a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows—infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks.”
Blacklisting was one of the elements of agitation-propaganda. A blacklisted collective farm, village, or raion (district) had its monetary loans and grain advances called in, stores closed, grain supplies, livestock, and food confiscated as a penalty, and was cut off from trade.
The passport system in the Soviet Union (identity cards) [i.e. COVID Card] was introduced on 27 December 1932. Individuals not having such a document could not leave their homes on pain of administrative penalties, [COVID Card] Joseph Stalin signed the January 1933 secret decree restricting travel by peasants after requests for bread began. Soviet authorities blamed the exodus of peasants during the famine on anti-Soviet elements, saying that “like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power.” [MAGA Americans]
There was a wave of migration due to starvation and authorities responded by introducing a requirement that passports be used to go between republics and banning travel by rail. During a single month in 1933, 219,460 people were either intercepted and escorted back or arrested and sentenced. It has been estimated that there were some 150,000 excess deaths as a result of this policy.
“Red Trains” took the first harvest of the season’s crop to the government depots. During the Holodomor, these brigades were part of the Soviet Government’s policy of taking away food from the peasants. A factor contributing to a surge of deaths within certain region of Ukraine was the relentless search for alleged hidden grain by the confiscation of all food stuffs from certain households, which Stalin implicitly approved of reminding Ukrainian farmers of the severe penalties for not surrendering grain they may be hiding.
Despite the crisis, the Soviet government refused to ask for foreign aid for the famine and persistently denied the famine’s existence. What aid was given was selectively distributed to preserve the collective farm system.
This perspective is argued by Michael Ellman to have influenced official policy during the famine, with those deemed to be idlers being disfavored in aid distribution as compared to those deemed “conscientiously working collective farmers”. In this vein, Olga Andriewsky states that Soviet archives indicate that the most productive workers were prioritized for receiving food aid. [In America, the Biden Administration prioritizes the “deserving” by the exact opposite criteria.]
Food rationing in Ukraine was determined by city categories, occupational categories, status in the family unit (with employed persons being entitled to higher rations than dependents and the elderly), and type of workplace . [New York more brazenly prioritizes rationing by race.]
The mass repressions of the 1930s resulted in the arrest and execution of over 1,500 Ukrainian speaking intellectuals. Many teachers of the Ukrainian language were arrested and exiled from the region. By 1932, all Ukrainian language education establishments were closed.
The names of places such as the rural town of Kiev were changed to “Krasnoartilyevskaya”, Uman to “Leningrad”, and Poltavska to “Krasnoarmieiskaya”. The physical destruction of all aspects of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian population, and the resultant ethnic cleansing of the population, This is known as “Cancel Culture” in the United States.
Despite attempts by the Soviet authorities to hide the scale of the disaster, it became known abroad thanks to the publications of journalists Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ewald Ammende, Rhea Clyman, photographs made by engineer Alexander Wienerberger, etc. To support their denial of the famine, the Soviets hosted prominent Westerners such as George Bernard Shaw, French ex-prime minister Édouard Herriot, and others at Potemkin villages, who then made statements that they had not seen hunger [like the Black, Lesbian, Immigrant Biden spokesperson claiming the U.S. border is not open].
The Soviet Union long denied that the famine had taken place. The NKVD (and later KGB) [DOJ] controlled the archives for the Holodomor period and made relevant records available very slowly. The exact number of the victims remains unknown and is probably impossible to estimate even within a margin of error of a hundred thousand. However, by the end of 1933, millions of people had starved to death or otherwise died unnaturally in the Soviet republics.
Holodomor denial [like Open Border Denial] is the assertion that the 1932–1933 genocide in Soviet Ukraine either did not occur or did occur but was not a premeditated act. Denying the existence of the famine was the Soviet state’s position and reflected in both Soviet propaganda and the work of some Western journalists and intellectuals including George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty, and Louis Fischer. In Britain and the United States, eye-witness accounts by Welsh freelance journalist Gareth Jones and by the American Communist Fred Beal were met with widespread disbelief. In the Soviet Union, any discussion of the famine [pandemic] was banned entirely. Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky stated the Soviet government ordered him to falsify his findings and depict the famine as an unavoidable natural disaster, to absolve the Communist Party and uphold the legacy of Stalin [BIDEN].
