Madam, - Having read the article "Ukraine clashes with Russia over 1930s famine" by Peter Finn (The Irish Times, April 29th), I would like to enlarge readers' knowledge of the great famine in Ukraine, or as we Ukrainians call it, Holodomor.
Holodomor, which literally means "hunger plague", was one of the largest and most inhumane catastrophes suffered by the Ukrainian nation with the loss of millions of lives. It occurred as a result of the Soviet policy of crushing the Ukrainian nation as a troublesome opposition that endangered the unity of the Soviet empire.
In seeking international condemnation of the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, Ukraine is not looking for revenge and is not accusing any country, but rather the totalitarian Stalinist regime. And I was quite astonished that this tragedy of the Ukrainian nation is presented in the article in the context of Ukraine-Russia bilateral relations. Mr Finn cites Russian researchers in this context. But I would like to draw the attention of the author to an article by another Russian researcher Sergey Sklyarov, published in Moscow's Nezavisimaya gazeta on November 21st, 2007, which expressed a less prejudiced attitude to this issue.
Official data from censuses in 1926 and 1939 in the Soviet Union show an increase in population in Russia by 28 per cent during the period, in Belorussia by 11 per cent and in the USSR by 16 per cent on average. As to the decrease of 10 per cent in Ukraine, experts believe this means that several millions of Ukrainians were exterminated in only a year.
Ukrainian and foreign scientists have revealed incontestable evidences that the tragedy was caused by deliberate actions by the authorities aimed at the extermination of the Ukrainian people by means of famine. Not only grain, but also all possible foods were expropriated from the Ukrainian people. Any delivery of food to Ukrainian villages was prohibited. Starving Ukraine was isolated from the other regions of the USSR; the free movement of Ukrainians into regions not affected by the famine was prohibited and all the borders of Ukraine and of the South Russian regions populated by Ukrainians were sealed.
In August 1932, members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union received authorisation to confiscate all grain from peasant households. Later the same month, a law that carried the death penalty for the theft of "social property" was introduced. Thousands of starving people caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective silo or farm were executed on the spot. One third of our villages were put on the "black list". They became famine ghettos. And all this happened long before Hitler's activities.
These actions by the former Soviet regime have all the features of genocide according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, dated December 9th, 1948. Our duty is to condemn the mass killings committed by totalitarian regimes in the past in order to prevent similar crimes in the future. The time has come to appeal for the universal condemnation of the Soviet Communist terror which exterminated millions of Ukrainians and of other nationalities including Russians, Crimean Tatars, Bylorussians, Jews, Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks and others.
We should say to all the apologists of Stalin's regime that attempts at justification are in vain because no justification of those crimes can be given. I am convinced that my comments will be understood here in a country that survived the Great Famine almost a hundred years before the Ukrainian Holodomor. - Yours, etc,
BORYS BAZYLEVSKYI, Ambassador of Ukraine, Dublin.