Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, by Miron Dolot, Adam B. Ulam (Introduction). 1987

The Holodomor Was No Misstep or Accident. It was an Act of Sustained Genocide. Remember Black Ribbon Day

This review is dedicated to the 85th anniversary of this tragedy. Miron Dolot is the pseudonym of a Ukrainian who went through the 1932-1933 famine, later fought in WWII and was a prisoner of the Germans, and who finally emigrated to the West after the war.

AGAINST THE COMMUNIST DEMONIZATION OF PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

Strictly speaking, the Ukrainian farmer should not be called a peasant, because he was not a farmhand, nor a serf: “…the Ukrainian SELIANYN was a free Cossack-farmer before the Russian occupation of Ukraine.” (p. xiv). Contrary to Communist propaganda, the kurkul/kulak was not usually particularly wealthy, and his success did not come from exploiting the poor. It came from initiative and hard work.

THE SOVIET AUTHORITIES DID NOT MERELY ACCOMMODATE OR TOLERATE STARVATION. THEY ACTIVELY PROMOTED IT

Far from being an incidental by-product of collectivization, the mass starvation of Ukrainians was very deliberate. In fact, so scrupulous were the Soviets in confiscating the last traces of feedstuffs hidden by Ukrainian farmers that they checked everything imaginable. (pp. 166-167). They overturned the cribs of babies (p. 167), tore apart the chimneys and ovens, holed the walls and floors (p. 208), destroyed the fields and gardens (p. 229), and sent horses walking all over the fields in the belief that a horse would abruptly stop at, or jump over, a buried food-storage pit. (p. 167). Dolot survived this genocide because his family had very creative hiding places for feedstuffs. (pp. 170-171).

CONSEQUENCES OF THE MAN-MADE GENOCIDE-FAMINE

The people ate almost anything: rotting food, dogs and cats, wildlife, frogs, weeds, tree bark, insects, etc. Cannibalism existed, and mothers cooked the bodies of their own children. (p. 199).

Suicides were quite common. Corpses lined the roads in winter. Cemeteries were overflowing, with people too weak to bury their dead. Beggars were everywhere. People bartered their last valuables, and even robbed the graves for jewelry. (p. 178).(This is reminiscent of the later poverty-stricken WWII-era Poles who dug up the sites of mass murders of Jews.) In time, villages became silent ghost towns.

NO HOLOCAUST OBFUSCATION: THE HOLODOMOR WAS GENOCIDE

Dolot refutes those who suppose that the targeting of the Ukrainians was incidental: “It finally became clear to us that there was a conspiracy against us; that somebody wanted to annihilate us, not only as farmers but as a people–as Ukrainians.” (p. 175).

Even if the Soviet leadership was primarily motivated by enforcing collective farming, they knew, or should have known, that it would cause millions of deaths and they knew, or should have known, that most of the victims would be Ukrainians. Therefore, the leadership of the Soviet Union, if not guilty of genocide by direct intentionality, is certainly guilty of genocide by oblique intentionality.