|
 |
|
The Kyiv City
Organization
|
of the All Ukrainian
Memorial Society of V.Stus |
|
|
| Panels 38-39 |
|
|
|
Whereas panels 36 and 37 of the exposition conclude the treatment of the postwar
period of the final decade of Stalin’s dictatorship, panels 38 and 39 hark back to
1946–1947, when famine struck another blow in Ukraine. The famine began with a
drought that devastated the southern oblasts of Ukraine. Instead of organizing aid to
this region, Stalin cynically connected this famine to manifestations of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the spring of 1947 Khrushchev, who until Lazar Kaganovich’s
arrival was the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Ukraine and head of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote several letters to Moscow. According to
documented proof in the form of memoirs, Stalin called Khrushchev a “Ukrainian
bourgeois nationalist” and categorically forbade any assistance to Ukraine.
During this period grain was being exported from the USSR, and the president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, whose country was one of the beneficiaries of these grain exports, declared: “The Soviet Union has saved us from starvation.” Other data indicates that at the very time that people were dying of
famine in Ukraine, Poland received shipments of 200,000 tons of grain and
France–500,000 tons. A horrifying but little known fact is that during this period
various branches of the Registry of Births and Deaths in Ukraine alone registered
nearly one million deaths by starvation. In recent years several books have been
written on the famine of 1946–47. They are based on unique documents revealing
the true situation in Ukraine, which was experiencing a third famine. With the
aid of Ukrainian currency, i.e., Ukrainian grain, Moscow was feeding the
Communist regimes that it had created in Eastern Europe.
 1946-1947
|
|
back
