On November 23, Ukraine pays tribute to the victims of the Holodomor. Long before the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, Stalin organized ethnic cleansing through starvation. His victims are 7 million. Ukrainians.
According to the scientists, the then Kharkiv and Kyiv regions (now Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv, Cherkassy, Kiev, Zhytomyr) suffered the most from the famine. They accounted for 52.8% of those who died. The mortality rate of the population here exceeded the average level 8-9 times and more. In today's Vinnytsia, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk regions, the death rate was 5-6 times higher, in Donbas – 3-4 times. In fact, the famine covered the entire Central, Southern, Northern and Eastern parts of modern Ukraine.
In practice, this meant the physical extermination of all class and national "enemies" of the Stalinist regime, that is, of people who had their own opinion about the development of the "bright future".
In the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. The country produced 20% of the world's wheat production, 43% - of barley, 10% - of corn. But this was in the conditions of a market economy and private property. During the military communism (1918-1921), the Bolshevik government left the peasant only 14 kg of grain per month, confiscating the rest. In protest, Ukrainians stop production. There is a shortage of foodstuffs, and in the Russian region of Volga - famine. Older Bulgarians probably remember how grain was collected in Bulgaria to help the starving in the Volga region. But then no one asked themselves the question, is the drought the only reason for the lack of bread in Russia?
The NEP (New Economic Policy) launched by Lenin, adopted in March 1921, gave hope to the Ukrainian peasants, many of whom after the 1917 revolution have acquired land. Instead of confiscating the grain, a tolerable tax is introduced. The peasants put the surplus wheat on the market. Compared to 1913, which is considered the "peak", in 1927 the cultivated area in Ukraine increases by 10%. Then the Ukrainian village was dominated by small and medium-sized producers. Wealthy peasants were only 5% and owned 40-60 decares of land. The population of Ukraine then was around 28-30 million.
With Stalin's rise to power, politics changed. The Kremlin is betting on collectivization in agriculture.
In 1929-1930 Stalin launched an attack against the leaders of the Ukrainian village - the well-to-do people, and later - against the average producers. 850 thousand were deported to Siberia. Ukrainians. This did not break the resistance of the Ukrainians against the collective farms. In March 1930 Stalin published in “Truth“ his program article “Dizzy with success”. It signals a temporary suspension of forced collectivization.
Immediately 50% of collectivized Ukrainians leave the collective farms. But this time the state creates unbearable tax conditions for the private individual, provides low-productivity plots. And the peasants again return to the collective farms. However, production continues to decline. In 1931 30% of the harvest remained unharvested in the field, and in 1932 sown areas decrease by 20%. And to feed the cities and to import equipment for industrialization, grain is needed, which for Moscow is equivalent to currency. Stalin's envoys - Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich - arrive in Ukraine. Together with the repressive organs of the state, they began to confiscate even the grain that had been set aside for sowing. Mass starvation begins.
It is estimated that in January 1933 the average Ukrainian peasant family (5 people) has 80 kg of grain and until the new harvest, i.e. until August, each member of the family had to consume no more than 2 kg of bread per month - 60 g per day. It is known that when the Ukrainian village dies, grain is shipped abroad from Odessa. The earned currency is used to import turbines and other heavy engineering equipment for industrialization. In the USSR, Ukraine provided 38% of the grain.
Private ownership of land in Ukraine has deeper traditions than in Russia, and so Ukrainians resisted collectivization longer. "The instinct for private property in Ukraine is stronger than in Russia", noted the famous Soviet writer Vasily Grossman.
For Stalin, taming the Ukrainian countryside through starvation was also a means of weakening Ukrainian nationalism. "The rural question is the basis of the national question," the leader of the world proletariat often repeated.
After the end of World War II, Stalin decided to re-educate the Ukrainians through starvation.
But these same statistics show that in the summer of 1947 in Ukraine there were 1.154 million dystrophies. Mostly peasants and workers died of hunger - Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Bulgarians, Gagauz. It even goes as far as cannibalism.
In his letter to Nikita Khrushchev, head of Ukraine, a senior party functionary in Odessa wrote: "When I entered the house of a collective farmer, I saw something terrible. The woman had cut open the corpse of her child and said: "Manechka, we have eaten it, and Vanechka, we will sprinkle it with salt and save it for later". She went mad with hunger and slaughtered her children.
But Stalin did not believe these signals. "Everything is a lie,- he says to his entourage.- You want to touch me to open the state reserves".
And let us bow our heads before the Bulgarian victims of the Holodomor. It is known that there are two large Bulgarian diasporas on the territory of Ukraine – Bessarabia (today Odesa Oblast) and Tavria (today Zaporozhye Oblast).
Bulgarians settled in Bessarabia at the end of the 18th century and the first three decades of the 19th century, fleeing from cruel Turkish slavery. And the Bulgarians moved to Tavria in 1860-62. from the Bessarabian Bulgarian villages.
During the two Holodomors of 1921-23. and 1932-33. the Bulgarians in Tavria gave a total of about 30,000 victims. Until the beginning of the Second World War, the Bulgarians in Bessarabia were within the borders of Romania. In the winter of 1946-47 the Stalinist government also organized the Holodomor in Bessarabia (Moldova and Odesa regions of Ukraine), during which more than 70,000 ethnic Bulgarians died.
In total, about 100,000 Bessarabian and Taurian Bulgarians died in the three Stalinist Holodomors, which is a third of their number. The tragedy of the Ukrainian people is also a Bulgarian tragedy.
The most starving people were at the end of February 1933. They were mostly collective farmers... The starving people consumed various surrogates (corn stalks, grain husks, straw, rotten watermelons and beets, potato husks). There are cases where people feed on cats, dogs and dead horses. 28 cases of cannibalism were registered, 19 of them in the Kyiv region. In February, 13 cases of consumption of dead people were registered.
Aleksandrovsky, assistant head of the secret-political department
...The cannibals I saw and talked to are poor, middle class, collective farmers and sole producers, left without a livelihood. They all give the impression of brutally hungry people who have no desire except one - to eat anything, at any cost...
Report by O. Odintsov, Minister of Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR