The Liberty Papers

During one horrible year starting in 1932, the truth of Stalinism came to be seen in the massacre by starvation of as many as ten million people in what has come to be known as the Ukranian Terror Famine.

The massacre started 75 years ago today when the Soviet Government issued an order increasing the portion of their harvests that Ukranian farmers were required to give to the state, and it resulted in a wholesale collectivization of agriculture in the region. Now, the government of Ukraine is seeking official recognition for what some say was the massacre that gave Hitler the idea that murdering every Jew in Europe might just be possible:

KRASYLIVKA, Ukraine (AP) — After authorities broke into Yakiv Atamanenko’s home in autumn of 1932 and confiscated the family’s food, his mother and two brothers died of starvation and their bloated bodies were tossed among others in a freshly dug grave on the outskirts of this farming village.

Mr. Atamanenko and other survivors said their neighbors, Oleksandra Korytnyk and her husband, ate their two children. “They cut their children into pieces and ate them,” recalled Mr. Atamanenko, now a frail, gray-haired 95-year-old.

In the end, he and others said, the Korytnyks died as well.

Today, Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across what was then the U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions perished.

It will offend the heck out of the Russians, but it’s time that history recognized an event as equally evil as the Holocaust.