From zodiac@io.org Mon Jul 26 14:10:00 1993 The following is a transcription of an award-winning historical documentary. Visuals are not included. Square brackets have been used to aid comprehension in places where the lack of pictures adds confusion. The massive Ukraine famine, in which millions died, is an often overlooked area of 20th century history. -------------------------------------------------------------------- HARVEST OF DESPAIR The 1932-33 Man-made Famine in the U.S.S.R. produced by the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee, Vladimir's Institute, Toronto 1988 NARRATOR: The year: 1933. The place: the Soviet Union. Behind the facade [of celebratory parades], food is being used as a weapon against peoples who have proven troublesome to Moscow. Famine is engineered, deliberately, in the North Caucasuses, the Volga Basin, and the Ukraine. The Soviet secret police seal off Ukraine's borders - no one can get out, no food can get in. A nation the size of France is strangled by hunger. In less than two years, ten million people die, seven million of them in Ukraine, and three million of them children. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (British correspondent): There was a total absence of any kind of sympathy. JOHANN VON HERWARTH (former German attache to Moscow): When you revive this terrible past, you are always shaken again, it always moves you again. You can't get rid of these terrible pictures you have seen,or the certain reports you got in this period. MOTRIA DUTKA (former Ukrainian village midwife): The nearest city was 40 miles, so I walked but once a week or so to that city. I could buy with my salary two loaves of bread a month. That's the only way we could survive. But the peasants... were dying. LUBOV DRASHEVENSKA (student during famine): This was the first time in my life that I saw people dying. And... of course... it was very hard. -- The Revolution -- NARRATOR: The untold story of Ukraine's darkest tragedy begins at a time of great optimism and joy, in March, 1917. A tidal wave of revolution sweeps aside the once-mighty Czarist empire. National boundaries change rapidly with the dramatic shift of power. Ukrainians grasp the chance to reclaim their independence, after 200 years of Russian domination. Kiev, Ukraine's ancient capital, is once again the seat of government. Ukraine's rich and fertile land has supplied Europe with grain for countless generations - even the ancient Greeks depended on her abundant stores of wheat. History has taught Ukraine that freedom has a price. The people prepare to defend themselves against all invaders. In December, 1917, having consolidated Bolshevik control in Russia, Lenin prepares to reclaim the former Czarist territories. In four ensuing years of chaos, Ukrainians fight Lenin's Red Army, Denikin's White Army, Germans and Poles. However, whether an army marches in as enemy or ally, the price is always measured in tonnes of food. This bountiful country is slowly bled dry. In 1921, the dust of battle finally settles: Russia has retaken the major part of the country. Western Ukraine is carved up between Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. The Soviet conquerors ship out more and more grain to feed Moscow. A draught dds to Ukraine's misery. Millions die as the 'breadbasket of Europe' experiences its first famine. It is, however, but a preview of the tragedy to follow. -- Calm Before The Storm -- To end the continued resistance to Bolshevik rule, Lenin adopts a new economic policy. Grain requisitions are cancelled. The peasant farmer is allowed to trade freely on the open market. The impact on Ukraine is dynamic - 80% of her population are farmers. Hoping to win further support, Lenin tolerates the national revival that has been gathering momentum since the 1917 revolution in Kiev. Ukraine's blossoming renaissance is so successful, Lenin's successor, Stalin, views the loss of Russian influence with increasing alarm. Ivan Majstrenko was a marxist instructor of journalism in Soviet Ukraine. IVAN MAJSTRENKO (former professor of journalism - translated): A meeting of the Politburo heard a report that students in Kiev no longer wanted to speak Russian. Everyone was shocked. How can that be, they asked? Well, in Ukrainian schools of the 20's, the Russian language was treated like French, German, etc. - that is, as a foreign language. And that's why students who came from Ukraine schools didn't know Russian. And not knowing Russian constituted a clear threat that Kiev would eventually become the capital of an independent Ukraine. NARRATOR: Thousands of Ukrainian-language parishes spring up across the country. For the first time since the 17th century, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church re-establishes its independence from the Moscow patriarchy. In the arts, the flourishing avante garde models itself on Western, not Russian, culture. Literary circles abound, writers and poets encourage a uniquely Ukrainian literature. Ukraine's leading Communist writer, Mykola Khvylovy, elaborates openly on the dangerous slogan 'Away From Moscow.' Even the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Mykola Skrypnyk, sees the U.S.S.R. as a kind of League of Nations, and he argues for greater cultural and political autonomy in order to win Ukrainian's over to communism. JAMES E. MACE: (Harvard University): Mykola Skrypnyk clearly saw himself as an equal to Stalin, as an independent national ruler. When he went to Moscow, he would take a translator - even though he spoke perfect Russian. He tried, with some success, to establish a cultural protectorate over Ukrainian communities in Russia. He even called for the direct annexation of border areas with a majority of Ukrainians to Soviet Ukraine. He was actually making territorial demands against Stalin. -- Stalin Turns His Attention to Ukraine -- NARRATOR: By 1928, Stalin is the law unto himself. This efficient and ruthless administrator has eliminated all effective opposition within the Politburo. The dream of a world-wide communist revolution has not materialized. As Stalin strengthens communism within the borders of the U.S.S.R., Russian nationalism is increasingly injected into his policies. The strong cultural individuality of the Ukraine is no longer tolerated. In 1929, Stalin strikes at Ukraine's heart and mind: it's church and intelligentsia. Over the next few years, the systematic liquidation of intellectuals is carried out by the Communist regime in Ukraine. Five thousand scholars, scientists, poets and artists, prominent during Ukraine's independence, are arrested for allegedly belonging to a secret organization the Soviets claim is planning an armed insurrection. Only 45 get a public trial. No evidence is considered necessary. Thousands upon thousands are imprisoned, deported, and executed later, as mass arrests continue throughout the 30's. Even the church is accused of being involved in this alleged plot. ALEXANDER BYKOVETZ (priest, survivor from Poltava- translated): Many priests were arrested, many were sent to Siberian concentration camps... many were shot. My father was one of them [who went to Siberia]. He never came back.... Thirty bishops were martyred, thousands of priests perished, and hundreds of thousands of faithful were liquidated. FEDOR SHPACHENKO (priest, survivor from Kiev - translated): The church was full of people... Some communists rode inside the church on horseback and ordered them to undress. It was March. There was snow outside. The snow was melting and I walked in water up to my knees, while they rode on horseback. They interrogated me, and I didn't answer their questions, for which I was rewarded with pistol blows across my back. ALEXANDRA KOWALSKA (wife of a priest from Poltava - translated): They began taking down the icons and smashing them on the ground. A lot of people wanted to go inside the church, but they wouldn't let them. They ruined everything, smashed everything in the church. The faithful stood outside, crying, because they couldn't do anything. When a man went up to remove the church bell, and that bell fell to the ground and rang out, all the people burst into tears. Everyone was weeping, saying goodbye to the bell, because that was the last time that bell rang. NARRATOR: By 1930, only the Russian Orthodox Church remains. -- The Five Year Plan -- NARRATOR: In October, 1928, Stalin introduces a drastic Five-Year Plan. It is designed to transform the Soviet Union from a backward rural society into a modern, self-sufficient, industrial empire, virtually over night. Military defense takes priority: socialism must be protected from all future enemies. Western technology is urgently needed. To pay for it, Stalin must seize the only exportable resource: grain. And so Stalin decrees the cultural collectivization of agriculture. Henceforth, all private land, livestock, and farm equipment will belong to the state. The farmer will work as a laborer, for pay, like a worker in a factory. ROBERT S. SULLIVANT (Toledo University): One of the intriguing elements in the Ukraine was that they had brought together both the peasant question and the nationality question in a way that was somewhat different than othe areas. This was because in the Ukraine, Ukrainians tended to concentrate in rural areas, while in the city areas, particularly in the eastern Ukraine, it was Russian and Jewish populations that dominated. So, any policies that the Bolsheviks adopted toward the peasants, obviously had a heavy impact on the Ukraine. NARRATOR: With the destruction of the intellectuals and the church well underway, collectivization allows Stalin to break the farmers, the backbone of the nation. Anticipating fierce resistance, he orders the liquidation of the 'kulaks' as a class. Kulak is a Bolshevik label for the wealthier farmers who own 24 acres of land, or hired labor. They are considered the potential leaders in any revolt. The state confiscates not only the lands of the farmers classified as kulaks, it also takes all of their possessions. Further, it is forbidden by law to assist these 'enemies of the people'. Myroslava Utka was seven when her father was arrested. She never saw him again. MYROSLAVA UTKA (translated): In the winter of 1931, they came to evict us from our house. Activists - a group of people, if they could be called people - came into the house and looked over everything and made us very frightened. Then they said, 'Get out! This isn't your house anymore!' My mother said, 'At least let us spend the rest of the winter here.'She begged. 'Where can I go with these children and old people?' A man picked her up and threw her outside. A militia man - or activist - stood in the doorway as a guard. Mother shouted to us, 'Don't leave the house!' There were tears and screams, it was frightening, and we all grabbed onto benches and furniture in the house, screaming and refusing to let go. Then the men began to throw outside, one by one, all six of us. NARRATOR: A neighbor does risk deportation and gives her family shelter. Some farmers burn their crops, kill their livestock, and flee to the cities. But, over the next three years, one million men, women, and children are rounded up, jammed into sealed boxcars, and shipped off to the remotest corners of the Soviet Union. The survivors of these deportations work as slave labor to provide raw materials for export to the west. This is the end of the line for some of the best farmers, and cultural and religious leaders of Ukraine. Young party activists are brought in from the cities to push through collectivization. Anyone who opposes the measure is denounced as a kulak and deported. Yet resistance comes from all quarters. Not so long ago, the Bolsheviks had been giving land to the poor... Now they want to take it away. LEV KOPELEV (former activist - translated): Thank God I didn't kill anyone. I didn't have anyone put away. I didn't inform on anyone. But I wrote. I was an agitator. I attended meetings and also told the peasants: "Bring in the grain! Hand in the grain! The workers have nothing to eat! There's a world crisis! Hitler has taken over in Germany! The Japanese are advancing into Manchuria! Our country is a fortress surrounded by enemies on all sides!' And I yelled, and begged, and swore, and yes, threatened: 'Anyone who doesn't bring in grain better watch out for the punishing sword of the proletarian dictatorship!' I rattled on, as we all did. I believed it was necessary. My father was very much against collectivization. He said it was ruining the village, the Bolsheviks knew nothing about farm management and even the old landlords were better than the Soviet District officials. But when you're 18- or 20-years-old... who believes in fathers? NARRATOR: In 1930, Petro Grigorenko was one of the many students brought in from the cities to harvest the grain. PETRO GRIGORENKO (former Soviet general - translated): There was rebellion and sabotage. People didn't give up. They attacked the local authorities - usually not killing anyone, they only tied them up and threw them into a barn, or simply drove them out of the village. And they took back their property - their horses, cows, and implements - which had just been taken by the collective. They would take all that back. To crush the rebellion, troops were sent in. They would shoot over the peoples heads... but they would sometimes shoot at their heads... and their hearts. NARRATOR: Vasyl Sokil witnessed a squad of GPU secret police attacking a lone defiant farmer. VASYL SOKIL (former Soviet journalist - translated): They formed a wide circle around the house. When they finally realized that the farmer inside had no more bullets left, they threw a grenade into the attic. After that... everything fell silent. The act of that armed resistance burned itself into my memory. I saw that even under those terrible conditions, there were people who believed in fighting for the right to live the way the Ukrainian farmer had always lived. -- The War For Bread -- NARRATOR: The wheat is left standing in the fields. The demoralized farmers respond to the ruinous taxes and the presence of troops by simply refusing to work. The grain quotas, or taxes, are deliberately raised so as to exceed what the individual farmers can possibly produce. Either they join the collectives - where the taxes are three times lower - or face ultimate exile as kulaks. By mid-1932, three-quarters of all Ukrainian farms are collectivized. Then, in August, crippling new quotas are levied on the collectives themselves. Another exorbitant quota is levied in October. And yet another at the beginning of the new year. These levies are impossible to meet. MOTRIA DUTKA (former village midwife): The working people were getting ration cards. They could get food from the warehouse in the village. Something like, one litre of milk and two pounds of bread for a week. But the farmers, the peasants, they could not get anything. Any place. So they starved. They had nothing to eat right away, the day after the government came and took everything from them. NARRATOR: The regime blames the farmers for the stringent food rationing in the cities. In reality, however, the Soviets are dumping tonnes of wheat on Western markets. The 1932 harvest yields enough grain to feed the entire population of Ukraine for two years. Instead, famine ravages the country. PETRO GRIGORENKO (former Soviet general - translated): It was a spoken order - from Stalin - there was a definite plan. I knew from instructions given us by the secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukraine. He said: The Kulak wants to crush our Soviet government with the boney hand of famine; we will bend this boney hand back on the throat of the kulak. MOTRIA DUTKA (former village midwife): The Russians came from house to house, and took all the food that people had, starting with grain, flour, wheat, barley, whatever they had, up to the last drop of food. They took the beets, the beans, the potatoes, whatever they had in the cellar or in the house. And besides that, they didn't trust and they started searching the houses. Looking all over. Digging in the house, holes in the floor, digging in the ovens, ruining their ovens. They took everything from the peasants. NARRATOR: In 1931, the farmers crowd into the cities, selling heirlooms, anything in order to buy the bread they themselves produced. An internal passport system is introduced to deliberately contain them to their villages. In 1932, Stalin condemns the Ukrainian Communist Party for its appeals to reduce quotas and send aid. He accuses them of placing local interests above the success of the Five-year Plan. The war for bread is the war for socialism, he says. Stalin's trusted envoy, Pavel Postyshev, is given sweeping dictatorial powers and is sent into Ukraine with an army of secret police to purge the Ukrainian party ranks, as well squeeze out the last kernels of grain. One hundred and twelve thousand trusted party members fromRussia are now stationed in Ukraine. They guard the standing crops and livestock from the starving, brutally enforcing the law, to protect state property. VASYL SOKIL (former Soviet journalist - translated): This was a horrible law. If they saw a child picking a stalk of wheat, trying to eat those unripe grains, that was a very serious crime. This was a government order, to punish anyone, even by death through execution. NARRATOR: Not only do state quotas have to be met, but additional grain has to be set aside for seed and livestock before the collective farm workers get paid. Eighty percent of the collectives fail to pay their workers anything at all. And a new draconian measure prevents the farm workers from searching for work elsewhere. PETRO GRIGORENKO (former Soviet general - translated): The collective farm where my father worked had stood since 1928. It was a good, strong farm. But, even though this was the best farm around, it was suffering even more than the others,... When the government trucks pulled right up to the winnowing machines, [they] took everything, they even took the chaff. [I remember my fathers death.] My father was already swollen - not too much, but his feet were swollen. And his eyes... [sighs] all in the typical look of starvation. And in the house... nothing but half a pumpkin. That was all. One day, I went to the collective farm to get horses. A friend of mine from the Communist Youth League said, weakly, 'They came to take your father a way. Maybe he'll survive. We won't.' NARRATOR: Village mothers, dying of hunger, throw their children onto trains heading into the cities, in the desperate hope someone will take pity and feed them. LUBOV DRASHEVENSKA (student during famine): I entered the car - a railroad car - and then I saw it was full of children. Some of them were enormously thin... but others were... thin at the top of the body, but their legs and stomachs were enormously swollen. [Along the way], some of them had convulsions. In general, if a child was lying very quietly, we all just knew... this child will die soon. JOSYP HIRNIAK (former actor): During the day, people would hide. You couldn't see them anywhere. But at night, they would come out, like shadows, lining up in front of the bread stores, hoping maybe to get some bread in the morning. Only homeless children were seen walking the streets... and starving women in rags. And dead bodies. You would watch children stepping overthem. OLHA MAK (student in Kharkov during famine - translated): It is hard to imagine how long those lines were for the so-called 'commercial bread'. They lined up by the _thousands_. NARRATOR: Andor Hencke was the German consul stationed in Kiev during this time. He and his family witnessed the horrors of the famine first hand. MRS. ANDOR HENCKE (wife - translated): The Russian newspapers were reporting that there was a famine in Germany, while everything was wonderful in Russia. I became very angry [and went out] and took pictures of the corpses. ULRICH HENCKE (son - translated): I still have a very vivid memory of that time in Kiev. We were children at the time, my sister four years younger than I. We lived in the consulate, like in some golden cage. We weren't allowed to go out into the streets alone at this time. Nevertheless, I remember the misery and the famine very well. I remember seeing bodies everywhere, in doorways, on street corners, and wagons would come along and take them away. They were picked up, thrown in, and driven away. ALEXANDRA KOWALSKA (wife of priest from Poltava - translated): Some of them [thrown into carts] were still alive. But they were still all thrown into a pile and taken out of the city and there thrown into a pit and covered with earth. ALEXANDER BYKOVETZ (priest, survivor from Poltava): We survived, thanks to the parishioners who were railroad employees and had the chance to travel beyond the borders Ukraine. And we had the Soviet officials, too - they always had food. We would come to their garbage can, and we'd eat rotten potatoes, rotten cabbage and beets, and the scraps of good food they might have thrown away. I am not ashamed to admit it, because it was a matter of survival. I didn't want to die. FEDIR WERETENO (former farm worker - translated): When we reached the state farm and met the manager, he hired us to work there. He told us we would work at night feeding the horses linseed cakes mixed with chopped straw. He said we should do this when people are asleep, otherwise, if they were awake, they would eat all the horses fodder. We said, 'How can we do that? People are more important than horses.' But he said, 'We need the horses to cart the corpses away.' LEV KOPELEV (former activist - translated): They collected the corpses from the houses. A deep sleigh would stop at each house and the men would ask (hushed) 'You got any?' Thank God we have none, might be the response. And they'd stop at the next house, 'You got any?' Yes. 'Well, bring them out.' But I don't have the strength. In that case, two or three young men, themselves with swollen legs, would go into the house, bring out the corpse, and place it in the sleigh. MYROSLAVA UTKA (kulak daughter - translated): In the spring, when my little sister died, the body lay in the house the whole week. We kept it until our mother came back from the state farm. People would come to our house and knock on the door every day, asking whether we had any corpses. We'd shout, no we don't. Then the wagon would continue down the street collecting corpses. When mother came home, we had to bury my sister. But how could we bury her, there was nothing for a coffin? So, we wrapped her in a sheet, placed her on a sled, and took her to the cemetery. We put her between two coffins in a big grave. Coffins were placed on top also. And that's how we buried her. -- The West Gets Involved -- NARRATOR: Half-a-world-away, the kinsman of the victims voice protest and form relief committees. Help is offered from Canada, the United States, Switzerland, France, Belgium... Austria... Western Ukraine.... but all shipments of food grind to a halt at the Soviet border. The Soviet Red Cross flatly denies the existence of famine. The hands of the international organizations are tied. Metropolitan Mstyslav was then a deputy in the Polish Parliament. He helped to organize relief efforts among Ukrainians living under Polish rule. METROPOLITAN MSTYSLAV (translated): Our attempts to shipment the grain into Ukraine were co-ordinated through the Soviet embassy in Warsaw. They told us this was not in their jurisdiction, and that they would relay the request to the central government in Moscow. But Moscow's communications to us were, 'What are you doing? Why would we need grain? We have had a wonderful harvest. There is no famine of any kind. This is nothing but anti-Soviet propaganda, and that's all.' So they gave us no hope of any kind that the grain would ever get there. -- The Depths of the Famine -- NARRATOR: In spring, 1933, the man-made famine reaches its height. Twenty-five thousand are dying everyday - 1,000 an hour, 17 human beings a minute. FEDIR WERETENO (former far worker - translated): They tried to fool the people, telling them the famine was from natural causes. But people saw the famine was not from natural causes. No matter how hard they tried to hide sealed inside mills and silos, people somehow found out there was plenty of grain. But they wouldn't give out any. Most of the grain was inside state mills. They were filled, and _nobody_ was allowed near them. Some of it was piled high in the yard, in sacks, covered with canvas. It just rotted away. Why I went to [a particular village] the first time, all the bushes were still green. But when I came back, there was not a single leaf left. They ate it all. And you wouldn't hear a dog bark anymore, because they ate them also. MYROSLAVA UTKA (kulak daughter - translated): We were told [as children] it is very dangerous to go begging for food from house to house now. Terrible crimes are happening. [We were told] a man was going to a well for water - or was coming back from the well - and he fell and froze to death. His wife cut off pieces of his flesh and ate them. IVAN MAJSTRENKO (former professor of journalism): My cousin, who was much younger than I, had three children. And those three children were eaten by their neighbors. NARRATOR: A directive issued by the Justice Department ensures that no official records of cannibalism are kept. All such cases are withdrawn from the courts and dealt with behind the closed doors of the OGPU secret police: "... all cases pertaining to cannablism should be withdrawn from the courts and are to be immediately referred to the... OGPU..." -- The Cover-up -- Having killed a quarter of the nation's population, the Soviets stage one of the greatest cover-ups in history. At a grain conference in London, the Soviets campaign vigorously to raise their grain export quotas from 25 to 85 million bushels of wheat. The scheme is effective. Few can imagine a state exporting grain at the cost of its own people's lives. Indignant over the mass unemployment and hardships in their own countries, many influential socialist sympathizers unwittingly rally to Moscow's defense. George Bernrd Shaw, and a party of leading British socialites, visits the U.S.S.R. and report, quite truthfully, that the restaurants where they eat are full of food. Another important foreign guest to receive the red carpet treatment is former French prime minister, Edouard Herriot. He is actually given a five-day guided tour of Ukraine, at the height of the famine. His favorable impressions of the country receive wide-spread publicity: "I would like to thank the government and the people of the Soviet Union for their warm reception...." Johann von Herwarth was a young attache at the German embassy in Moscow - and after the Second World War, German ambassador to Great Britain. He recalls the Soveits stage-managed Herriot's entire trip. JOHANN VON HERWARTH: The famous visit of Herriot, when he came to Kiev he had the opinion that everything was alright, the streets were well-cleaned, he got a wonderful breakfast in his hotel, and in the streets were trucks laden with bread, and the bread was unloaded and everything seemed to be fine. And then he went to see a collective farm, and when he spokes to the farmers... well, nobody knows if they are real farmers or not.... And he came home and said there is no famine in the Ukraine, the peasants are very happy. NARRATOR: Idealized scenes of work and happy peasant life are staple diets in Soviet movie theatres, as the famine rages on. [lots of film footage of happy-go-lucky peasants singing and dancing as they sow seeds] A sensational show-trial is staged in Moscow to further help distract the Soviet people from the failures of the Five-Year Plan. Six British engineers working in the U.S.S.R. face the death sentence on propped-up charges of sabotage, espionnage, and bribery. The interest the trial arouses in the West in the Soviet's extra leverage to muzzle the foreign press corps. Correspondents are bluntly told that if they want access to the trial, they are not to mention the famine in their dispatches. Having served their purpose, the British 'saboteurs' are eventually released. Malcolm Muggeridge arrived in the U.S.S.R. in 1932. He was one of the very few of the journalists to defy the Soviet travel ban and report on the real conditions in the countryside. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: I didn't think that foreigners realized sufficiently how completely the Soviet authorities could control the foreign press. Now since it worked that simply if you wrote a message, you had to take it along to the press department - the telegraph company wouldn't accept it unless it was stamped by them - you HAD to submit it to them. They would then read it through... and say, you can't say that. I began to be very critical of the whole set-up.... The articles I wrote about the famine... would undoubtedly [have been squashed] and I would have to leave. But I sent those over in a diplomatic bag and got out before they had appeared. NARRATOR: For every article on the famine that appeared, two were published denying its existence. Muggeridge recalls the most influential foreign correspondent in Moscow was Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: He was not only the greatest liar among the journalists in Moscow, but he was the greatest liar among any journalist I ever met in my 50 years in journalism. We used to wonder whether, in fact, they had some kind of hold over him. He so utterly played their game. BUt then, it didn't seem to worry the New York Times, who featured his reports. When it came to the famine in the Ukraine, brought about by collectivization, that was when his report was particularly disgraceful, because he denied there was any famine. NARRATOR: The Soviets actually grant Duranty permission to tour Ukraine unchapparoned. He reports in the Times that all talk of famine is ridiculous. Yet, documents from the British foreign office reveal that in private conversations at the British embassy, Duranty says that as many as 10 million people have died. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE: When they were discussing the question of the United States government recognizing the Soviet Union, the articles of Duranty were considered as very valuable evidence on the side of recognition. NARRATOR: Shortly after, Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov visits Washington. In November, 1933, the U.S. recognizes the Soviet government and enters into agreements securing a balance of trade in favor of the United States. The following year, the Soviet cover-up achieves its ultimate success: a seat in the League of Nations. All this inspite of the fact that the Western governments knew all about the famine. JOHANN VON HERWARTH (former German attache to Moscow): The government of Weimar was well aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union. The attitude of the government was, I would say, passive. We, the younger ones in the embassy, were of the opinion that we ought not to have any commercial relations with the criminal government which allowed hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people to starve. The government said, basically, we already have great unemployment in Germany, and if we stopped delivering manufactured goods to the Soviet Union, we would increase unemployment [even more]. NARRATOR: Trade relations take precedence. The famine is regarded as a strictly internal Soviet affair. The Western governments make their peace with genocide. The communist writer Mykola Khvylovy reacts to the destruction of his people by starvation, the mass arrests of his friends and party members, by taking his life. The party's strongman, Mykola Skrypnyk, is denounced as an enemy of the state. He, too, commits suicide. LEV KOPELEV (former activist): These suicides symbolically represent the end of an epoch in eastern Ukraine. Up to that time, we believed that a normal national development was possible. They taught us a culture socialist in content and national in form. NARRATOR: Stalin ends the famine with a single decree. Having broken the Ukrainian farmers, he can afford to give out grain on the collectives during the harvest in 1933. In 1934, purges take place in the cities and mark the end of Ukrainian participation in the running of their affairs. Twenty- seven thousand Ukrainian communists are arrested and replaced by Russians. Only 36 out of 259 Ukrainian writers survive as the terror intensifies. But the jails cells empty rapidly as Ukrainian nationalism becomes an offense punishable by death. The purges stop when the Nazis invade Ukraine in June, 1941. Millions perish as Hitler attempts to replace Stalin's shackles with his own. To divert attention away from their own brutalities, the Nazis invite an international commission to inspect the mass graves left from Soviet rule. In the town of Vinnitsa alone, the commission uncovered the bodies of 9,000 brutally-murdered farmers, workers, poets and priests. No one can estimate the real total of those who disappeared in Stalin's reign of terror. Ukraine's only crime was that she never adapted to wearing chains. The Soviet Union denies to this day [1988] that the famine ever took place. ~~~ eof