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Monday, March 9, 2009

Holodomor Truth

For the past years, I have been a supporter of peace. In the Philippines, a group of peace advocates started a signature campaign calling for a lasting peace in the area of Mindanao. When we say peace, it does not mean absence from freedom but it could also be emotional, psychological and mental destruction. We have a lot of problems that arises from the wrong hands of our economic leader. I could name a few that recently bothers the Philippine economy and famine is one.

On the other hand, we are not the only country who are experiencing famine. Way back 1932-1933, it occurred in the Ukrainian SSR wherein 6-8 million people died from starvation or the term they called golodomor. The word golodomor means death by starvation or mass hunger.

The scholars estimated that 1/4 of the entire population of Soviet Union died from Hunger. According to their estimate :Central Russia 2 million, Kazhastan - 1.7 million, Ukraine - 1.3 million, North Caucasus - 1 million peasants died from golodomor.

During that time, it was under the regime of Joseph Stalin. He designed the "Industrialization" and "Collectivization" policy. The transformation sought by Stalin by siezing grains from the peasantry and exported most of their Republic's agricultural output to the West in order to sustain the rapid economic transformation was harsh.

As I continued my reading about the real causes of the golodomor tradegy. I found out that the real causes had even divided the historian and experts. Some people say that in order to politicize the issue of golodomor and get the worlds' attention, the word golodomor have been changed into holodomor making it sounds like 'holocaust,' and it could be considered as a genocidal famine. Genocide means the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. This was made to attack the Ukrainian but it was denied by the the European Parliament in its resolutuion on 23 October 2008. It was rejected to call the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine as "an act of genocide" but a crime that was "cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin's regime in order to force through the Soviet Union's policy of collectivization of agriculture".

Based on what I have read, if the industrialaztion was abandoned during that time, the famine would have been prevented or atl east it was significantly alleviated. But there were other reasons also for this famine. The poor management and lack of agricultural mechanism like, no tractors and less employed havesters were few of the reasons. In 1929, in the same area, Sovkhozes suffered a great loss because of lack of manpower and infrastructure but still they continued sowing wheat without fertilizers.

At all event, the Stalin policy which is the Industrialization" and "Collectivization" contributed the famine to the Ukrainian. It was crazy to pursue an export of food when there is nothing to harvest. Now, I could only say it was not the failure of Ukrainian but Stalin himself was the failure.



DJtammy

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Grabe gang, this is a very sensible post.. I love your thoughts..

Forgetful Princess said...

Juice ko gang, nahirapan ako sa post na ito :)) nag gather muna ako ng information before ako nag write ng post. Napaka sensitive ksi ng issue :))