Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

notes that 2007 marks the 75th anniversary of the Great Ukrainian Famine—Holodomor—of 1932–33, caused by the deliberate actions of Stalin’s communist Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics;

(2)

recalls that an estimated 7 million Ukrainians starved to death as a result of Stalinist policies in 1932–33 alone, and that millions more lost their lives in the purge that ensued for the remainder of the decade;

(3)

notes:

(a)

that this constitutes one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history;

(b)

that the Ukrainian Famine was one of the greatest losses of human life in one country in the 20th century; and

(c)

that it remains insufficiently known and acknowledged by the world community and the United Nations as an act of genocide against the Ukranian nation and its people, but has been recognised as such by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine);

(4)

honours the memory of those who lost their lives;

(5)

joins the Ukrainian people throughout the world, and particularly in Australia, in commemorating these tragic events; and

(6)

submits that the Australian Government support a resolution to the General Assembly of the United Nations, which may be submitted by the Government of Ukraine, that the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33 be recognised as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation and its people.

I rise with great sadness to speak on this resolution, a resolution which must be very painful for members of the Ukrainian-Australian community who remember one of the great crimes of Stalin in the period of Soviet communism. He was responsible for the death of between eight million and 10 million citizens of his own country who live in what is now a free country, the Ukraine. Any of us who read that magisterial history The Harvest of Sorrow by the great Professor Robert Conquest, one of the most important works about the period of Soviet communism, understand exactly the nature of the crimes that were perpetrated against the Ukrainian people. I must say that my knowledge of this issue began in the 1970s when I met the Ukrainian mathematician Leonid Plusch. He was one of the persecuted dissidents from the Ukraine who managed to get out. He was brought to Australia by someone I became friendly with, Dr Michael Lawriwsky. He is now a leading financial expert, but was then one of the young leaders of the Ukrainian community. This began my journey of discovery of exactly what happened in the Ukraine in those periods.

It seems that Stalin, in the period of complete Soviet power, in probably what is the equal worst paradigm of a totalitarian state, decided he was going to eliminate entire categories of people who might be a threat to him. In this case the kulaks, the peasants of the Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of the USSR, were a category of people—an entire minority who, as private producers, had been encouraged to production after the New Economic Program of the early part of the Soviet Union—who were considered enemies and dispensable. Under the dreadful commissar of the Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich, who died, unmourned, in his bed aged 92 just a few years ago, the mass starvation program was begun. Exports of wheat from the Ukraine were increased, production quotas were increased completely unrealistically and the producers—the Ukrainian people—were not fed. As news of the famine spread beyond Ukraine, then a province of the Soviet Union, various people were brought in to write stories about the kinds of Potemkin villages that Stalin wanted them to know about.

There was an infamous writer for the New York Times called Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for saying that there was no famine in the Ukraine. He is the only person to have been stripped of a Pulitzer prize subsequently, because of what people discovered happened in that benighted area at that time. This Stalinist forced famine, undertaken after the Bolshevik Revolution, stemmed from the move to collectivise farm into kolkhoz, or state farms, and to deprive people not just of their livelihood but actually of food with which to live. There are terrible examples of what happened during the Holodomor. People were said to be actually turning to cannibalism because the starvation was so widespread.

As I said, seven million to 10 million Ukrainians perished as a result of the famine—a deliberate state policy—while Ukrainian wheat was exported to earn foreign exchange for the USSR. It was not mere indifference of the Soviet apparatus to its own people; this was an exercise that was understood and advanced at a macro level by Stalin and henchmen like Kaganovich as an early example of ethnic cleansing. To this end, the quotas for Ukrainian grain production were increased by in excess of 40 per cent but all of the fruits of the labour of the hardworking farm labourers were taken for the Red Army, guarded by the NKVD and the legion of other Soviet security agencies. The grain of these starving farmers, who worked so hard, was guarded and kept under lock and key as the farmers and their families died. Internal travel controls were implemented to prevent movement in areas where food was comparatively more plentiful, further compounding the suffering of ethnic Ukrainians in the northern Caucasus and lower Volga. The world should never forget this mass starvation of the Ukrainian people.

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