Time.news – Pope Francis recalled this in the audience, inevitably drawing a parallel with what is happening before the eyes of a world otherwise distracted by the World Cup in Qatar. But the Holodomor is not only or so much the omen of the Russian fury that is unleashed on Ukraine: it is what the historian Ernst Nolte, in a book that caused controversy and sensation, defined a sort of general rehearsal of the Shoah. The prodome and model, together with the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, of the subsequent globally planned and organized genocide of the Jewish people.
This is enough to better understand the heaviness of the parallel and the extent of the comparison. Taken literally, the term Holodomor indicates precisely “extermination by hunger” because hunger was the instrument of extermination. Also in this case (although the Holocaust remains something unique) it was ideology that unleashed the mass murder. A mechanism experienced by many totalitarianisms: the regime identifies the common enemy to be overthrown and unleashes horror. In this case against the kulaks, the peasants who own land they themselves cultivate, who with their mere existence block the forced collectivizations decided by the Bolshevik Party.
Putin’s attempt with his missiles to reproduce the Holodomor almost 90 years later by reducing the Ukrainians to hunger and freezing temperatures is intolerable. The Russians must understand that the extermination of the Ukrainian people will not be allowed for the second time in a century. pic.twitter.com/nuPjyb9TEF
— Vittorio Emanuele Parsi (@VEParsi1) November 22, 2022
The adhesion policy imposed on collectivizations, in the USSR where Stalin now commands, already began at the end of the 1920s, but it was in the winter between 1932 and 1933 that the Kremlin decided to crack down. Ukraine was, had been and will continue to be the granary of Europe, a source of bread for the Soviet Socialist Republics and of extremely precious hard currency for the coffers destined to finance the creation of socialism in a single country.
Dai Soviet ai Kolchoz
It was unthinkable that the producers of so much wealth could escape the direct control of the Masters of the Revolution. It was the death sentence for millions of people, made up of wave after wave of famines, requisitions, expulsions. It was also the end of revolutionary promises: if Lenin had come to power calling for “all power to the soviets” and “land to the peasants”, the soviets had long since been emptied of all power and the peasants were about to lose their land. The new production machine was now called kolkhoz, a structure above all of a social nature in which the peasant no longer had his own land, but continued to work it as a community. Anyone who didn’t want to be part of it ended up under Stalin’s ax.
First step: to demand from the refractory peasant, indicated by the regime’s propaganda as a landed capitalist, contributions equal to 20 percent of the product previously calculated in theory. In fact it went above 50. Famine broke into every farmhouse. Whoever hid grain or stabled animals was declared an enemy of the peoplesubjected to searches, bent by all kinds of pressure.
Given the stubbornness of those peasants who defended estates that had been cared for for centuries, it came down to being shot on the spot. It was enough to be in possession of potato peelings. The minimum age for the death penalty was lowered to 12 years, to be sure of cutting the plant at the root.
The re-education camps in Siberia
Forced labor and re-education camps sprang up in Siberia: with the successive purges against the intelligentsia and the armed forces as well as the dissident cadres of the communist party itself, they would become the Gulag Archipelago. Behind it, today, someone sees the shadow of an attempt to Russify Ukraine.
Very probable, although it would perhaps be more correct to speak of the Sovietization of Ukraine at the urging of a Pcus led by a Georgian but controlled by the Russians. In other words, a multinational empire where the glue of the culture of the dominated nation imposes the choices that matter even to those who are not part of it by birth. Whoever puts himself out of this scheme is eliminated. Like the Armenians in Turkey.
Four million dead
The repression, and even more the hunger, caused at least four million deaths in the Ukraine alone, to which another million must be added for the other territories of the USSR. Then epidemics, diseases, cannibalism such as has not been seen since the first failure of Lenin’s economic policy.
In particular, the victims were children, almost half of the total. After all, they were the most fragile subjects, the ones least able to resist the deportations which often involved communities en bloc, entire families. It is these families – the last of them – that Georges Simenon describes in a beautiful report on Eastern Europe in 1939.
You see, Simenon, the last skeletal kulaks treated as pariahs, left to die of starvation on the sidewalks of Odessa, an almost Russified city from which ships loaded with collectivized grain have taken off again. While waiting for a new Holocaust, a new world war, to come back to upset those lands. It is useless to dwell on the value of prophecy.