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  • [in Ukrainian] People were lying in the fields, swollen

  • and so many dead people lay down on the road."

  • [in Ukrainian] I survived the Holodomor,

  • and will remember it as long as I live.

  • This is Rostyslav, reading the words of his grandmother, Lydia, who lived in Ukraine.

  • [in Ukrainian] It was scary to watch and remember.

  • Lydia was a witness and survivor

  • of a horrific man-made famine that killed millions in Ukraine.

  • My father has recorded an oral history that his grandmother told him

  • and he just recorded it in ink pen.

  • [in Ukrainian] Our family consisted of 10 people.

  • [in Ukrainian] On one of those nights, my father said that we would starve to death.

  • [in Ukrainian] We needed to do something.

  • The famine hit several parts of the Soviet Union, from 1932 to 1933.

  • But in Ukraine it became known as "the Holodomor"

  • a term meaningdeath by starvation".

  • It was genocide carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control.

  • And would do everything in his power to cover it up for decades.

  • In 1917, after the fall of the Russian empire, Ukraine briefly gained freedom.

  • But, by 1922, it was forcefully integrated into the newly formed Soviet Union

  • and became known as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.

  • At the time, the country was largely rural

  • most of the population were villagers and farmers.

  • Self-reliance is a very important thing for every Ukrainian.

  • And so having that piece of land, cultivating that land

  • was something that was very important to so many.

  • In fact, Ukraine was known for its farmland.

  • With some of the world's most fertile soil, the country was a huge grain producer

  • especially in these regions.

  • Over time, it became known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union

  • and Joseph Stalin wanted complete control of it.

  • When Stalin rose to power in the mid-1920s

  • a distinctly Ukrainian culture and national identity were thriving.

  • But by the late-1920s, he and other Soviet leaders

  • feared it could bring on a Ukrainian revolution.

  • They decided to crackdown on what they saw as an ideological threat to the Soviet regime

  • and they began a widespread, violent purge of Ukrainian intellectuals

  • along with priests, and religious structures.

  • You have to think about it as kind of

  • decapitating the leadership of the country.

  • You cut off its head, basically.

  • Around the same time, Stalin introduced a “Five Year Plan

  • that would eventually give him control of Ukrainian agriculture.

  • The goal was to industrialize all of the Soviet Union at a rapid pace

  • which meant building up industries like electricity, coal, and steel.

  • To fund this project, Stalin turned to thecollectivizationof agriculture.

  • Which meant consolidating individual farms

  • across all of the Soviet Union into large, state run farms.

  • If you combine, you know, 60, 70, 80 small farms into one big farm

  • it's easier to control it.

  • It's easier to extract surplus grain or surplus sugar or whatever that farm produces.

  • In Ukraine, the plan gave Stalin direct control over grain production

  • which meant he could extract all of the crop to sell to the West

  • as a way to fund Soviet industrialization.

  • By this policy of industrialization, by taking away everything that grew on the land

  • Stalin aimed to really destroy that connection between the land and life itself.

  • That was one of the key ideological things in industrialization

  • saying that it's not about the land, it's about the state

  • the Soviet state that will then provide for your livelihood.

  • Many Ukrainian farmers who had worked independently for their entire lives

  • resisted Stalin's plan.

  • So, Stalin found another way to attack them.

  • He launched a propaganda campaign to smear farmers.

  • He labeled anyone resistant to collectivization, a “kulak

  • a Russian term for a wealthy peasant and depicted them as greedy, exploiters,

  • and enemies of the state.

  • And sometimes, as literal parasites.

  • This is a way to drive a wedge within a community.

  • And it's a way to also justify, I think, what the Soviet state

  • and what the Communist Party is trying to do on the ideological side.

  • No matter how rich or poor, Stalin seized the belongings of the so-calledkulaks".

  • He then exiled, imprisoned, or executed hundreds of thousands of them.

  • And for the farmers who remained, he engineered a famine to starve them.

  • In 1931, Stalin deliberately set quotas for grain production

  • that were far beyond the capacity of farmers across the Soviet Union.

  • When farmers failed to meet those quotas

  • Stalin's men swept their farms to confiscate all the grain they could find.

  • Records show the Soviets took over 4 million tons of grain from Ukraine alone in 1932.

  • That same year, a new law punished anyone who took even a handful of grain

  • or was caught hiding grain or breadwith 10 years in prison, or the death penalty.

  • Stalin's oppressive collection policy created a famine that started spreading

  • in grain-producing regions across the Soviet Union.

  • Some party members sent Stalin letters about the growing crisis

  • pleading for a change in policy.

  • And that's what makes it so diabolical because

  • if a government is really concerned about its population, its people

  • then at the end of the first famine year, it can reverse its policies.

  • But instead, the government and the party actually doubled down.

  • Their commitment to collectivization

  • made the famine deadly in many parts of the Soviet Union.

  • But when it came to Ukraine, Stalin's need for the complete submission of its people

  • compounded the effects of the famine.

  • In the fall and winter of 1932, Soviet police began seizing not just grain

  • but anything edible.

  • Even livestock.

  • Farms in Ukraine and sometimes entire villages, wereblacklisted

  • for missing grain quotas, torn apart for food, and prohibited from receiving any supplies.

  • In January 1933, knowing Ukrainians were leaving in search of food

  • Stalin closed the borders of Ukraine and policed migration from Ukrainian villages to cities, too.

  • In the coming months, tens of thousands of Ukrainian villagers

  • were caught trying to flee

  • and were sent back to their homes to starve.

  • This was a targeted extermination of peasantry.

  • People try to find food, you know, wherever they could in rivers and streams.

  • They began to eat their animals, their pets.

  • They began to catch birds and mice, whatever they could find on trees

  • that would give them some sort of sustenance.

  • People were so desperate that they ate flesh from animals

  • that they found on the road

  • and some even resorted to cannibalism.

  • But even in this unimaginable suffering, Ukrainians fought for their lives

  • and each other.

  • She was my great grandmother.

  • I have fond memories of her.

  • My dad took me to her village, I was really young.

  • So Lydia's house is actually my first memories.

  • The way Holodomor happened, it was mostly happening in the rural areas.

  • Lydia was a student at the time.

  • And she actually told me about how they survived.

  • [in Ukrainian] At night, we dug a hole under a tree.

  • [in Ukrainian] We put a barrel in the hole and poured grain in there

  • and covered the barrel with soil.

  • At night they would make flour out of that wheat and make some makeshift bread.

  • And the reason why they would do it at night is that nobody could see

  • the smoke coming out of the windows.

  • Lydia describes horrific village scenes

  • seeing “a mother die of starvationandpolice taking away children.”

  • Once, when Lydia saw her neighbors who hadbloated bodies and couldn't get up

  • she started to sneak thembread and milk".

  • It's likely due to her efforts, that seven people, out of that family of nine, survived.

  • After its peak in May and June of 1933, the famine slowly started subsiding.

  • Likely because of a weakened labor force, the Soviet regime

  • finally took measures to decrease grain confiscations and arrests.

  • By 1934, most regions collectivized.

  • Almost all farmers were working for the state.

  • Though we will never know the total number of deaths from the Holodomor

  • a recent study estimated nearly 4 million Ukrainians killed.

  • Places like the North Caucasus, with a large Ukrainian population, suffered greatly, too.

  • And further east, Kazakhstan lost at least a third of its population.

  • So many people perished during the Holodomor

  • that the Soviet Union had to send people over to Ukraine to rebuild the labor force.

  • The main goal was to resettle those areas in order to work the land.

  • There were settlers brought in from various parts of the Soviet Union

  • but mainly from Russia.

  • This resettlement program set off a wave of future campaigns over the years.

  • Many Russians moved here in the east and south

  • which are, to this day, places with large Russian populations.

  • In Russia, Stalin carried out a massive disinformation campaign

  • to cover up the famine he'd created.

  • Throughout the crisis, he outright denied that a famine ever took place.

  • He banned the Soviet press from reporting on the famine

  • and banned foreign correspondents from even going to Ukraine.

  • But, he strategically allowed language that would effectively downplay the Holodomor

  • words likefood shortagesorfood supply problems”.

  • For example, Walter Duranty — a Moscow correspondent for the New York Times

  • who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Stalin's success with the Five Year Plan

  • denied the famine in his reporting

  • calling it a “food shortage".

  • Duranty was challenged by others, including journalist Gareth Jones

  • who snuck into Ukraine and wrote a series of articles on howfamine ruled Russia".

  • At the time, Russia was a term many journalists used

  • to describe the Soviet Union as a whole

  • including Ukraine.

  • Jones wrote: “Everywhere was the cry, 'there is no bread.

  • We are dying.'”

  • In responseDuranty, who had more influence than Jones, put out another article

  • this time insisting thatRussians were hungry, but not starving".

  • Several photographers who also tried to expose the humanitarian crisis