In the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin became the supreme authority in the Kremlin and embarked on an ambitious program to build up a totalitarian state. People across the Soviet Union were outraged, protested and rioted against Stalin’s new policies. The revolutionary promise “Land to the farmers and factories to the workers” became a farce as the state prohibited even small private enterprises. Slavery was returned to the lands, revealing itself through the confiscation of property, inventories, and restrictions on the freedom of movement.
But rural uprisings threatened Stalin’s plans, and over half of these protests took place in Ukraine. The Communist dictator designed a ruthless response, creating a man-made famine, the Holodomor. In 1922-1933, several million Ukrainians perished after being besieged by Soviet troops, who confiscated not only bread, but anything edible from the Ukrainian households. In June of 1933 about 24 Ukrainians were dying every minute.
Stalin’s plan went much further than simply suppressing protest movements. Ukrainians had finally experienced a taste of freedom after centuries of Russian colonialism; hence their protests had acquired not only an economic dimension. The national liberation movement was not completely eliminated, despite the Soviet occupation. Illustratively, even the Ukrainian Communists lobbied for their own programs of development that emphasized the sovereignty of Ukraine, which was very different from Moscow’s policy. The Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s spread ideas of freedom even within the Soviet framework. This small island of relative free thinking on the western border of the Soviet Union was the chief obstacle towards the construction of a totalitarian society. The Bolsheviks’ plans of global dominance were doomed to fail without it. Those who envisaged a new world order could not tolerate any different vision of any individual, let alone a whole republic.
Ukraine was turned into a testing ground of the Soviet empire, where the mechanics of occupation and totalitarian rule were tried first. The Communists used these practices later in other states in Central and Eastern Europe that were conquered in the course of the Second World War.
The genocide by man-made famine led to irreversible demographic, cultural and mental losses. Nevertheless, the fact that Stalin failed to bring all Ukrainians to submission prevented the dictator from changing the configuration of the whole free world at his personal whim. The Communists were exhausted after the Second World War, along with waves of military struggle with insurgents in western Ukraine and rebellions in the Gulag labour camps. They still managed to install puppet pro-Moscow governments in half of Europe, but there were no resources to conduct genocide similar to the Holodomor, or mass purges such as the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
Soviet dissidents, among which were Vasyl Stus and Yevhen Sverstyuk, told the world what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. These people were the few who prevented there being a complete loss of freedom in these lands.
They were not the first ones, nor the last ones. Even during the Holodomor, British journalists Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones wrote reports about the atrocities of the man-made famine in Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians who escaped from the Soviet Union after World War II, tirelessly told the people in Europe, the United States, Australia, and in African and Asian states about the unknown genocide – the Holodomor. A plethora of brave historians, honest journalists and responsible politicians came to their aid. Ultimately, the Soviet Union was forced to acknowledge the fact of famine, even before the Communist empire collapsed.
The truth, which could not be hidden despite information blockade and could not be killed through the ruin of millions of lives, became a step toward freedom. It is likely that without it, repression, torture, kidnapping and extreme oppression of the freedom of speech might have continued in Ukraine to this day.
Ukraine regained its independence in 1991 and is still taking a winding road toward democracy, overcoming clampdowns on human rights, corruption and abuse of power. However, Ukrainians retain a strong and reliable foothold of European freedom. Totalitarianism is gradually receding to the east. The war with it is all-embracing. It claimed a hundred lives during the Euromaidan in Kyiv, and thousands of Ukrainians in a war with expansionist Russia.
Ukraine believes the world will not abandon a brave and committed people, and it will not stay silent about Russian crimes against a free country. Our message to the world is about freedom. We shall stand for it, and defend it.
Volodymyr Viatrovych is a historian and the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
