Ukraine Accuses Moscow Of Genocide Over 1932 Famine That Killed Millions

KIEV, Ukraine -- Bitter enmity between Ukraine and Russia could be rekindled after the Kiev authorities launched a criminal investigation into a devastating famine that claimed millions of lives, stating it was an More than 70 years since the famine struck Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, the country's prosecution service believes it has enough evidence to begin criminal proceedings.A statement issued by Ukraine's security service, the SBU, said that through murder, the forcible collectivisation of agriculture, dispossession, deportation and confiscation, the Soviet authorities had "aimed at organising hunger to kill the Ukrainian people as an ethnic group".It went on: "The Stalinist regime wanted to create living conditions that would result in the total physical elimination of ethnic Ukrainians."Although estimates of how many people died in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, which ravaged the nation in 1932 and 1933, conservative estimates have put the death toll at more than seven million.Ukraine has long maintained that Stalin wanted to wipe out the Ukrainian people, because of their questionable loyalty to the Soviet Union and their stubborn adherence to age-old farming practices that stood in his way of the plan to destroy private agriculture.In the early 1930s, Stalin launched a brutal campaign of collectivisation and requisition across Ukraine that few historians dispute turned a natural famine into a human tragedy of massive proportions. Eye-witness accounts from the time speak of whole villages being obliterated by starvation and disease, and people resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. Often, the authorities prevented survivors fleeing the famine-stricken regions in fear that if news got out, it would damage the credibility of Stalin's regime and policies.The Ukrainian government has waged a long campaign in the international arena to have the famine classified as genocide, while some Ukrainian nationalists argue that Russia, as the successor to the Soviet Union, should now be held responsible.However, the Russian government disputes the genocide claim, pointing out that famine and starvation struck other regions of the Soviet Union at the same time. It also argues that so far no evidence, such as a paper trail, clearly stating that the Kremlin wished to starve Ukraine has ever come to light.With Ukraine and Russia at odds over links to the West and energy, Kiev's genocide claims have assumed a political dimension. Some in Russia consider Ukraine's willingness to open old wounds as evidence of its determination to antagonise Moscow and seek sympathy in the West.Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, has charged Ukraine's pro-western president, Viktor Yushchenko with exploiting the famine for "instantaneous political goals", while General Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration and archives department at Russia's federal security service, dismissed the Holodomor as a "Ukrainian invention".Ukraine's decision to push ahead with a criminal investigation could fall under the scrutiny of a new Russian commission, appointed by Mr Medvedev last week and charged with guarding against "the falsification of history at the expense of Russian interests".But opposition to the inquiry also comes from within Ukraine, with some politicians questioning the sense of investigating events of 70-plus years ago."From the legal point of view, what the security service is doing is absurd," said Gennady Moskal, a member of parliament. "Who will criminal charges be brought against? Maybe against a cemetery? Who can be brought to justice? If a person was 18 years old in 1933, then how old are they now when criminal proceedings are beginning?"act of genocide orchestrated by Moscow.

Priest Uncovers Ukraine's 'Holocaust By Bullets'

The Holocaust has a landscape engraved in the mind's eye: barbed-wire fences, gas chambers, furnaces. Less known is the "Holocaust by Bullets," in which over 2 million Jews were gunned down in towns and villages across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Their part in the Nazis' Final Solution has been under-researched, their bodies left unidentified in unmarked mass graves."Shoah," French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's documentary, stands as the 20th century's epic visual record of the Holocaust.Now another Frenchman, a Catholic priest named Patrick Desbois, is filling in a different part of the picture.Desbois says he has interviewed more than 800 eyewitnesses and pinpointed hundreds of mass graves strewn around dusty fields in the former Soviet Union. The result is a book, "The Holocaust by Bullets," and an exhibition through March 15 at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage.Brought to Ukraine by a twist of fate, Desbois has spent seven years trying to document the truth, honor the dead, relieve witnesses of their pain and guilt and prevent future acts of genocide.Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during the war. Another 550,000-650,000 Soviet Jews were killed in Belarus and up to 140,000 in Russia, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly.Begun after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the slaughter by bullets was the opening phase of what became the Nazis' Final Solution with its factories of death operating in Auschwitz and other camps, all in Nazi-occupied Poland.Desbois devotes his 233-page book, published by Palgrave Macmillan in August, to his work in Ukraine, where he says he has uncovered over 800 mass extermination sites, more than two-thirds of them previously unknown.Since the book was written, he has expanded his search for mass graves into Belarus and plans to look early this year in areas of Russia that were occupied by the Germans.Sometimes bursting into tears, old men and women from poor Ukrainian villages recount to Desbois how women, children and elders were marched or carted in from neighboring towns to be shot, burned to death or buried alive by German troops, Romanian forces, squads of local Ukrainian collaborators and local ethnic German volunteers.Even then, it was methodical, Desbois' research shows. First, Germans would arrive in a town or village and gather intelligence on how best to transport the victims to extermination sites, where to execute them and how to dispose of their bodies."It was done as systematically as it was done elsewhere," said John Paul Himka, an expert on the Holocaust and Ukraine at the University of Alberta in Canada, who is not connected to Desbois' work. "You can read as they're figuring out best way to do this, the best way to shoot ... it's absolutely systematic, no accident here."Desbois' interviews and grave-hunting tie in to millions of pages of Soviet archives, heightening their credibility, says Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who wrote the foreword to Desbois' book.Father Desbois' work is also having an impact on efforts to preserve Holocaust sites. In December, the 26-nation International Task Force on the Holocaust called on European governments to ensure the protection of locations such as the mass graves Desbois is uncovering, according to Shapiro, who helped draft the resolution.Among Desbois' key findings is the widespread use of local children to help bury the dead, wait on the German soldiers during meals and remove gold teeth and other valuables from the bodies. His work has also yielded evidence that the killings were most frequently carried out in the open, in daylight and in a variety of ways — shooting victims, throwing them alive into bonfires, walling up a group of Jews in a cellar that wasn't opened until 12 years later.Desbois' witnesses are mostly Orthodox Christian, and he comes to them as a priest, dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar, taking in their pain and trying to ease their suffering. Many have never before talked about their experiences.In the village of Ternivka, some 200 miles south of Kiev where 2,300 Jews were killed, a frail, elderly woman, who identified herself only as Petrivna, revealed the unbearable task the Nazis imposed on her.The young schoolgirl saw her Jewish neighbors thrown into a large pit, many still alive and convulsing in agony. Her task was to trample on them barefoot to make space for more. One of those she had to tread on was a classmate."You know, we were very poor, we didn't have shoes," Petrivna told Desbois in a single breath, her body twitching in pain, Desbois writes in his book. "You see, it is not easy to walk on bodies."Desbois, 53, a short, soft-spoken man with dark, thinning hair, says the stories give him nightmares. The most difficult is "to bear the horrors that the witnesses tell me, because often the people are simple, very kind and want to tell me everything," Desbois said in a phone interview while on a trip to western Ukraine."You have to be able to listen, to accept, to bear this horror," said Desbois. "I am not here to judge the people's guilt, we are here to know what happened."Desbois' small team includes a translator, a researcher, a mapping expert, a ballistics specialist and a video and photo crew. He often joins his witnesses in their homes, leaving his shoes outside. He tends to a peasant's cow while the man tells his story.Desbois has deep personal roots in his project, dating to 2002, when he first visited Ukraine to see the place where his grandfather was interned as a French prisoner in World War II.When he arrived, the locals told him of a stream of blood that had run from the site where the Jews were executed and of a dismembered woman hanging from a tree after the Nazis threw a grenade in a pit full of people. When he was offered a visit to more villages, he did not hesitate."I am in a hurry to find all the bones, to establish the truth and justice so that the world can know what happened and that the Germans never left a tiny village in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia without killing Jews there."The Holocaust is a divisive topic here because some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis. Jewish groups are grateful for Desbois' efforts and lament the lack of government support for his and other Holocaust research and education programs."As a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian historian it pains me ... that there is no policy of national remembrance," said Anatoly Podolsky, head of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies. "We are not responsible for the past but we are responsible for remembering."Desbois leads a French association, Yahad-In Unum (the Hebrew and Latin words for "together"), which was founded by Catholics and Jews to heal the wounds between the two faiths. He believes that as a Catholic priest talking to Orthodox believers about the killing of their Jewish neighbors his work advances that healing mission."The book is meant so that people know ... that a genocide is simply people killing people," Desbois said. "My book is also an act of prevention of future acts of genocide."