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Ukrainian Voice | 16Jan2012 | Cheryl A. Madden
http://www.yluhovy.com/MML/genocide_revealed.html
Woonsocket premiere's
Genocide Revealed
"So much evil directed against the Ukrainian people"
A Review of the
Documentary Genocide Revealed
By Cheryl A. Madden,
Order of Princess Olha
In his poem, “The Cross,” the poet Mykola
Rudenko wrote of Ukraine:
Mother of mine, you have
been a milking cow.
You have such a gentle
nature that even the loafer will milk you,
And then the same lazy
hand will rake your manger bare.
Woonsocket, R.I.: Director
Yurij Luhovy’s
documentary Genocide Revealed, through use of primary source interviews
with Holodomor survivors and explanatory commentary by historians
dispassionately addresses many controversial points of the
Holodomor. Well-paced topic development explains contributing
historical factors dated from the Soviet takeover enlightens viewers
unfamiliar with Soviet history and the Stalinist Famine. Discussion of
newly released documentation sparks the interest of those possessing
previous knowledge. A director dealing with such dire subject matter
might have chosen to employ even greater shock value, and yet by doing
so, such a film would have risked losing the audience to mere
sensations of horror. Luhovy chose a higher road, and created
Genocide Revealed, a documentary that, thus far, has won a dozen film
awards internationally.
Recently, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of
St. Michael in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, celebrated a Holodomor
Panakhyda.
Following the memorial service officiated by
Father Anthony Perkins, the event culminated with the Rhode Island
debut of the feature documentary Genocide Revealed. The
evening was opened by Cheryl A. Madden, followed by director/producer
Yurij Luhovy. He explained that, whereas the earlier film Harvest of
Despair demonstrated that a famine took place in Ukraine during
1932-1933, Genocide Revealed shows that the Holodomor was an act of
genocide. Those who deny the genocidal nature of the Holodomor
oft-maintain that Stalin’s concurrent policy of forced
industrialization necessitated the extraordinarily high quotas of grain
repeatedly expropriated from Ukraine. In the film, a Holodomor survivor
counters this point by asking why the Communist cadres sent into the
countryside expropriated every item of nutritional value -- not merely
the
grain, but also meats, fats, and vegetables. Those Communists [the
so-called “25,000ers”] charged to find any hidden stocks of food,
taunted the villagers, “Why are you still alive?” Their acts of
carrying off all livestock fodder and seed grain confirms the
government’s intention that the villagers not survive.
The film describes how designated Socialist
property, all livestock and food products came under the possession of
the Soviet government. Starving people were shot, if caught trying to
gather even just a few ears of corn or grain from the fields or from
stockpiles of grain left to rot due to the lack of sufficient means to
transport it to trains or ships for export. Carbolic acid
poured onto any dead animals prevented the starving people from eating
this carrion.
Survivors in the film recount how desperate
fathers kissed the boots of Soviet officials in hopes of mercy. Weeping
mothers begged for food to feed their children. These innocent children
perished of hunger. After her own starvation dried her breast milk, one
mother remembered of her infant son she could no longer feed, “I held
him and sang until he died in my arms.” Survivors recalled their
elementary school age classmates dying of hunger in their classrooms or
schoolyards. Yes, even starving children were required to attend
school. There was no mercy. All food was taken; the borders sealed to
prevent the peasants from traveling to bordering Russia or Belarus
where there was food available; internal passports were denied to the
peasantry; those persons who did slip across the border and acquired
food were arrested upon their return trip, and the food taken from
them.
The government decreed that these persons
were to be charged as speculators and either shot, or sent to the labor
camps of the Gulag, or “returned to their domiciles” to starve there
with their families and neighbors. There, they perished horribly -- as
Stalin intended.
Luhovy’s film technique of altering still
photographs from the Holodomor into negative images depersonalizes and
yet universalizes their tragic content, thereby enhancing their
significance and increasing the empathetic reaction of the viewer to
those images. He tried to recreate with sound and picture the
impression that the soul is leaving the body.
Historical film footage showing many of the
aspects of the Holodomor provides visual proof of the deliberate nature
of the Holodomor. It is troubling to watch these film clips of Stalin,
Kaganovich, Molotov and the other Communist figures, as they went about
the functions of government or conducting their personal lives fully
aware, but uncaring, of the suffering they caused and exacerbated that
killed 5-12 million of their own people. By 1932, 127
districts of Ukraine had reported to the highest level of Soviet
government that they were facing extermination by famine. Nonetheless,
Stalin and the Soviet hierarchy, “criminals on a global scale,” allowed
their own people to perish by the starvation death and related diseases
at the rate of 25,000 per day.
Kaganovich targeted the Kuban; Molotov
worked his evil in Ukraine; the Politburo decreed the suspension of all
trade of provisions to Ukraine. Certificates of death were altered to
erase hunger as the cause of death or, in 1933, destroyed by Stalin’s
order. Still-alive victims were taken to the burial pits for premature
internment, so the burial parties would not have to return to the same
house. “The wolves came and dragged the corpses around.”
Daily, Stalin followed the progress of the
Holodomor. He deprived the victims of foreign assistance from the
International Red Cross, the League of Nations, and the Ecumenical
Council of Churches by denying a state of famine existed in the Soviet
Union. In their turn, Stalin’s cohorts and underlings vied with each
other to “up the ante” by increasing the already impossibly high
quotas, thereby demonstrating their Communist fervor in hopes of
personal aggrandizement or professional promotion. However,
fearing Ukrainian Communists working in the Holodomor-afflicted areas
might suffer lapses of political obedience or even join in the numerous
village protests, a massive purge of Party ranks took place. In
Ukraine, Russian cadres replaced those of Ukrainian ethnicity. By the
end of the Purges of the 1930’s, few Party functionaries in a position
to know the hidden responsibilities and the deliberate mechanics
employed by the genocidaires of the Holodomor still survived. Indeed,
“dead men tell no tales.”
Archival film footage with signs posted on
the doors of empty cottages belonging to Ukrainian victims of the
Holodomor read, “All are dead.” Russians relocated to repopulate the
decimated areas leading to the present state of markedly increased
russification of Eastern Ukraine. To eliminate the stench and
contagion from the decaying bodies of famine victims, many homes were
razed and burned. Depopulated in their entirety, it is now
impossible to tell exactly where many villages were located or how many
persons once lived there.
Arrest, deportation, imprisonment, and
execution during the time of the Holodomor and in following years until
the 1980’s, decimated the Ukrainian intelligentsia and cultural elite.
The OGPU falsified charges in show trials. The peasant-base in the
villages, who had for centuries “kept the home-fires burning,” and who
held the oral histories and folklore were targeted for
destruction.
As Ivan Drach points out, Ukraine had its
own system of government lost to Soviet dominion only a few years
earlier. Ukraine was “a state within a state” in the Soviet Union, and
as such posed a viable political threat to Stalin’s increasing
hegemony.
The film addresses how thousands of peasant
and women’s revolts over widespread areas fought against forced
collectivization, and the destruction of churches, against which
“repression was continuous.” Already deprived of their
weaponry and armed only with pitchforks or whatever weapons they could
devise, the people fought a lost battle against well-armed Soviet
forces. They preferred meeting their deaths in battle, rather than to
die slowly, as starvation takes several weeks to kill. The madness of
extreme hunger led to cannibalism, of course, because in the dire need
for sustenance negates prohibitive social
mores.
Prof. Wolodymyr Serhijchuk, historian,
points to the great percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in geographic areas
outside of Ukraine-proper also targeted for destruction: the Northern
Caucasus, the Kuban, Lower and Middle Volga, and Kazakhstan. Ukrainians
came to populate these regions due to earlier crisis-generated
migrations. At the time of the Holodomor, in Kazakhstan, there lived
approximately 850,000 persons claiming Ukrainian ethnicity. The sad
history of genocidal events too often has proved the truism,
“Forewarned is forearmed.”
Luhovy’s methodical presentation of facts
resulted in a teaching tool that builds the viewer’s comprehension. As
such, it is highly suitable for the task of educating persons “outside
the choir” of Ukrainian ethnicity about this too-long hidden genocide.
After all, in the 20th century alone, not only Adolph Hitler, but
Chairman Mao as well, learned from Stalin’s success in perpetrating the
Holodomor many methods of how to conduct and conceal heinous acts of
ethnic and cultural genocide. Therefore, be it ever so painful a topic
to explore, it is necessary to build an understanding of the methods
and results of genocide.
Interviews are conducted in Ukrainian, dubbed in English by Jill
Hennessy and Lubomyr Mykytiuk. The multi-award winning documentary is
narrated by Graham Greene.
To arrange a showing or to financially support the making of an
Educational Version of Genocide Revealed:
or write to
MML. Inc.
2330 Beaconsfield Ave
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
H4A 2G8