Miron Dolot and the Ukrainian Holocaust

A Sober Challenge to Glasnost

Fr. James Thornton

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. VII (1990), No. 2, p. 16.

 

In an article published several years ago, I stated that the euphoria over apparent changes in the U.S.S.R. was premature, to say the least. I pointed out that the Soviets are always willing to take a step backward, from their perspective, in order later to take several steps forward. Events of the past year in Eastern Europe have not changed my mind. In my earlier article I listed certain conditions, the fulfillment of which might enable one to recognize genuine, fundamental change in the Soviet Union, should such change ever come about. They included the dismantling of the "gulag" system and freedom for all prisoners of conscience; open, free, and unrestricted multi-party elections; the destruction of secret police organizations; complete, unrestricted freedom for the Church; and the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from occupied areas, especially those seized during and after the Second World War. To date, none of these things has come to pass.

On reflection, furthermore, I would now have to add another essential condition, a condition yet to be met. Glasnost and all that it has generated cannot be genuine, in my view, unless and until all of the crimes of communism are fully exposed to public light—not just the crimes of Stalin, but those of Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Castro, Mao, Mengistu, and every other communist dictator in every part of the world from 1917 to the present moment. Those responsible for the crimes against humanity—against decency—must face judgement, either of the legal sort, in the case of those still living, or of the historical kind, for those now dead. The communist movement must itself face the harsh judgement of history. In this way the alibis, the distortions, and the mythologies created by the apologists for communism will be exposed forever. Future generations must know, for example, that Stalin did not betray the revolution, as the present Soviet leadership claims. The communists must acknowledge that Stalin was the fulfillment of everything for which Lenin stood. He was the Marxist-Leninist par excellence. His every action typifies Marxism wherever it has gained power: terror buttressed by murder on a scale without precedent in all of human history. This is the very foundation of every Marxist-Leninist state. It is in the very nature of the beast and cannot be otherwise.

There is an understandable resistance on the part of the Soviet Communist Party to allow the truth a full airing. It would probably spell the end for them. Nonetheless, the truth will certainly eventually surface. And until it does, no real change can be attributed to communism, its goals, or its leaders. Nor will such change readily be embraced by communist leaders. We can understand their reluctance, as we have said. Change will come despite the leaders of communism, Gorbachev included.

The reluctance of the West, on the other hand, to face honestly the record of murder and terror that is inherent in communism is not so easy to explain. Books on this subject generally receive negative responses from publishers. Even when they are published, they are not given the promotion they deserve. They do not receive reviews in the fashionable news magazines and newspapers. They are not part of the "Book-of-the-Month Club" selections—one of the means by which "best sellers" are created by the opinion molders. The authors of such books do not receive lucrative motion picture and TV "mini-series" contracts from Hollywood. Professional historians of a less objective bent do not quote from these books. Is it any wonder, then, that so few people in the West today are capable of grasping the horror that is communism? Is it any wonder that they think that the threat of this menace has come to an abrupt end?

Miron Dolot's superb volume on the Ukrainian Holocaust, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985) is one of the dozen or so books published over the last twenty years which give a truly accurate assessment of Marxism in action. In this respect it complements Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, another outstanding book on communist atrocities. Like Conquest, Dolot [a nom de plume] seeks to reveal the monumental sufferings of the Ukrainian people during the forced collectivization campaign of Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s. But Dolot does not tell the story from an historian's perspective, as does Conquest. He relates what he actually lived and saw during his own childhood and youth. He is an eyewitness to and survivor of the attempted communist genocide against the Ukrainian people. For this reason, Execution by Hunger is a precious record of enormous value to the future.

Stalin, we see in this book, organized the famine in the Ukraine with fiendish efficiency. Step-by-step, beginning in 1929, his totalitarian machinery of mass butchery was put into place. Its goal was not the Bolshevization of agriculture. Collective farming had already proven a pathetic failure during the 'twenties. This was not high idealism gone astray. Nor was it some gigantic miscalculation on the part of the Soviet leadership. The goal of the campaign was mass murder. The goal was to crush, once and for all, the Ukrainian people and to inculcate both in the Ukrainian mind, primarily, and that of other peoples a terror so all-consuming that total subjugation and submission to the communist masters would be guaranteed for many decades.

Starvation is perhaps the most terrible of deaths. It is thus absolutely heart-rending to read the details of this characteristically Stalinesque act: the deliberate starvation of the Ukraine. It is an act almost beyond belief, were it not for the fact that this terror-famine served as a model for other, more recent communist dictatorships—in Cambodia and Ethiopia, for example. Whole families were wiped out. Whole villages were obliterated. Whole regions were ruthlessly depopulated. Hundreds of thousands of children wandered the countryside, "reduced to mere skeletons," as Dolot says, "the heads on their small thin necks...like inflated balloons." Stupefied by hunger, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe that had overtaken them, nearly all perished. 'Their pathetic faces, parched or swollen, and streaked with tears," Dolot writes, "will remain in my memory forever." Roughly fifteen million Ukrainian people were thus coldly exterminated.

Let us remember that the Ukrainian people, then as now, are our Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. Before World War I, over 90% of the Ukrainian people were Orthodox and a free Ukraine would, no doubt, follow the Orthodox Faith of its Fathers. Indeed, its survival and resilience, in spite of all the grisly, satanic torture that communism has inflicted, are a modern miracle and a tribute to the Faith of a people whose Churches drip with martyric blood drained from them by a system dedicated to the eradication of Orthodoxy.

Just as we remember piously the Martyrs of the early Church, so we must remember the Martyrs of our own age. Let us not forget that the Soviet system exterminated our own brothers and sisters. Communism, both as an ideology and a system, cannot be "reformed" or made "more human." To believe in a "kinder and gentler" communism is to believe that the Evil One himself can become an ally of goodness and decency. If we understand our enemy well and remember his atrocities, then perhaps we will possess the requisite wisdom to grasp the true significance of contemporary events in Eastern Europe and to assure that history will not repeat itself.

 

Execution by Hunger:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X-17v9dZpQY2-SBvOKOmJ2M8AP1fPWjS/view?usp=sharing

Harvest of Sorrow:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1voSJkurHBLyjwIfhqHQqweyaumeJG4ay/view?usp=sharing