Friday, June 11, 2010

Holodomor / Genocide Documentaries

Holodomor Survivors Tell the Sad Truth
By Randall King
Winnipeg Free Press, June 10, 2010
"The Ukraine famine of 1932-33 claimed as many as four million lives and is widely considered a deliberate genocide by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Almost 80 years later, Stalin's active role in creating the famine is still debatable, even among Ukraine presidents. ... To get the viewpoint that matters most, Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Anna Gin went right to the source in her documentary Stone Mill ... Gin, 36, interviewed many now-elderly survivors of the famine from every corner of Ukraine's Kharkiv region, which experienced the highest death toll and is where she is from. On the ground level of the actual events, there can be no doubt that farmers in the Ukraine produced crops in 1932, only to watch helplessly as apparatchiks and party goons raided every granary, barn, cupboard and attic in the region. The searchers sometimes employed long steel rods to dig through the hiding places, looking for hidden caches of grain or produce. In most cases, they left no food whatsoever to the families whose toil produced it. The sad testimonies of the survivors are punctuated with records of official meetings and correspondence that suggest that whatever Stalin's intentions towards the people of Ukraine, the result was a virtual genocide. [...]"

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