Ukraine: Germany calls Holodomor genocide
Germany has just declared Joseph Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukrainians a genocide, said Ronen Steinke in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Some 3.9 million Ukrainians starved to death from 1932 to 1933 in a man-made famine that Stalin imposed to crush the Ukrainian national identity movement. For years, soldiers had been “carting off” Ukrainian wheat to feed other Soviet regions, but that year they carried away everything edible—including livestock, pets, and the seed for next year’s crop—and then prevented the desperate Ukrainians from fleeing. Ukrainians refer to this monstrous crime as the Holodomor, or hunger-death. But this is not mere history. In declaring the Holodomor a genocide, Germany’s parliament is “officially confirming that there has been an independent Ukrainian people for more than a century,” because “genocide” refers to the attempted extermination of a national group. This Ukrainian nationhood is exactly what Vladimir Putin “and his war propagandists” deny as they seek to absorb Ukraine back into Mother Russia. Germany is thus showing the world that it believes in “the historical legitimacy of Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
That’s not the German parliament’s job, said Alan Posener in Die Welt (Germany). The Bundestag exists to “pass laws and control the government,” not make “inconsequential resolutions” about historical events. I think the Ukrainian peasants were starved not because they were Ukrainians, but because they were peasants, “useless mouths” to Stalin, who preferred to steer Soviet food toward the new industrial workers modernizing his country. But then, I’m not a historian—and neither is the Bundestag. Once it starts pronouncing on history, then to be “even halfway fair,” it would have to start ruling on all kinds of past and present trauma, including in allies like the U.S., business partners like China, and of course our own country with our past crimes. Indeed, Germans have a lot of gall to go accusing Russians of genocide, said Elena Karaeva in RIA Novosti (Russia). The mass starvation in several Soviet states in the 1930s was certainly a “tragedy with a colossal number of victims,” but it was largely the result of Stalin’s “rapid and violent collectivization of agriculture.” Germany, though, actually did “use hunger as a military weapon” during World War II, and not just during the siege of Leningrad, when some 800,000 Russians in the encircled city perished of hunger. Worse was what the Nazis called the Hunger Plan, the stealing of Russian food to feed the Wehrmacht. At least 7 million Soviet citizens starved as a result. The Germans have no moral standing to accuse Russians of any crime.
Yet Germany isn’t the only one to draw parallels between Stalin and Putin, said Ugo Poletti in the Kyiv Post (Ukraine). In a speech commemorating the Holodomor, Pope Francis last month prayed for the victims of that genocide in the very same sentence that he mentioned “the many Ukrainians, children, women, and the elderly” suffering today. That’s a “clear comparison between the Holodomor and the ongoing Russian invasion.” And that’s the historical truth.