UKRAINIAN FAMINE

Adjourned debate on motion of Mr Hamilton-Smith:

That this house—

(a) notes that 2007-08 marks the 75^th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, caused by the deliberate actions of Stalin's Communist Government of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics;

(b) recalls that an estimated seven million people in the Ukrainian Republic starved to death as a result of Stalinist policies in 1932-33 and that millions more lost their lives in the purge that ensued for the rest of the decade;

(c) notes that this famine resulted in one of the greatest losses of human life in one country during the 20^th century and that it has been recognised as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation and its people by the Verkhovna Rada, the Parliament of Ukraine;

(d) honours the memories of those who lost their lives and extends its deepest sympathies to the victims, survivors and families of this tragedy; and

(e) joins the Ukrainian people throughout the world and, in particular, people of Ukrainian origin and descent in South Australia, in solemn commemoration of those tragic events.

(Continued from 5 February 2009. Page 1420.)

The Hon. M.J. ATKINSON (Croydon—Attorney-General, Minister for Justice, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Veterans' Affairs) (11:30): We have just passed the 75^th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33. In October 1917, the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party staged a coup d'etat by armed force against the elected All Russian Duma, or parliament. Years of warfare followed, during which Ukraine sought to be independent of the newly-formed Soviet Union. Ukraine was the scene of heavy fighting between the Bolshevik Red Army, the Ukrainian Hetmanate, the Ukrainian nationalist unders Symon Petliura and his Polish allies, the White Russian forces under General Anton Denikin, and the anarchist forces of Nestor Makhno.

The Russian Bolshevik forces prevailed, and Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union, just as it had been part of the Russian empire of Tsar Nicholas—that is, with one exception: the area of western Ukraine around Lwow, that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, became part of Poland.

In 1929, the Soviet government decided to force Ukrainian small farmers into collective farms (known in Ukrainian as kolhosps) and to take most of their production without payment for supply to Russia's cities and for export to Western Europe. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was afraid of Ukrainian nationalism and separatism, and also of Ukraine's small-scale independent farming economy, characterised by the free Cossack farmer, the selianyn. The Soviet government sent 25,000 Russian-speaking communist activists, many of them young city-dwellers with no understanding of agriculture, to Ukrainian villages to enforce the government policy of collectivisation. These activists were known as 'thousanders'.

I am indebted for what follows to a book I have read three times since I was given it 24 years ago, Miron Dolot's Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, and also Peter Kardash's Genocide in Ukraine. The government said it was intervening in Ukraine to liquidate the kulaks, a Russian pejorative for rich farmers who exploit other, smaller farmers. The Ukrainian equivalent is a kurkul. Possession of a one-room house, a cow and a few chickens, or the possession of a house with a tin roof or floorboards was enough for the communists to denounce one as a kurkul, an agricultural capitalist; and, from there, eviction, dispossession and exile to Siberia followed. Writing of the situation in the Zhytomyr region, an eye witness of events in 1932 and 1933 writes:

Those who had a cow kept it inside and lived off the milk. When spring came, people boiled and ate nettles...people swelled up and died, whether they had joined the collective farm or not. While they were still alive, their skin was yellow, then almost black. The skin of people who had starvation edema burst and a watery discharge flowed from their wounds, which became infected with maggots.

Even before the famine began, the village looked like a wilderness: the village soviet had dismantled the barns, stables and granaries, shipped the wood to the cities and sold it as firewood...unattended horses roamed the fields and the village. Little signboards were tied to their manes saying 'No master, no food, no-one to tend me, nowhere to sleep'.

Lovers of piano music may recognise Zhytomyr as the birthplace of the great 20^th century pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was raised in Odessa.

In the industrial city of Kharkiv in the east of Ukraine close to the Russian border, which the communists made the capital of Ukraine at this time, a witness said, 'I saw a starving woman being eaten alive by maggots on Kinna Square. Passers-by gave her bits of bread, but the unfortunate woman did not eat it because she was close to death.'

In 1932 the Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koester, famous for his book Darkness at Noon, travelled through Ukraine by rail. He writes:

All along the railway, all the way to Kharkiv, throngs of bedraggled peasants gathered at every station. They wanted to exchange icons and pictures for bread. Mothers held up their emaciated children with swollen bellies to the windows of train cars.

...The thousanders erected watchtowers around grain fields to try to stop the locals obtaining green stalks of wheat and boiling them to eat. There was a mandatory minimum sentence of five years' imprisonment for stealing Socialist property. Some people resorted to cannibalism, others to suicide.

In 1919 when the Soviets conquered Miron Dolot's part of Ukraine, his father was arrested on allegations that he was 'a servant of the old regime' and a 'bourgeois nationalist', and then murdered in prison. Mr Dolot writes:

From the time of my father's death, fear dogged my mother's every step. She was afraid that at any moment she would be denounced as the wife of an 'eliminated enemy of the people', a charge that would have been fatal for the four of us. For 11 long years, she laboured under that fear, always having to be very careful in her speech. During those years, she had to appease many people in order to avoid quarrels and other frictions which might have resulted in denunciation. Indeed, she lived in a lonely and dangerous world.

It is this patience that has become a national characteristic of Ukrainians, both a virtue and a vice. Mr Dolot writes of the year 1932 in Ukraine:

By this time, after only two years of compulsory collectivisation, normal human relations had broken down completely. Neighbours had been made to spy on neighbours; friends had been forced to betray friends; children had been coached to denounce their parents; and even family members avoided meeting each other.

As the winter of 1933 turned to spring and the snow melted, Mr Dolot describes the scene in his village:

As the snow slowly melted away, human corpses were exposed to view everywhere: in backyards, in roads, in fields. Those dead bodies constituted a pathetic problem for the living. As the weather warmed, they started to thaw and decay. The stench which resulted plagued us, and we could do nothing about it. The villagers who survived were unable to bury the dead, and no-one from the outside seemed in a hurry to do it, so the bodies were left where they just happened to die. Those in the fields or in the forest fell prey to wild animals; those in their home became the prey of countless rats...

Most of these desperate villagers reconciled themselves to death from starvation. They stayed at home. They were unkempt and haggard, and so weak they could hardly drag one foot after another. They just sat, or lay down silently, too feeble even to talk. The bodies of some were reduced to skeletons, with their skin hanging greyish yellow and loose over their bones. Their faces looked like rubber masks with large, bulging, immobile eyes. Their necks seemed to have shrunk into their shoulders. The look in their eyes was glassy, heralding their approaching death. The bodies of others were swollen, a final stage of starvation. Their faces, arms, legs and stomachs resembled the surfaces of plastic balloons. The tissues would soon crack and burst, resulting in fast deterioration of their bodies.

In his epilogue, Mr Dolot relates a Ukrainian story I have heard more than once in South Australia. I quote:

When World War II broke out I became a soldier and, eventually, I was taken prisoner by the Germans and interned in Stalag 3 in Germany. After the war was over knowing that all Soviet prisoners of war were declared deserters and traitors by Stalin's order and faced the firing squad, and because of my desire to live in the free world, I decided to stay in West Germany as a displaced person, and later I emigrated to the United States where I found my new home. My mother and my brother, who suffered with me, who shared with me the last morsel of food, and to whom I owe my survival, remained in the village. They had no other choice but to continue working on the collective farm. World War II separated us and what happened to them afterwards, I don't know.

It has been my honour to know members of the Ukrainian-Australian community since about 1984 and to share in their Holy Liturgy, their music and dance, their varenyky and their borscht, their beer and their vodka and their fellowship. From 1991 Ukraine became independent. I am glad that so many of the migrants to South Australia lived to see it. Ukraintsi and Ykpaïha were able to rediscover their history, get in touch with their relatives overseas (even visit each other), worship in a church of their choosing, vote for their Verkhovna Rada and erect memorials to the victims of the Holodomor.

It was one of the joys of my life as an MP to visit Ykpaïtta for a week last month. I laid flowers at three Holodomor memorials on behalf of South Australia in the company of my colleague the member for Torrens: one outside St Michael's gold-domed monastery in Kiev, a beautiful blue painted church at the opposite end of proyizd Volodymyrsky from Saint Sophia's, torn down by the Soviets in 1937 to terrorise Ukrainian Christians and re-erected in 2001; one at the rural town of Kominternivsky, outside Odessa; and the third being the exquisite and moving new memorial erected in Kyiv on the initiative of President Victor Yushchenko on the heights overlooking the Dniepro River on the road back from Percherska Lavra to Independent Square. Rest eternal grant unto them O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.

Time expired.

Mr HAMILTON-SMITH (Waite—Leader of the Opposition) (11:44): I rise to close the debate and I thank the Minister for Multicultural Affairs for his contribution. Clearly, both sides of the house acknowledge and understand that this 75^th anniversary of Holodomor, this terrible tragedy, caused by the deliberate actions of Stalin's communist regime, delivered horror and catastrophe to hundreds of thousands of innocent people. That seven million people in the Ukraine could have been starved or suffered so horribly at the hands of this dictatorial regime is a great crime against humanity.

It is pleasing to know that the house as a whole in a bipartisan way, having noted that the famine resulted in such loss, is prepared to honour the memories of those who lost their lives and extend its sympathy. The parliament is at one with the Ukrainian people as they remember this horror. I think that this motion is an example of how, in a bipartisan way, the state Liberal Party and the state Labor Party can signal together, arm in arm, their support for multicultural communities. This is a very important thing.

Remembering such things should never become a matter of contest between the parties. No party should ever feel that they need to prove better than the other that they care about these tragedies and about the people whose lives were affected by them. The reality is that we care equally together, and that is what underpins multiculturalism in this country. It is the fact that it has bipartisan support and that both major parties can work together on helping to repair the damage in the hearts and minds of those who live on with these memories in Australia, that we seek to unite and not divide, support and encourage and not dismiss, and that multicultural communities know that both parties are there for them. I commend the motion to the house.

Motion carried.