The first five year plan was launched by Stalin in 1928. Fundamental in this plan was the collectivization of farms. When the Ukrainian farmers resisted, Stalin launched his brutal famine. This genocide was much more complex than the Holocaust. Aside from racism and anger, Stalin had other reasons for his mass murder, all of which were meant to benefit Russia. These goals for the famine included:
• Successful Collectivization of the Ukraine; the most fertile area in the Soviet Union
• The crushing of Ukrainian nationalism and the dominance of Russia over the other Soviet Republics
• The successful exportation of enough grain to finance the five year plans
• The repopulation of the Ukraine by Russian Communists and the destruction of the Ukrainian people
Through his famine policy, Stalin successfully collectivized almost all of the Ukraine, the most important agricultural portion of the U.S.S.R. (History Channel). In 1928, Stalin had announced the first of his five year plans for the Soviet Union. The plans were timetables for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and had strict quotas for all raw materials in Russia (History Channel). Without all farms, mines and factories under state control, this plan would be impossible (History Place). After the famine, nobody in the Ukraine dared to challenge his collectivization policy. As the above map (obtained from the History Place website) shows, Russia is a vast land, towering over the Ukraine. The Soviet Union of 1932 contained Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasia (divided in 1936 into Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan). This "Union" was more like a Russian Empire, but Russian propagandists tried to hide this from outsiders (History Channel). The Ukraine was second to Russia in population and wealth, and was therefore the most dangerous to Stalin (Ukraine Weekly). Through the Ukranian famine and genocides similar to it (The Kazakstan Famine, The Muslim Deportations) Stalin assured that Russia would dominate the Soviet Union and would not be challenged by nationalism (Infoukes). As part of his plan to destroy Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin promoted colonization of the land by ethnic Russians (Ukraine Weekly). The best evidence of this is the most recent census taken in the Ukraine: over 22% of the people there are ethnic Russians (Grolier). Many of these Russians are descendants of the settlers who arrived in the latter stages of the famine. In Section 14 of Chapter 2 (page not available) in The Ninth Circle of Hell, Olexa Woropay described a clash between surviving Ukranian orphans and ethnic Russian schoolchildren. The orphans ambushed the settlers and severely hurt them, saying, “‘You have murdered our parents by hunger, and occupied our houses. Go away from our homes! Go away from our village!’” The schoolmaster of these orphans was imprisoned for twelve years following the incident. His crime, according to the Soviets, was his failure to teach his Ukrainian students proper love of “the fraternal Russian people” (Woropay). Possibly the most important and diabolical reason for the famine was Stalin’s five year plans (History Place). The famine assured that all farms would fall under state control through forced collectivization. A second function of the famine, though, was to finance the construction of mines and factories. During the famine, Stalin was able to export vast amounts of grain to various nations all over the world. He was able to offer extremely low prices to nations full of starving people (remember that the famine took place from 1932-33, in the midst of the Great Depression). With the money Stalin made from the grain exports, he purchased machines from the very same nations. It is easy to see that the Western nations, including the United States, benefitted from the famine, as the result was massive amounts of grain that could be given to starving citizens and thousands of manufacturing jobs that could be given to the unemployed (History Place). The five year plans helped to make the Soviet Union, with Russia at its heart, one of the most powerful nations on earth in only a little more than a decade (History Channel). Stalin was no stupid man, and he perfectly manufactured the famine to ensure that Russia benefitted as much as possible. Vital to his plan was the secrecy of the Western media.
Stalin, of course, would not be able to continue his lucrative deals with the west if the people of those nations discovered the extent of his atrocities in the Ukraine. He needed the media to be silent. As has been shown before, Stalin was an extremely intelligent man. If he was not, he would not have been able to rise to power and would not have been able to conduct such a profitable genocide as the Ukrainian famine (History Channel). He knew very early on in his reign that he would need a respected reporter in the west whom he could count on to be his voice. He found that man in Walter Duranty. Duranty was a rising reporter who had already achieved a small level of success. He was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, and was exactly the kind of person Stalin was looking for: an ambitious reporter with a large ego. He was hand-picked by Stalin for an exclusive interview in 1931, in which they discussed the five year plan. Thanks to the interview and the subsequent stories surrounding it, Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 (Pulitzer-Winning Lies). In early 1933, while the famine was reaching its peak, a young Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones traveled to the Ukraine. He had been hearing rumors of a bad famine in British reporting circles, and had decided to see for himself if it was true. When he arrived in March, he went by foot from village to village, horrified at what he saw. At the end of the month, Jones filed a report describing the suffering of the Ukrainian peasantry that was published in many major western newspapers, including the New York Evening Post and The Manchester Guardian (Gareth Jones Biography). Stalin’s secret was out. The Soviet dictator was not nervous, despite the fact that millions of people had just found out about his genocide. He had a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on his side; his opponent, Jones, was in his twenties, just a few years removed from college. On March 31, Duranty published his rebuttal to Jones in the New York Times. In it, he defended Stalin and attacked Jones, saying that Jones had greatly exaggerated the amount of Russian suffering (Duranty, along with the rest of the world, referred to all people in the Soviet Union as Russians; this is precisely what Stalin had hoped for) in order to make a name for himself. The world was faced with a choice: would they take the word of a twenty-something writer, or would they believe a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter? As one could guess, Duranty’s story is the one that won out (Gareth Jones Biography). Six weeks after Duranty’s rebuttal, the Times agreed to publish a counter-rebuttal by Jones. In it, Jones showed evidence (such as letters written by victims) that the famine was indeed occurring. Shortly after this piece, Stalin banned him from ever again setting foot in the U.S.S.R., and he never got the opportunity to retrieve more evidence (Gareth Jones). Bernard Shaw, a respected British reporter, decided that he himself would go to the Ukraine and inspect the happenings there. He was led on a tour by the Communists through model villages full of plump Ukrainians. He had no way of knowing that the people he saw were not peasants, but members of the Communist Party elite and the secret police. Had he strayed from the tour, as Jones had, he would have found country roads littered with corpses, and families with but one survivor, teetering toward death. Instead, he followed the tour and came back to Britain with a good impression (The History Place). After Shaw’s “inspection” of the Ukraine, the GPU arrested six British engineers working in Moscow and charged them as spies. The trial, of course, was open to the media, but only if they did not mention the famine in their stories. Correspondents had to decide between reporting on the famine, which meant being denounced by two of the most respected journalists in the world, or reporting on the trial, an easy story that would enhance their careers. Just as Stalin predicted, they all chose the latter (The History Place). The famine was once again a secret, and to a large extent, it still is.
