Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support this motion and to remember the crime committed on the people of the Ukraine. After years of chaos, conflict and battles for ownership of the Ukraine, in 1921 those battles ended with the Soviet victory led by Lenin. The Soviets immediately began shipping out huge amounts of grain to feed the hungry people of Moscow and other Russian cities and deprived the people of the Ukraine of the food that they had grown with their own hands.

If Ukrainians thought that Lenin was a monster at that time, they had not seen anything. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin, one of the most ruthless humans ever to hold power, succeeded him. To Stalin, the burgeoning national revival movement and the continuing loss of Soviet influence in the Ukraine was completely unacceptable. Stalin immediately imposed the Soviet system of land management known as collectivisation. This resulted in the seizure of all privately owned farmlands and stock. In the Ukraine, once proud village farmers were by now reduced to the level of a rural factory worker on large collective farms. Anyone refusing to participate in that compulsory collectivisation system was denounced as a Kulak and deported.

The people simply refused to become cogs in the Soviet farm machine and remained, rightly, stubbornly determined to return to their pre-Soviet farming lifestyle. In Moscow Stalin responded to their unyielding defiance by dictating a policy that would deliberately cause mass starvation and result in the deaths of millions. By mid-1932, nearly 75 per cent of the farms in the Ukraine had been forcibly collectivised and the mandatory quotas of foodstuffs being shipped out to the Soviet Union were drastically increased. There was simply no food remaining to feed the people in the Ukraine. All food was considered to be the sacred property of the state. Mothers in the countryside would sometimes toss their emaciated children into passing railway cars travelling towards cities such as Kiev, in the hope that someone would take pity on them. However, children and adults had already flocked from the countryside to the cities. They were dropping dead in the streets.

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