Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House:

(1)

notes that 2007 marks the 75th anniversary of the Great Ukrainian Famine—Holodomor—of 1932–33, caused by the deliberate actions of Stalin’s communist Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics;

(2)

recalls that an estimated 7 million Ukrainians starved to death as a result of Stalinist policies in 1932–33 alone, and that millions more lost their lives in the purge that ensued for the remainder of the decade;

(3)

notes:

(a)

that this constitutes one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history;

(b)

that the Ukrainian Famine was one of the greatest losses of human life in one country in the 20th century; and

(c)

that it remains insufficiently known and acknowledged by the world community and the United Nations as an act of genocide against the Ukranian nation and its people, but has been recognised as such by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine);

(4)

honours the memory of those who lost their lives;

(5)

joins the Ukrainian people throughout the world, and particularly in Australia, in commemorating these tragic events; and

(6)

submits that the Australian Government support a resolution to the General Assembly of the United Nations, which may be submitted by the Government of Ukraine, that the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33 be recognised as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation and its people.

I rise with great sadness to speak on this resolution, a resolution which must be very painful for members of the Ukrainian-Australian community who remember one of the great crimes of Stalin in the period of Soviet communism. He was responsible for the death of between eight million and 10 million citizens of his own country who live in what is now a free country, the Ukraine. Any of us who read that magisterial history The Harvest of Sorrow by the great Professor Robert Conquest, one of the most important works about the period of Soviet communism, understand exactly the nature of the crimes that were perpetrated against the Ukrainian people. I must say that my knowledge of this issue began in the 1970s when I met the Ukrainian mathematician Leonid Plusch. He was one of the persecuted dissidents from the Ukraine who managed to get out. He was brought to Australia by someone I became friendly with, Dr Michael Lawriwsky. He is now a leading financial expert, but was then one of the young leaders of the Ukrainian community. This began my journey of discovery of exactly what happened in the Ukraine in those periods.

It seems that Stalin, in the period of complete Soviet power, in probably what is the equal worst paradigm of a totalitarian state, decided he was going to eliminate entire categories of people who might be a threat to him. In this case the kulaks, the peasants of the Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of the USSR, were a category of people—an entire minority who, as private producers, had been encouraged to production after the New Economic Program of the early part of the Soviet Union—who were considered enemies and dispensable. Under the dreadful commissar of the Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich, who died, unmourned, in his bed aged 92 just a few years ago, the mass starvation program was begun. Exports of wheat from the Ukraine were increased, production quotas were increased completely unrealistically and the producers—the Ukrainian people—were not fed. As news of the famine spread beyond Ukraine, then a province of the Soviet Union, various people were brought in to write stories about the kinds of Potemkin villages that Stalin wanted them to know about.

There was an infamous writer for the New York Times called Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for saying that there was no famine in the Ukraine. He is the only person to have been stripped of a Pulitzer prize subsequently, because of what people discovered happened in that benighted area at that time. This Stalinist forced famine, undertaken after the Bolshevik Revolution, stemmed from the move to collectivise farm into kolkhoz, or state farms, and to deprive people not just of their livelihood but actually of food with which to live. There are terrible examples of what happened during the Holodomor. People were said to be actually turning to cannibalism because the starvation was so widespread.

As I said, seven million to 10 million Ukrainians perished as a result of the famine—a deliberate state policy—while Ukrainian wheat was exported to earn foreign exchange for the USSR. It was not mere indifference of the Soviet apparatus to its own people; this was an exercise that was understood and advanced at a macro level by Stalin and henchmen like Kaganovich as an early example of ethnic cleansing. To this end, the quotas for Ukrainian grain production were increased by in excess of 40 per cent but all of the fruits of the labour of the hardworking farm labourers were taken for the Red Army, guarded by the NKVD and the legion of other Soviet security agencies. The grain of these starving farmers, who worked so hard, was guarded and kept under lock and key as the farmers and their families died. Internal travel controls were implemented to prevent movement in areas where food was comparatively more plentiful, further compounding the suffering of ethnic Ukrainians in the northern Caucasus and lower Volga. The world should never forget this mass starvation of the Ukrainian people.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion moved by the member for Melbourne Ports, and I would like to recognise the initial work done on this motion by the member for Reid. I would also like to recognise members of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations who are in the gallery. The 1932-33 Holodomor, the death by hunger of an estimated seven million Ukrainian people, more than one-fifth of that nation’s population, was a tragedy of such magnitude that it can only move us to a sadness that is essentially beyond words. The great Ukrainian famine was a man-made horror of a kind and on a scale that was inconceivable before the 20th century. The horror belongs to the legacy of that century and, from it, we learn the consequences of not only political ambition, which has been and always will be with us, but also political and ideological ambition mobilised by the power of a totalitarian state.

When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at the 1956 Communist Party conference, he said that Stalin had wanted to deport all Ukrainians—all 30 million of them—but that he could not find a location for the resettlement. Political scientist Yaroslav Bilinsky recalls that:

... in 1932, Stalin had no illusion that he could exterminate all the Ukrainians at once, but by killing approximately one fifth of all the Eastern Ukrainians, he made a good start in turning them into a more submissive, denationalised people of  ‘sowers of millet and hewers of wood’.

Bilinsky asks:

... is this not genocide?

For far too long, the world has failed to recognise the Ukrainian famine as genocide. We have failed to realise that in 1932-33, the Soviet policy of forced collectivisation created an unprecedented and horribly unsustainable crop failure in the breadbasket of Europe, that the regime punished starving men, women and children alike with execution or deportation for stealing so much as a handful of grain from the collective, that the very seeds were taken from the hands of the planters, that the borders were barred against those who tried to flee and that, in the end, the deaths of millions were defended as the successful execution of a policy assembly.

The world failed to respond. As the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, Valeriy Kuchinsky, stated on 10 December 2003:

In 1933, the international community believed the cynical propaganda of the Soviet Union, which was selling bread abroad while in Ukraine the hunger was killing 17 people each minute.

On that day, Ambassador Kuchinsky also informed the General Assembly that a joint statement on the Holodomor, signed by 36 delegations and supported by 27 other member states, had been issued. The statement recognised the national tragedy caused by the cruel actions and policies of a totalitarian regime.

I wish to acknowledge the significance of the 2003 motion moved by Senator Bill Heffernan in the Australian Senate. The motion acknowledged the 70th anniversary of the enforced famine, recognised that it constituted one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history and honoured the memory of those who died.

This motion recalls the seven million Ukrainians who starved to death as a result of Stalinist policies and the millions more, amongst whom were intelligentsia, religious leaders and politicians, who died in the subsequent purge. It is a motion of remembrance and honour. It is a motion that joins the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian Australians in commemorating this tragedy. It is a motion that asks the Australian government to support a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly that the Holodomor in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 be recognised as an act of genocide against the nation of Ukraine and its people. I commend the motion to the House.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion as well, but before I do, on behalf of the member for Kooyong, the member for Melbourne Ports and all other members of parliament, I welcome members of the Ukrainian community who are in the gallery today. I support this motion with all sincerity, humility and ongoing sorrow, perplexed by the all-too-evident human ability to show astonishing disregard for human life—to deliberately, purposefully and even comfortably administer death, irreversible and eternal, to tens, hundreds of thousands, millions and tens of millions of Ukrainians, our fellow human beings. I also acknowledge the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933. It was a genocide orchestrated by the then Soviet leadership of Joseph Stalin for the decimation and subjugation of a people, the theft of their land, the fruit of their toil, their hope of a future and any chance to live.

The Soviet claimed as state property the Ukraine’s farming land and its produce on which Ukrainians relied to live. Ukraine’s breadbasket was targeted for state theft; it was exported and dumped in Europe. Stalin’s policy of bleeding every last head of grain from the regions literally left the local populations to starve. Ukrainians, showing due regard for their own survival—spiriting away and hiding what food they could find for themselves and their families—if caught with so-called state property, were sent to show trial, Siberia or executed.

The Soviet exploitation of the Ukraine’s harvests was devastating. The three harvests of 1931 to 1933 produced 18.3, 14.6 and 22.3 million tonnes of grain—easily enough to feed the population, but not enough to satisfy both the demands of the Kremlin and the needs of the Ukraine people. Millions of Ukrainians died of starvation as a result. Sources vary in their estimations—perhaps seven million or eight million from 1932 to 1933. Stalin told Churchill once of 10 million dying, and it is suggested that up to 14 million died in the six years to 1937.

Survivors’ accounts conjure up mental images of food confiscators returning again and again to deprive families of identifiable sustenance. There are stories of children slowly and painfully assuming gargoyle characteristics, of bodies swollen with hunger and leaking fluid, of bodies lying in the street wrapped in children’s blankets—town after town, region after region, million after million. It is suggested that throughout the 20th century Ukraine lost 50 million human souls—almost as many as all of those lost in World War II, more than the Ukraine’s total current population and equal to two deaths for every man, woman and child currently resident within Australia. Such figures surely put Holodomor as one of the most heinous events in human history.

I support the motion before the House in honour of the lives of the millions who were murdered by the Soviet state, to honour the Ukraine nation that continues to mourn their deaths and to encourage all peoples and nations to identify the need for such human induced horrors to be remembered as genocide. I would support such evils being identified within the context of the United Nations General Assembly, should the opportunity arise.

The parliament should note that 2007 marks the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian Great Famine, known as the Holodomor, of 1932 to 1933, which was caused by the deliberate actions of the Stalinist communist government of the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There are many, many Ukrainians who found their way to Australia and have made their home here. Many of them had no hope of survival or of seeing a better future in their homeland. We see many Australian Ukrainians today who have gone on to make a commitment to this land. They certainly contribute to this great multicultural country that we call home—Australia. This motion marks their astonishing deeds, leaving their homeland in such tremendous poverty and amid such destruction. I would like to acknowledge all those people. (Time expired)

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 12.40 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 41. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed on a future day.