[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 148 (Friday, October 16, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2217-E2218]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            UKRAINE'S FAMINE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. LUIS V. GUTIERREZ

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, October 16, 1998

  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, for many Americans, the years of 1932 and 
1933 conjure up memories of depression, bank failures, ``Hoovervilles'' 
and unemployment lines. This was the reality our nation faced as we 
were challenged by the greatest financial crisis in our history.
  We know that we were not alone in our suffering throughout the 1930s. 
The economies of Western Europe collapsed as well, sending Europe down 
the slippery slope toward totalitarianism, genocide and war.
  However, what is often not discussed when we endeavor to recall the 
era leading to World War II is the great hardship visited on the people 
of Ukraine by the Soviet government.
  Our great depression is often called the greatest crisis of modern 
capitalism.
  The famine of the 1930s in Ukraine has been called the first great 
tragedy of modern absolutism.
  I have learned of this tragedy from people in my district who 
remember this terrible event. They are the descendants of Ukrainian 
immigrants to Chicago, people who lost relatives under the oppression 
of Joseph Stalin.
  They remember the stories their parents told of the great famine just 
as many Americans remember the stories their parents told about the 
great depression.
  What is important then is that we not forget.
  In 1929, Joseph Stalin devised a plan to force industrialization on 
the people of Ukraine.
  He attempted to strip the land from the peasants of Ukraine to 
terminate their agrarian lifestyles and traditional values.

[[Page E2218]]

  Yet the people of Ukraine resisted. They had been bound to the land, 
the fertile ground of Ukraine, for generations and they were not 
prepared to cede their way of life to toil in factories building 
Stalin's army.
  So they fought the usurpation of their property the only way they 
knew how. They refused to leave it.
  Stalin would not let this pass. He intended to crush the Ukrainian 
people into subservience. Not with direct violence but with a tactic 
just as deadly--starvation
  Stalin cut off the farmers from grain to seed their farms, from 
water, from their markets an thus from subsistence.
  Between 1931 and 1933, the grip of famine spread throughout the 
Ukraine. Fields were over harvested. Food became scarce.
  By its end, more than seven million people would perish in Ukraine 
due to hunger. This event stands as an unprecedented catastrophe, 
claiming the lives of nearly one-fourth of Ukraine's people.
  Sadly, as the full details of the famine became known in the West, 
little action was taken to condemn Stalin's government for this crime. 
Our attention was fixed on our own financial circumstances as we 
overlooked the tragic famine in Ukraine.
  This year is the 65 anniversary of the end of the great famine in 
Ukraine. The Ukrainian-American community in Chicago and throughout the 
nation have spent this year solemnly commemorating this unfortunate 
event. I join them in doing so.
  I believe that we must forever remember this tragedy and teach our 
children of it.
  We must do so in order to ensure that humanity never again endeavors 
to conceive another tragedy of this kind. This famine was of man's 
doing, a punishment for intransigence in the face of oppression. It did 
not have to happen. Nature had no part in this matter. Cruelty lies at 
its root.
  So today, I ask my colleagues to remember Ukraine's famine by 
supporting H. Con. Res. 295. This resolution commemorates the 
``Ukrainian Famine Days of Remembrance'' and recommits all of us to 
fight totalitarianism in all its forms so as to prevent future 
tragedies of this nature.

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