[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Page 17454]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE

  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, this year we commemorate the 80th 
anniversary of the Holodomor, the genocidal Ukrainian Famine of 1932-
1933. Eighty years ago, an engineered famine in Soviet-dominated 
Ukraine and bordering ethnically-Ukrainian territory resulted in the 
horrific deaths of millions of innocent men, women, and children.
  I visited the Holodomor monument in central Kyiv, a poignant reminder 
of the suffering perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin's deliberate and 
inhumane policy to suppress the Ukrainian people and destroy their 
human, cultural, and political rights. Requisition brigades, acting on 
Stalin's orders to fulfill impossibly high grain quotas, took away the 
last scraps of food from starving families and children. Eyewitness 
accounts describing the despair of the starving are almost 
unfathomable. Millions of rural Ukrainians slowly starved--an 
excruciatingly painful form of death--amid some of the world's most 
fertile farmland, while stockpiles of expropriated grain rotted by the 
ton, often nearby. Meanwhile, Ukraine's borders were sealed to prevent 
the starving from leaving to less-affected areas. International offers 
of help were rejected, with Stalin's henchmen denying a famine was 
taking place. At the same time, Soviet grain was being exported to the 
West.
  The final report of the congressionally created Commission on the 
Ukraine Famine concluded in 1988 that ``Joseph Stalin and those around 
him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-33.'' No less than 
Rafael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish-American lawyer who coined the term 
``genocide'' and was instrumental in the adoption of the 1948 U.N. 
Genocide Convention, described the ``destruction of the Ukrainian 
nation'' as the ``classic example of Soviet genocide.''
  We must never forget the victims of the Holodomor or those of other 
republics in the Soviet Union, notably Kazakhstan, that witnessed 
cruel, mass starvation as a result of Stalin's barbarism, and we must 
redouble our efforts to protect human rights and democracy, ensuring 
that 20th-century genocides such as the Holocaust, Armenians in the 
Ottoman Empire, Ukraine, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda become impossible 
to imagine in the future.

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