Mark Piggott
IB Times
November 23, 2013
The former Soviet state of Ukraine and members of the Ukrainian diaspora around the world have been remembering one of the darkest times in the country’s history when millions of their forebears were starved to death under the iron rule of Joseph Stalin.
Eighty years ago (1932-33), when Ukraine was under USSR rule, millions of ordinary Ukrainians perished mostly from starvation as a result of the liquidation of private property and industrialisation. It became known as “Holodomor”, or “execution by hunger”.
Stalin decreed that Ukrainian peasants must join collective farms and that their harvests would be confiscated by Soviet authorities. Bolshevik forces swept through villages taking food and carrying out mass executions. Anyone caught stealing food or trying to leave the region in search of bread was either imprisoned, turned back or executed.
Many Ukrainians survived by eating bread made from weeds and grass, and there were documented accounts of cannibalism.