Versión Español
EspañolWhen the winter of 1932 came, it was impossible to leave Ukrainian territory. The soviets had blocked the exits, and there were no supplies or food left to survive on. Joseph Stalin, faced with the possibility of losing Ukraine after the development of his collectivizing agricultural plan, ordered the confiscation of all remaining grain in the country, as well as the obligatory handing over of all means of production to the Soviet state. It was then that famine began.
In less than a year, over 7 million individuals were murdered by Stalin. This terrifying statistic was the result of systematic extermination, brought about by communist ideology in Ukrainian territory between 1932 and 1933. It was a mass slaughter that few talk about: the Holodomor (extermination by hunger).
Soviet troops — specifically the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) — were tasked with taking out the corpses from Ukrainian houses, and exchanging no more than 200 grams of bread for every body handed over.
Various testimonies from survivors of the Holodomor attest that Stalin’s communist troops buried people alive, looking on as they continued to move in the ground. Mass murder was already a common practice under communism.
This explains why 7 million people died of hunger in Ukraine, while the levels of exports of Ukrainian cereal crops had reached their highest level.
No one remembers — and far fewer judge — this particularly dark fragment of communist history. Quite the opposite: many are the individuals who celebrate communism without recognizing the perversity of the ideology and the deaths that come with it.
These 7 million Ukrainian victims, without counting the number of deaths at Stalin’s hands in total (over 23 million people), never received recognition or commemoration. They were simply buried in common and anonymous graves. It seems as though the victims of communism have been wiped from global history.
Many forget that the Nazis were national socialists and the soviets international socialists.
Both those who call themselves “socialists” or “communists,” as well a large number of academics and intellectuals, rarely comment on these terrible happenings.
The king of communists himself, Fidel Castro, affirms that communism and socialism are exactly the same thing. Both seek to create the “new man” through a system of social engineering. And there have been those, socialists or communists (however they want to call themselves), who openly defend the genocides of the previous century.
It’s strange that those who defend these ideologies are astonished by the inhuman extermination carried out by Adolf Hitler. They usually forget that the Nazis were national socialists and the soviets international socialists. They clearly don’t want to see or admit that Nazism is one symptom more of an ideology also defended by Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.
How is it possible that we live in a world where so many romantic myths about communism persist? Such an ideology should be loudly vilified in all its various forms in the same way that German Nazism is reviled.
It’s now commonplace that young people make jokes with the symbols of the past. They wear T-shirts with the face of “Che” Guevara, praise the dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela, play with Soviet symbols, and celebrate the imprisonment of Leopoldo López or Antonio Ledezma.
It’s almost the same as using the Nazi swastika, making gods out of tyrants, defending the biggest mass murders in history, and disrespecting the millions of victims claimed by communism.
