The farmers died by painful starvation.
One of the areas in which Stalin applied this technique was in the Ukraine. Some regions of that country expressed hesitation about the Soviet-Communist plan for collectivization.
Ievgen Vorobiov writes about Grigoriy Petrovskiy, a Ukrainian who actually aided Soviets in their mass murder. Far from protesting Stalin’s deadly communism, he carried out Stalin’s killing schemes:
Petrovskiy is notorious for having abetted the Soviet policy of Holodomor: forced requisition of food from Ukrainian peasants that resulted in mass starvation and the deaths of an estimated 3 to 5 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933. Even as a quarter of the Dnipropetrovsk region’s population was wiped out by the artificial famine, Petrovskiy proclaimed triumphantly in September 1933 that “the collective farm system has finally defeated all its enemies.”
Nearly a century after the fact, historians have discovered the full extent of the atrocities, details of which were kept partly secret until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Most Ukrainians (as well as at least 17 countries) recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
The USSR had help, not only from the traitor Petrovskiy who turned against his own people, but also from an American: Walter Duranty.
A reporter for the New York Times, Duranty aided Stalin by suppressing details of the millions of deaths. Instead, Duranty reported that Stalin’s communist collectivist program was a success, and that the ordinary people were benefitting from it.
Why did Duranty lie? Why did he willing aid the century’s most prolific murderer? Either Duranty received payment from Stalin, or he was ideologically sympathetic to Stalin’s cause.
