UKRAINE STILL HUNGERS FOR INDEPENDENCE.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: UKRAINE

FOR TWO YEARS in the 1930s, the people of Ukraine were forced to starve in service of a political idea. Some 5 million people died preventable deaths, victims of poisonous ideology, political vanity, and state power wielded in an attempt to destroy a national identity.

Almost 90 years later, a form of that struggle continues. To understand post-Soviet Ukraine and its ongoing tensions with Russia, you have to understand the Holodomor, the program of mass starvation forced on Ukrainians by the Soviet regime.

In the late 1920s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin sent Communist Party officials and activists out into the countryside with orders to convert private, family-owned farms into collective enterprises.

Ukranian farmers resisted, and party leaders resorted to torture, threats, and graphic public shaming. In one Ukrainian province, according to Anne Applebaum's Red Famine (Doubleday), a gang of Communist apparatchiks marched farmers into a room one by one and demanded they submit. Those who refused were shown a revolver. If they still did not comply, they were marched into jail, with the words malicious hoarder of state grain inscribed on their backs.

Stalin's radical economic program was rooted in the idea that virtually all food supplies, land, and farming equipment were the property of the government. Collectivization was a state-sponsored program of mass theft perpetrated under the premise that Ukraine wasn't even a real country.

Without private property, personal profit, or local pride there were few incentives to work. The new state-run farms were far less productive than expected, leading to shortages. At the same time, Stalin increased grain procurement requirements from Soviet localities--Ukraine in particular--so that most of what was produced was seized by the state. By the spring of 1932, Ukraine had begun to starve.

Local leaders wrote delicate notes to Stalin about the situation. Many pleaded for "food aid," essentially begging Russia to return a small portion of the grain the Communists had stolen from the farmers to begin with.

The famine forced on Ukraine was bound up with Stalin's effort to eliminate, often by deportation, imprisonment, or murder, the kulaks--somewhat wealthier citizens the Soviets viewed as ideological enemies. Eventually, kulak became an all-purpose term for anyone viewed as politically inconvenient, including artists, musicians, intellectuals, and writers.

The point was not merely to enact a Marxist...