Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 1:25am

Bitter Harvest

 

 

 

On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.

Malcolm Muggeridge – British foreign correspondent, War on the Peasants, Fortnightly Review, 1 May, 1933 

Eighty-five years too late, a movie on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in the Soviet Union is being released tomorrow.  Some six million people were murdered by starvation in Stalin’s man made famine, and almost all of these people died in the most agriculturally fertile areas of the Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine.  This was Stalin’s way of imposing collectivization on the recalcitrant farmers of his empire, while eliminating the opposition to Communist rule in the countryside.  For Stalin the mass deaths were a feature not a bug.  While all this was going on most Western journalists in the Soviet Union actively attempted to conceal the existence of the famine.  Only a few brave journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge, then a partisan of the left, had the courage to speak out and tell honestly what they had seen with their own eyes.  Walter Duranty, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reports from the Soviet Union,  of the New York Times denounced journalists who reported on the famine.  “Fake news” has a long pedigree on the left in this country.

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Mary De Voe
Friday, February 24, AD 2017 12:01am

Stalin said: ” to kill one man is homicide. To kill 30,000,000 is a statistic.” Stalin enjoyed the death and dying of other people. The Russians tore up floor boards to get at grandma’s hidden preserves.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, February 24, AD 2017 9:36am

The Reds killed approximately 100 million of their people during the 20th century. In 1973, five (?) US Supreme Court justice set in motion the killings of 57 million and counting American gestational human persons. “And the beat goes on.”

John Schuh
John Schuh
Friday, February 24, AD 2017 2:24pm

We know a lot about the Holocaust and little about the Great Famine because there were few cameras in the Ukraine.

Mary De Voe
Friday, February 24, AD 2017 5:56pm

John Schuh: Too many Americans justify what Stalin did. One person cannot own another person” A. Lincoln. I was once told that Russia was justified because Russia needed the food. Ebeneezer Scrooge said, that many years ago: “Let Tiny Tim die and reduce the population.+ Nothing new here.

CAM
CAM
Saturday, February 25, AD 2017 2:48am

Watch “The Soviets” when it’s rerun on your local PBS. It’s chilling. At first Stalin selected specific groups and areas like the Ukraine to be anihilated. Then it got so Kruschev and the like would just ask Stalin for a quota of humans to kill…a 100,000 here, 200,000 there. Depravity.

TomD
TomD
Saturday, February 25, AD 2017 8:39am

This looks like the year for genocide films. The Promise, a film about the Armenian Genocide, will be out in April.

https://youtu.be/zwut1DUXaZc

TomD
TomD
Sunday, February 26, AD 2017 5:19pm

Bitter Harvest is getting panned all over the place. Too bad. It is the kind of film that needed to have been made. Perhaps the DVD edition could be used in fast forward to get a good presentation of the real events.

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