Editorial

Different famines, same lessons

One cannot, of course, judge things such as where a person goes after death, however tempting it may occasionally be. Part of the problem is that we are very good at judging others while ignoring our own hypocrisies and our own sins. It’s such a human thing. Even Pope Benedict has said that Christians cannot say with certainty that a figure such as Judas is in hell, despite the very hard words of Christ about the one who betrayed him. But it is natural enough to wonder at all the monsters of history who have done the most evil things. At the very least, they have had a lot of explaining to do. Christians believe, after all, that there is a personal judgement to be followed later by a general judgement at the consummation of all history.

The year 2012, now just weeks away, will be the 80th anniversary of one of the most shockingly evil acts of the 20th century but, paradoxically, one that is still little known. It also has a resonance with events happening now a continent away in Africa and we should all be prepared to learn the lessons of both things.

Around Australia, there are still some who, by virtue of ethnic origin, know about the earlier tragedy only because their parents and grandparents survived it. Outside their relatively small number, few in Australia are aware that, beginning in 1932, millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by Josef Stalin. How many died? No-one knows and no-one will ever know. But the estimates run anywhere from 2.45 million to 7.5 million people in the terrible winter of 1932-33, with most estimates well into the upper range of those figures.

In 1932, the Soviet Union was still an unstable place. Famine was a regular occurrence throughout the country in the 1920s, one of the factors fuelling the Ukrainian independence movement. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was beginning to sense his policies were unpopular. In order to strengthen his own position and eliminate potential sources of opposition, he simply decided to starve the Ukrainians into submission. While Ukraine was the bread basket of what was then the Soviet Union, Stalin sent the secret police into the countryside to take control of the farms and deny Ukrainians food. What followed cannot adequately be described in words, but millions of Ukrainians and families slowly starved to death through that winter.

The young English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was then stationed in Moscow, where all foreign journalists were also based and all knew what was happening in Ukraine. Muggeridge bought a train ticket for Kiev and travelled on to Rostov through the countryside, seeing with his own eyes the devastation wrought by officialdom.

Decades later, he said in an interview that, while, as a journalist, he had seen many awful things, the sights of the Ukrainian famine were the worst. “[It was] the most terrible thing I have ever seen, precisely because of the deliberation with which it was done and the total absence of any sympathy with the people,” he told his interviewer. “The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivisation of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever the consequences in human suffering.”

The strange twist to this tale is that none of the stories Muggeridge filed back to his newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, were published and, when he returned to the UK, he was fired. His colleagues, overwhelmingly sympathetic to Stalin, could not believe Muggeridge was telling the truth. Blackbanned as a result, he could not get a job on any other newspaper. Ideology, not journalistic objectivity, had temporarily won the day.

Today, the Ukrainian Famine is a known fact, historically verified and proven. It is impossible not to think of the horror, the families, the children, starving to death in frozen homes throughout an entire nation because of the arrogance of ideology and the absolute corruption of absolute power. It is important that we not forget these events, that we keep them alive as lessons for ourselves and for our times.

It is, in every aspect, also equally important that we refuse to let, in our own relative affluence, similar events such as the current famine in eastern Africa escape our attention and our action. If we do, the terrible indifference to the terrible winter of 1932-33 which came from the low, conniving, dishonest ideologues of that era could scarcely be worse than our own. In the age of the internet there can be no excuse for not googling Caritas Australia.

If we do not, then the real, personal risk for us as individuals and more widely as a society is that we will also one day find ourselves saying, for all the wrong reasons, “Lord, when did we ever find you sick, or in prison, naked or hungry?”

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