Article content

He was the first to call it what it was.

Sixty five years ago this month, on Sept. 20, 1953, Dr. Raphael Lemkin, a legal scholar, spoke in New York City about Stalin’s four-pronged offensive against Ukraine during the 1930s. The country’s dismemberment began with the evisceration of its heart, mind and soul, achieved through the murder or deportation of Ukraine’s writers and poets, intelligentsia and clergy. That outrage was coupled with a body blow against Ukraine’s peasantry, the repository of the nation’s traditions, orchestrated through a man-made famine. To finish off the assault the country’s ethnic character was diluted through a mass resettlement of non-Ukrainians, particularly along Ukraine’s eastern marches.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Remembering the man who told the truth of Stalin's assault on Ukraine Back to video

Lemkin, known to history as “the father of the UN Genocide Convention,” understood clearly what had been done, branding it a “classic example of a Soviet genocide.” He estimated five million Ukrainians perished during the Great Famine of 1932-1933, now known as the Holodomor. Another observer, Fred E. Beal, reported this same figure in his 1937 book, Proletarian Journey. In a conversation held in 1933 with one of the famine’s architects, Grigory Petrovsky, the president of the ostensibly independent Soviet Ukraine, Beal asked: “They say five million people have died this year … What are we going to tell them?” Petrovsky responded frankly: “Tell them nothing! What they say is true. We know that millions are dying. That is unfortunate, but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify that. Tell them nothing!” Demographers now calculate over four million Ukrainians starved in just 6 months, one of the greatest genocides to befoul 20th century European history.