Suggested Quotes to use with Student Activities
SUGGESTED QUOTATIONS ON THE HOLODOMOR
Quotations for grades 7-12
“Food is a weapon.”
Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, 1921
“But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs…”
Walter Duranty, New York Times Correspondent, Moscow, 1933
“Farmers present by themselves the basic force of the national movement. With out farmers there can be no strong national movement. This is what we mean when we say that the national question is, actually, the farmers’ question.”
Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1952)
“Famine has not taught the farmers a lesson.”
Stanislav Kosior, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine (1928-1938), March 1933
“To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, _of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.”
Theodore H. White (1915-1986), Political Journalist, historian and novelist
“Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”
Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1952), 1950
Quotations for grades 10-12 only
“A Famine that came about without drought and without war.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian Dissident, The Gulag Archipalego
“If we do not start rectifying the situation in Ukraine now, we may lose Ukraine.”
(Letter from Stalin to Kaganovich Aug 11th, 1932)
Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1952)
“The child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved to death by the Stalinist re gime is worth no less than a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved to death by the Nazi regime.”
Stéphane Courtois, French historian and editor of Le livre noir du communisme Crimes, terreur et repression, 1997
“Ukrainians, with their profound religiosity, individualism, tradition of private property, and devotion to their plots of lamd, were obviously not suitable material for building communism and this fact was noted by the high ranking Soviet officials.”
Vasyl Ovsiienko, Ukrainian dissident member of Helsinki group, 2007
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.”
George Orwell, English novelist and journalist, 1954
“Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger.”
Stanislav Kosior, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine (1928-1938), Izvestiia, December 2, 1933
“…[Our reporting] served Moscow’s purpose of smearing the facts out of recognition and declaring a situation which, had we reported simply and clearly, might have worked up enough public opinion abroad to force remedial measures. And every correspondent each in his own measure, was guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax on this world.”
Eugene Lyons, Moscow United Press Correspondent 1928-1934
INSTRUCTIONS
- Students record their comments directly on the sheet of chart paper.
- Comments may be about: their interpretation of the quotation, their opinion about what was said;
a. inferences they have made,
b. questions that came to mind,
c. connections to previously learned course content, connections to ideas, top ics, news, and/or events beyond the classroom,
d. their thoughts on what their classmates have written.