Archived articles
Archived newspaper articles
These are newspaper articles that have been pulled from the UCRDC archives, scanned and transcribed so that students can use them as sources for media interpretation assignments.
Special Thanks to Yaryna Kudla for transcribing the documents from the articles for the website.
A drought in Ukraine
In commenting on my book The Harvest of Sorrow, Yuri Bogayevsky of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa attributes the troubles in rural Ukraine in the early thirties partly to inexperience and misjudgement on the part of the authorities, but mainly to drought and “kulak resistance” (letter - Dec. 13). At the same time he denies starvation took place on a large scale. Download full article in .docx format
Famine Stats
Re the letter from the USSR Embassy in Ottawa, about the famine during the “devastating drought” in 1931 and 1932 in the Ukraine (Dec. 13): Download full article in .docx format
The Big Lie
In the early 1930s, Josef Stalin caused a famine in the Ukraine to crush an independently minded peasantry and push home his plans for collective farms. By imposing unrealistic grain quotas, Moscow starved five million peasants to death. Download full article in .docx format
Kulaks
I regret that your paper thought it commendable and advisable to use almost two full pages on excerpts from Robert Conquest’s book about the “imposed famine” of 1931-1932 in the Ukraine (Nov. 29, Dec. 1). Download full article in .docx format
No grain of pity
Just over 50 years ago the Ukraine and its neighbouring areas, the Don, the Volga and the Kuban - a great stretch of territory inhabited by about 40 million people - resembled a vast Belsen. One quarter of the rural population lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbors. As at Belsen, well-fed squads of police and government officials supervised the victims. Download full article in .docx format