American-Ukrainian famine. 1930's hunger in Ukraine is more important for Washington than its own
Recently it became known that 1 in October 2013, the Ukrainian Embassy in the USA, finally received permission from the National Park Service to begin construction of the Holodomor Memorial in Washington. The United States Congress back in October 2006 agreed with the request of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to "build a memorial to honor the memory of the victims of the famine 1932-1933 on the federal land of the District of Columbia". President Bush signed the relevant law without delay: every whim is for your money. But it was with the money that the Ukrainians didn’t work out initially.
Only in 2009 was the government able to allocate 5 million hryvnas (615 thousand dollars) to implement the overseas project.
This money then disappeared somewhere without a trace. And since the monument should have been built within seven years from the moment the US law came into force, then in September of this year. the decision to allocate a plot of Washington land under the “Ukrainian image” could be annulled.
The successor of many affairs V. Yushchenko, the current President of Ukraine V. Yanukovych here showed his “orange” loyalty. As the deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee on human rights, freelance adviser to the president and his long-standing “right hand” Anna German, Viktor Yanukovych, did in May to do everything to find the necessary funds, since the budget has already been formed: “This is two million dollars.”
The Cabinet of Ukraine has allocated another 4 million hryvnia. A Ukrainian entrepreneur, well-known in Russian oil and gas circles, Dmitry Firtash donated 2,5 million dollars to the Ukrainian “construction of the century” (approximately 20 million UAH). Mikhail Sivkiv thanked Firtash for the recognition of the famine (representing the Ukrainian diaspora in America), the Chairman of the United States Regional Committee deeply thanked Firtash, because “to obtain a building permit, it was necessary to create a long-term fund for the total cost of building the memorial. Firtash's donation helped to fulfill this commitment. ”
In response, Firtash made a statement very characteristic of the current Ukrainian oligarchs and especially politicians: “The US regional committee for the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide of 1932-1933. plays a key role in what people around the world know about the famine. Thanks to the work of the Committee, the efforts of many caring people in Washington will be a memorial. It will be a reminder to current and future generations of the tragic stage in stories Of Ukraine. Many Ukrainians who survived the famine emigrated to the United States. This country has become their home. Memorial to the victims of the famine is a tribute to this great country, which opened its doors to a large number of Ukrainians. Their children - our compatriots - are a large, prosperous and valuable part of American society. ”
The design of the project was named “Wheat Field”. The ceremony is scheduled for mid-November, and the construction of the memorial will begin in the first months of 2014.
Earlier, as it is known, a monument was planned in Washington to open 2008 in October. Pan Sykiv said then that the committee “will initiate the installation of similar memorials in the capitals of other countries of the world where there is a significant Ukrainian diaspora”. Then it was expected that the monument would be installed in 2010. Again it did not work out, and the Foreign Ministry said that Ukraine would make every effort to finally open a memorial in Washington in 2013. Now it seems that the “orange” dream is coming true.
In turn, the leader of the Public Movement “Ukrainian Choice”, Viktor Medvedchuk, not without indignation, notes: “Why should these initiatives be implemented at the expense of Ukrainian taxpayers? The budget of the same memorial in Washington has grown from the initial rather modest sum of 1 million hryvnia twenty times! Probably, the “positive effect” for the international image of Ukraine should also grow in proportion? ”. “The current president continues the initiatives of the previous one,” the politician stresses.
For the most forgetful, we remind you that President of Ukraine V. Yanukovych at the meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg made a statement stating that he considers it unfair to call the 2010 famine a genocide of the Ukrainian people. “It was a tragedy, a common tragedy of states that were part of the USSR,” he said. A year earlier, Yanukovich, then the leader of the opposition Party of Regions, stated resolutely: “A very disappointing conclusion is suggested: the current government needs to maintain constant tension around the issue of famine in order to continue to worsen the already bad relations with the Russian Federation. It is known that for Russia as the successor of the USSR, this topic is particularly sensitive. "
Now, it seems, both Yanukovich and his entire party play the role of those whom they criticized so fundamentally a couple of years ago.
By the way, it was possible not to talk about the financial side of this business, if Russia did not participate in it. So far indirectly: Dmitry Firtash created his extensive business in mediating the supply of Russian energy to Ukraine. Firtash is considered to be close to the president of Ukraine, according to some sources, it was he who sponsored the presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych. Firtash recently received a preferential contract for the supply of Russian gas to Ukraine at a price of 260 dollars for 1000 cubic meters.
True, the discount is a one-time. It will be distributed only to 17-20 billion cubic meters, which Ukraine has agreed to buy for pumping into its UGS (underground gas storage facilities). Moreover, under the contract valid up to 2019, Gazprom’s fuel costs Naftogaz 360-390 dollars per thousand cubic meters. This time, the buyer will be the large chemical holding Ostchem, specializing in the production of mineral fertilizers and part of Group DF D. Firtash.
The calculation of Gazprom is simple: if at the height of winter Ukraine has a desire to again, as Yulia Tymoshenko said, “to gas the gas out of a Russian pipe, then Europe will have to deal with Naftogaz or Ostchem, but not Gazprom.” At the same time, the preferential contract with Ostchem can also be regarded as a frank message to the Ukrainian oligarchs: they say, cooperation with Moscow promises very specific dividends, and, importantly, specific people. This is very serious information for consideration, given the extremely difficult situation of Ukrainian industry.
Practically, oligarchs are the only real force capable of refocusing Ukrainian politics from a Western direction to a Eurasian one. But even if the Kremlin’s calculations are justified, this is not at all a guarantee that Ukraine will change its foreign policy guidelines. Viktor Yanukovych was also once considered “pro-Russian”, wasn’t he? And today, he, along with Dmitry Firtash, who has grown rich in Russian gas trade, is financing a frankly anti-Russian project in Washington.
By the way, the volume of the shortage of Russian gas by Ukraine is already comparable in value to the value of Ukrainian gold reserves. Debt collection threatens the Ukrainian economy with a collapse. And in this regard, it is not superfluous to recall that in 2006 on the initiative of Viktor Yushchenko, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law recognizing the famine in Ukraine for 1932-1933. the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Boris Bespalyi, a member of the Our Ukraine party in Yushchenko’s “close to the emperor,” and other prominent “orange” figures, expressing the opinion of their electorate, said that in the future Ukraine could demand compensation for genocide from Russia. The amounts were astronomical, from 10 to 13 trillions of dollars.
With this money, Ukrainians could not have worked for a hundred years, and the Russians would have gone around the world with an outstretched hand. The law on famine-genocide remains in force and is unlikely to be repealed in the near future. Maybe it is precisely for this reason that the Ukrainian leadership is behaving so confidently, to say the least, in gas relations with Russia?
By the way, D. Firtash's statement that “many Ukrainians who survived the famine emigrated to the USA” requires serious clarification. Only residents of Galicia (from Soviet times called Western Ukraine), which was then part of Poland, where hunger also raged, had the opportunity to go to North America, mostly to Canada. Galicia (Galicia) suffered the most. From here, immigrants flew overseas in tens of thousands.
Swept the wave of severe famine 1932-1933. and in other countries of Europe and America. Romania, Hungary, Germany, France, and Italy suffered great human losses due to severe flooding and a multiplying fungus that destroyed the grain crops. Especially a lot of material on hunger in the United States, Canada and Europe was published in the American newspaper Ukrainski Shkodenni Visty, which was also published in the Ukrainian language (Russian Ukrainian Daily News, eng. The Ukrainian Daily News). In newspapers for 1932, stored in the National Library of the United States and libraries in other countries, researchers counted more than 200 reports of hunger campaigns of workers and unemployed in various states of America and more than 170 about suicides due to crisis, unemployment and hunger in Europe and the USA .
Thus, in the report of the Director of the International Labor Office (ILO) A. Thomas, who was one of the institutions of the League of Nations, it was reported that in 1931 there were 20-25 million unemployed in the world. “And that means,” Thomas writes, “that 70 million people were deprived of their livelihood.” According to the Office, at the beginning of 1932 in Europe there were more than 11 million unemployed, including: in Germany - 6 million (later - 8 million), in England - 2,5 million, in Italy - 1,5 million, in France - 0,3 million person.
Hunger campaigns of workers and unemployed in the USA, Spain, Poland, Romania, Austria, England, Germany, in France in the 1930-1933 years. were massive and took place in many regions. Thousands of participants in these campaigns died in clashes with police and gendarmes.
In Poland and Romania, even regular troops armed with machine guns were used against mass campaigns. All participants of the hunger campaigns, which, as a rule, were held under the slogan "Work! Salaries! Bread! ”Was accused of communist propaganda and brought to criminal responsibility, and the organizers to death. According to the newspaper UCHVV for 10.02.32, more than 1931 thousand political prisoners were accused of communist propaganda in Polish prisons in 10. Every day was carried out before the 10 executions. According to the newspaper Proletary (18.03.32), “800 of thousands of revolutionaries (participants of the hunger campaigns are called so) are killed and sentenced to death in Europe in two years”.
According to the American press, it can be concluded that the Great Economic Crisis 1929-1930. started with a crisis in agriculture. The cost of farms fell by half. The collapse of the exchange (at the same time the shares “lost weight” on 16 billion dollars) led to the depreciation of the collateral. Given the specifics of agriculture, living on credit for property, land, and future harvest, the consequences for farmers are easy to imagine. Few people today know, all the more, recalls about five million American farmers (about a million families) driven by banks from the land for debt, but not provided by the US government with neither land, nor work, nor social assistance, nor old-age pension. Literally deprived of everything, people crowded into the mass unemployment, hunger and bloody robbery of uncertainty ...
Every sixth American farmer fell under the famine rink. At the same time, the US government was getting rid of excess food. No, food was not distributed among the starving — grain was burned and drowned in the ocean. In the same way, for example, 6,5 million pigs were destroyed, and 10 million hectares of land was harvested with harvest. So that a large entrepreneur does not suffer losses - his interests are paramount. This practically “dispossession” in the American way in terms of the number of victims can probably be put on a par with dispossession in the USSR.
... In December, a crowd of hungry teachers storming banks in Chicago's 1932, in Oklahoma and Minneapolis, mobs rob food stores.
Farmers, whose farms were to be sold by auction for debts, were taken in hand weapon and broke the auctions. War was brewing the city with the village. But not in Russia, exhausted from hunger and typhus, but in the not so long time prosperous America, which reaped the rich fruits of the First World War that had collapsed Europe.
On another misfortune, however, you cannot build your happiness. Already in 1932, the number of unemployed in the United States reached 12,5 million people, and the entire population was 125 million. The peak of American adversity came at the beginning of 1933, when the unemployed became 17 million. With family members this is, for example, - France or Britain. According to the AFL (American Federation of Labor, American Federation of Labor), in 1932, only 10% of workers remained fully occupied.
Mass vagrancy, poverty, homeless children became the brightest signs of the time. There were abandoned cities, ghost towns, the entire population of which wandered around the country in search of food and work. About 2,5 million people in cities have become homeless. When filled with shops and colorful windows of confectioneries and butchers in America began the great famine. Even in the wealthiest city in New York, people died en masse. This finally forced the city authorities to start distributing free soup. What happened then with American society, shows the film "King Kong" 1933, and his remake 2005, (directed by Peter Jackson), awarded four "Oscars".
The film demonstrates the Great Depression from the inside and tells the story of the actress against this sad background. Already the first shots show how she tries to steal an apple from a tray, since she hasn't eaten for three days. In general, there are products in the city, and in abundance. But in New York, covered by continuous unemployment, the population simply has no money to buy anything. People die on the streets. However, hunger and death from starvation of their own population have never been particularly occupied by the US government, but they were terribly worried and worried about the victims of other “famines”, whose plot can be “unwound” for decades in their own political interests.
On the eve of the Great Depression, US President Hoover optimistically stated: “I have no fears for the future of our country. It glows with hope. ”
Add: to this day, "lit." October 20 2003. “The US House of Representatives adopted a resolution on the famine 1932-1933. in Ukraine, which recognized the famine as an act of terror and massacre against the Ukrainian people. "
And already 23 September 2008, the House of Representatives in its resolution N1314 proclaimed hunger 1932-1933. in Ukraine "genocide". Here the question arises, what is called, the topic: what about the Great American Holodomor of the same period, as a result of which the United States missed several million of its citizens?
As such, the national social insurance system in the country at the height of the crisis simply did not exist - people were left to themselves. Little assistance to the unemployed began to be provided only from the middle of 1933. For a long time, the administration did not even have a federal program to combat unemployment, and the problems of the unemployed were passed on to state governments and city municipalities. However, almost all the cities turned into bankrupts. Only in August, 1935, five years after the onset of the crisis, when the main part of those who “did not fit into the market” had already died, a law was passed providing for old-age and unemployment insurance.
However, insurance has not affected neither farmers, nor a number of other categories of people engaged in production.
These masses of the unnecessary population were sent to Roosevelt's "public works". In 1933-1939 under the administration of public works and the administration of civil works (construction of canals, roads, bridges often in uninhabited and swampy malarial areas), the number of people employed at a time reached 3,3 million. In total, 8,5 million people passed through this American GULAG. This is not counting prisoners, although the rest of the workers were kept there as in a private prison. The conditions and mortality in these works are almost not studied. However, it is hardly surprising today that in those years a wave of demonstrations under the red flags swept across the USA? It was a natural reaction to the inhuman policies of the authorities of all levels.
State authorities, for example, have passed laws defining criminal liability for “vagrants and their accomplices.” At the gates of the Ford factories in Dearborn 7 in March 1932, the police use assault rifles against demonstrators. Americans bury the dead, carrying portraits of Lenin to the sound of revolutionary marches. In July, 1932-th government throws troops to defeat the temporary camp of World War I veterans who came to claim the money they owed. 17 thousand people got bullets instead of money. Armored cars, closed bayonets and tear gas grenades are used. The ghost of the second civil war was then hovering over the United States ...
Remember how it was said about this period in the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by the American writer John Steinbeck? The author by his own example felt how unbearably difficult it is to be a seasonal worker. But it was already 1936, that is, the events in which the writer participated, occurred three years after the Great Famine, but “... anger is ripening in the eyes of the hungry. In the souls of people, clusters of anger are poured and matured - heavy clusters, and now it’s not long for them to ripen. ” Not matured. Until! The true history of those terrible times is still unknown, first of all, to America itself. It can only be said with complete certainty that the republican administration of President Herbert Hoover and the democratic administration of President Franklin Roosevelt are equally to blame for the enormous sacrifices of 1930's. And those, and others on conscience, millions of innocent victims, which the US authorities purposefully starved to death. But how many were at least approximately?
Official data on the victims of the American famine are not available. There is simply no statistical information about 1932: either destroyed or deeply classified. Politicians and scientists of the United States have been consistently keeping silence for years about their national, famine 80: in the history of America such a problem does not exist and never existed! But researchers in other countries cite casualty figures of six, or even eight million people.
It’s just right to create a Russian commission to study the overseas famine. Moreover, it may be necessary not only to study the American past. An old Europe, too, would do well to recall the victims of famine in its different countries.
As for the United States, today there 240 million people are able to work, but only about 140 million of them are employed. In the federal budget, 70% of all expenditures goes to social assistance programs, such as food, preferential housing, student assistance and other programs. And despite the fact that 49,5% of the population does not pay income tax.
The US Department of Agriculture has already announced a reduction in food assistance to low-income families under the program of preferential purchase of products (SNAP). The amount of benefits paid to families of four will be reduced. In accordance with the plan of the Ministry of Agriculture, all food stamps for October 2013 were distributed, and in November, the volume of aid may sharply decline. A temporary increase in SNAP funding, begun in 2009, will end on October 31.
Currently, 47 million Americans use the program SNAP, about half of them are children and adolescents.
In general, more than 100 million Americans receive all sorts of government benefits. With a public debt of more than 17 trillion dollars, when the whole country is one of the biggest in the world! - lives actually loaned.
Imagine only what a huge force a social explosion can shake the States if all state "troughs" cover. By the way, many other countries will be seriously “shaken” by European countries - so certainly they will get under the full crisis program! The situation seems to be close to the one that developed in the 30-s of the last century. No matter how much later Washington would have to ask permission from Kiev to install on Maidan a monument to the victims of the American Holodomor? On an equal footing, so to speak. So far, the Ukrainian side still has money for the implementation of the Washington project, and the US budget allows allocating two or three dozen million dollars for a similar construction in Kiev. As the historical truth demands for a long time.
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