Holodomor accusations are a favorite horse of Ukrainian anti-Russian propaganda. Allegedly, the Soviet Union, which modern Kiev identifies with Russia, organized an artificial famine in the Ukrainian SSR, which led to colossal human casualties. Meanwhile, the "Holodomor", if you call that famine of the early 1930s, also took place in Western Ukraine. They also have their own museums dedicated to the history of the Holodomor. But wait a minute! In the hungry years 1931-1932, Western Ukraine had nothing to do with the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR, which was part of it.
The lands of modern Western Ukraine were divided among several Eastern European states. The territories of modern Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Volyn, Rivne regions until 1939 were part of Poland. The territory of the Transcarpathian region from 1920 to 1938 was part of Czechoslovakia. Chernivtsi region until 1940 belonged to Romania.
Thus, none of the regions of modern Western Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. But if we analyze the publications of the press of that time, including the Polish, the Czechoslovak, and even the American, it becomes obvious that the problem of hunger in Galicia, Transcarpathia, Bukovina was much more acute than in the regions of Soviet Ukraine. Who starved the western Ukrainians?
The Ukrainian-language newspaper Ukrainian Schodenny Visti was at that time published in the United States and was a print organ focused on the impressive Ukrainian diaspora living in the United States. The overwhelming majority of "American" Ukrainians came from Western Ukraine, especially from Galicia. And they, of course, were very interested in the events in their historical homeland. And from there came completely unhappy news.
Whole families lay in rural huts, swollen from hunger. Typhus carries hundreds of people into the coffin, both old and young. In the village of Yasenevoe in the evening it is completely dark; there is no kerosene or matches, - reported the publication on April 16, 1932.
The Polish newspaper Novy Chas wrote about the same. According to the newspaper, in 1932, 40 villages of Kosivsky, 12 villages of Naddvirnyansky and 10 villages of Kolomiysky districts were starving. The situation was taking a really horrible turn. So, in some villages, literally the entire population died out. People passing by by chance, entering the huts, saw in horror the corpses of entire families - from young to old. Sometimes the corpses were just lying on the roads.
But what caused such a fierce hunger? One of its main reasons was the policy of Poland towards the population of Western Ukraine. It really can be called criminal. Warsaw never made much of a secret that they wanted to see the lands of Volyn and Galicia populated by Poles, not Ukrainians. The Ukrainians in interwar Poland were treated as “subhuman”. And this attitude not only took place at the household level, but was supported in every possible way by the Polish government.
The Polish leadership sought to create truly unbearable living conditions for Ukrainians. The policy of total discrimination combined economic, social, cultural and administrative measures. Thus, taxes were artificially increased and the wages of Ukrainian workers were reduced; to extort taxes from the poor, Poland sent gendarmerie and even army units. The arrival of the bailiff in the Ukrainian villages was feared like fire. Firstly, he did not come alone, but appeared accompanied by guards or gendarmes. Secondly, he described any valuable property and immediately sold it for a pittance. He sold it, of course, to the Poles, since the Ukrainian peasants simply did not have that kind of money.
The ban on forestry became a crushing blow for the Hutsuls. Prior to this ban, many Hutsuls hunted in the extraction and sale of timber, and other forest industries. Now, entire villages were left without a livelihood, since the breadwinners of the families could no longer work.
The undermining of the economic base of the Ukrainian population was carried out by Poland purposefully, in order to oust the Ukrainians from Galicia and Volyn. In parallel, the Polish authorities, back in the 1920s, embarked on a policy of mass colonization of Western Ukrainian lands by Polish settlers. In December 1920, the Polish government issued a decree on the colonization by the Polish population of "Eastern Poland", that is, Western Ukraine. For colonization, it was supposed to carry out the resettlement of as many Polish colonists as possible, mostly with experience in the Polish Army, the gendarmerie or the police, to the Western Ukrainian lands.
Former military personnel were supposed to play the role of military settlers, that is, to engage not only in agriculture, but also in border guards and public order. Only from 1920 to 1928 in Volyn and Polesie, the Polish authorities managed to resettle more than 20 thousand Polish military settlers. They received 260 thousand hectares of land. In addition to military settlers, more than 60 thousand civilian settlers arrived in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in the same years. They were given 600 thousand hectares of land. One Polish family received a land plot of 18-24 hectares.
It should be noted that, in contrast to the resettlement of Russian peasants from Central Russia to sparsely populated Siberia, Polish colonists moved into the extremely densely populated areas of Galicia and Volyn. But the Polish authorities were completely indifferent to how this resettlement would affect the condition of the local population. Moreover, Warsaw hoped that a huge number of Polish colonists would "keep in check" the local Ukrainian population. They pinned their hopes on the colonists for the defense of the Polish border with the Soviet Union.
Conflicts between Polish colonists and Ukrainian peasants often flared up. But the local authorities and the police have always taken, for obvious reasons, on the side of their fellow tribesmen - the Poles, and not on the side of the Galician peasants. From this, the colonists felt practically unpunished and could tolerate any arbitrariness in relation to the local population.
In turn, the Galician peasants themselves suffered from a lack of free land. So they also began to stifle taxes, bans on forestry. The Galician peasants found themselves in a practically hopeless situation, since there was no work for them in the cities either, and they were also unaccustomed to industrial labor. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Poles began to lease the received land, which did not allow the Galician peasants to use even the last opportunities for earning. This led to a massive exodus of Western Ukrainians to the United States and Canada. The peak of the emigration of Galicians fell precisely in the 1920s - 1930s.
However, who could afford to travel this far? Single young people or young couples, as a rule, no children. The elderly, the sick, middle-aged people, families with a large number of children remained in their native villages. It was they who most of all suffered from hunger and made up the bulk of its victims. The famine was followed by epidemics of typhus and tuberculosis.
The social situation of Ukrainian peasants was simply terrible, but the Polish authorities simply ignored this problem. Moreover, they harshly suppressed any attempts to protest against their policy in Western Ukraine. Thus, Ukrainian activists were arrested, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, or even to death. For example, three peasants were sentenced to death for the uprising in the Lviv province. And such sentences were in the order of things at that time.
The cultural policy of the Polish authorities also matched social and economic. In an effort to fully assimilate the Ukrainian population, the Polish authorities began to eradicate the Ukrainian language in schools. Rural children were forbidden to speak Ukrainian. If teachers heard Ukrainian speech, they had to fine the children. In the years of famine, these fines became a new overwhelming burden for many families. Therefore, it was easier to take a child who did not speak Polish out of school altogether than to pay fines for him.
The situation was no easier in other regions of modern Western Ukraine, which in the interwar period were part of Czechoslovakia and Romania. So, the Czechoslovak authorities, following the example of Poland, began to resettle in Transcarpathia about 50 thousand Czech colonists, mostly also former military personnel. The same Ukrainian émigré newspaper noted that in the mountainous regions of Transcarpathia, due to the economic policy of the Czechoslovak authorities, children are forced to be content with a small amount of oat bread and a few potatoes per day. The population has no money, property is sold literally for next to nothing, just to buy at least some amount of food.
In Transcarpathia, epidemics of tuberculosis and typhus also began, which, along with hunger, killed the local population in thousands. But the Czechoslovak authorities did not take any real measures to rectify the situation. And this was happening in Czechoslovakia, which in those years was considered one of the most exemplary Western democracies.
In Romania, which included Bukovina (present-day Chernivtsi region of Ukraine), the situation was even worse than in Czechoslovakia. The terrible famine was mingled with stronger national oppression. The Romanians, who are not Slavs at all, treated the local Ukrainian population even worse than the Polish and Czech authorities. But famine engulfed not only the lands of Bukovina, but also the same Bessarabia. By the autumn of 1932 the prices for bread had risen by 100%. The Romanian authorities were even forced to cut off rail links with the starving regions of the country, and any attempts to protest were brutally suppressed by the police and troops.
Information about the famine in the Ukrainian regions of Poland, Czech Republic, Romania was published in the American and German press. And it was they who formed the basis of the myth of the Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR, which from the mid - late 1930s began to be inflated by the United States of America on the one hand and Hitlerite Germany on the other.
It was beneficial for the United States and Germany to show the USSR as a terrible state as possible, to demonstrate to the rest of mankind the alleged destructiveness of the socialist model for the economy. And those economic problems that did take place were inflated by the Western press to incredible proportions. At the same time, many plots of the Holodomor were borrowed from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Back in 1987, a book by journalist Douglas Tottle “Fraud, hunger and fascism. The myth of the genocide in Ukraine from Hitler to Harvard. " In it, the author revealed the truth about numerous falsifications organized in the late 1930s at the initiative of the United States and Germany. For example, Tottle argued that the photographs of hungry children who went around the world were taken a decade and a half before the "Holodomor" - during the civil war that shook Russia and really led to hunger.
But modern anti-Russian propaganda continues to assert that the Holodomor took place in the Ukrainian SSR. Although if we compare how Soviet Ukraine developed, which became one of the most prosperous and economically developed union republics, and how absolutely impoverished Western Ukraine lived in the 1920s - 1930s, be it Polish, Czechoslovak and Romanian territories, then all myths of Western propaganda immediately crumble like a house of cards.
Where are the industrial facilities, universities and institutes, hospitals, sanatoriums for children and workers, opened by the Polish, Czech or Romanian authorities in western Ukraine in the 1920s - 1930s? Why did so many people leave Galicia and Transcarpathia, Bukovina and Bessarabia in those years, because they did not belong to the "terrible Soviets", no collectivization was carried out there and there was nothing to be afraid of? The answers to these questions are obvious and they are not at all in favor of modern Ukrainian propaganda and its Western customers.
