Closer to the Past and Future

Emaciated corpses in the snow roadside became a numbingly familiar sight. In some instances, the locals had been at them, feebly carving away what would otherwise have gone to the crows. Manpower was so scarce in the villages that whether to send the corpse-cart for the stiffs depended on whether their feet – unfailingly stripped of their boots – pointed towards or away from the village in question.

The villages themselves had once been prosperous. Prosperous in this sense means that they could do just a little better than subsistence farming. Obviously it was “insufferable greed” that any one farmer may want to end the growing season with a spare bushel of wheat or tank of milk. If a citizen were going hungry somewhere, then solidarity demanded that the farmer go hungry with him, which is why all “excess” produce was shipped away to Moscow. The farmers suspected of disagreement with this sentiment were called kulaks. The government had announced a vigorous initiative of “dekulakization,” which was a fancy word to mean exterminate these above-subsistence farmers. Sometimes this was a rifle shot point blank against a barn’s door. Other times it was a gulag in Siberia, where the murder was just as certain but took a few years longer. Before the entire village, a sharp example had to be made even of the industrious child who caught too many toads streamside to stave off hunger, since he was taking more than his “fair share.” And there was also a portion of “hoarded” potatoes to be earned by snitching your neighbor into slavery.

Not that any of this could or would be discussed publicly. The latest five-year plan kept everyone well fed, if anyone asked, though no one ever did. Parcels from abroad bearing aid were returned inscribed by the censors, “The USSR has no hungry people,” after any useful items of clothing were pilfered therefrom. Nor did Western journalists cosseted in Potemkin hotels discern anything amiss through their bottomless champagne flutes. Hell, even 1937’s census takers had to be executed since it was subversively unpatriotic to report that between 1931 – 1934, 3.9 million people had perished due to famine in the Ukraine.

It was not until 1986, on the heels of another tragedy in the Ukraine, namely the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, that public mention was allowed about the Holodomor, the engineered famine in the Ukraine between 1932-1933. Nowadays it is widely known and well documented, though historiographic interpretations are skewed. As recently as today, President Joe Biden blamed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin for the Holodomor, keen to score propaganda points against Russia as the lame duck president escalates the proxy war in the Ukraine during his final days in office. Every good cartoon needs a moustache-twirling villain, and Stalin certainly fits the bill.

Yet the Holodomor may be closer to us than we dare to admit, if truth be told. Official censorship and suppression of unfavorable news and statistics… blacklisting “uncooperative” professionals out of their careers… de-platforming, de-banking and de-personing dissidents, in stark contrast to smiley choreographed dances on social media reminiscent of the Soviet posters depicting plentiful harvests being reaped by happy robotniks (from which derives the term “robot”). The famine was unspeakably worse by far, but there are numerous parallels to the USA in 2020-2021 rather than the distant Ukraine ninety years ago. Years later we are still compiling the numbers and stories of those whom we victimized for challenging official narratives. Those who publicly questioned quarantine policy, the jabcine's efficacy, even those who openly opined that maybe the electorate deserved to know about a presidential candidate’s wayward son’s laptop, for example. Collectively we rushed to cannibalize them, at least figuratively, then applauded ourselves every evening from our balconies… and history suggests that we’ll do it again, at the nearest opportunity.