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Summary Of The Holodomor

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Yuri Shapoval’s claim to fame in his article is his access to documents, on the Ukrainian famine, from the Soviet party. He says that these documents have not been made public yet at the time that he wrote this article, and that the Ukrainian government under President Yuchenko released these records right before he wrote the article (99). Shapoval says these documents include ones that are declassified from the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and were prohibited from being accessed for years. He also used recently accessible documents from the GPU (the Soviet secret police), which have records of the orders given and details about the operations. Shapoval says that these files show exactly what the Soviets did to the Ukrainians…show more content…
Shapoval says that the documents and records show supposed proof that the Soviets preyed on people in the Ukrainian collective farms by disposing of supposed “counterrevolutionary kulak groups” (106), when really Shapoval says they were usually normal Ukrainian peasants. He brings an order by the GPU to all the towns in Ukraine saying that only the GPU were allowed to officially record any deaths, and whenever a town registered any deaths that would occur they were not allowed to list what the cause of the death was, and Shapoval uses this to show another way in which the Soviets hid the famine from the world. Shapoval cites a letter written by Stalin himself where Stalin writes, “starvation still has not taught very many collective farmers good sense,” (qtd. Shapoval 106). He uses this letter as further support towards his ideology that Stalin purposefully enacted the famine. Another measure that Shapoval brings that was ordered upon the Ukrainians was that the peasants were prohibited from leaving their district. Shapoval states that this order was to prevent the Ukrainians from wandering around trying to find bread and subsequently tell other people what atrocities were happening in the Ukraine (106). Not only did they prevent the Ukrainians from finding bread Shapoval says but food was also forbidden to enter Ukraine with out special permission from the government, according to a Soviet Ukrainian government order that issued the ban (107). He only does it once in his article but Shapoval brings a quote by Germany historian Gerhard Simon who he says is correct in saying that there was a “war against the peasantry,” and a
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