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Summary: ukrainian holocaust
Review: excellent introduction for a reader not familiar with the greatest crime of this century,committed by Russia towards Ukrainians. Most of the world did not realize that 7 million innocent people were exterminated by Stalin and its satraps, such as Krushchev, Kaganovych,etc.
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Summary: the ukrainian holocaust
Review: excellent introduction to the unknown ukrainian holocaust, when 7 million ukrainians died from the artificial famine orchestrated by moscow
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Summary: Heart-rending
Review: In 1929, Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of all Ukrainian farms. During the resulting upheaval, some seven million Ukrainians died of starvation. But, while it ended with mass starvation, the Soviet program of oppression started with property confiscation, arbitrary arrests, judicial and extrajudicial murder, and a whole constellation of unspeakable mistreatment.One of the survivors of this holocaust was a young Ukrainian boy, who survived the conflagration and World War II, and succeeded in escaping to the United States. Written under the pseudonym of Miron Dolot, this heart-rending book tells the story of what he saw throughout the holocaust, and what he felt and thought. I originally picked up this book because my own family, who were Russian Mennonites, left Ukraine before this time, but all of the relatives that stayed were annihilated to the last man, woman and child. Even so, I dare anyone to read this book and not be moved. The author does an excellent job of bringing the heartless insanity of this holocaust home to right where you live. So, if you are interested in Russian or Ukrainian history, then I highly recommend this moving book to you.
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Summary: A close-up of a tragic time in history
Review: It seems impossible that, in a place comparable to the American Midwest for rich soil, that the people who live there, millions of them, starve to death in spite of the bounty of their land. But their Ukrainian farms are collectivized by orders from faraway Moscow. The food is shipped to wherever the authorities decide it will go. This is not a dry history of bushels shipped and numbers of private farms collectivized, but a compelling depiction of lives progressively ruined as an ideology takes over. Families who resist collectivation are demonized as dirty, selfish kulaks, and are punished. The promises to the communities sound good, early on, but the resulting devastation of the Ukrainianian people that results ultimately reveals that there was not much in it for the people who worked the land.
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Summary: A commendable work
Review: Many have been calling the tragedy in the Ukraine during the 1930's the 'hidden' holocaust or the 'other' holocaust. This book and others like it('Harvest of Sorrow' by Conquest and 'Gulag' by Applebaum) describe the terrible pain and suffering and outright genocide that was perpetrated against the Ukrainians by Stalins Russia. This began with the collectivization of the farms. Then the Kulaks, who Stalin called capitalists because most owned one or two more chickens then their neighboors, were all shipped to Siberia. What followed next was the confiscation of the grain from the farmers and the starvation of millions. This book details the tragedy. It is a good accounting of this very hidden history, unknown to the west until years later. In fact many western jurnalists were duped into beleiving Stalin had created a 'maricle' in the Ukraine. THe only miracle was the disappearence of millions of people, whose only crime was that they were peasents.
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Summary: Powerful
Review: More gripping than any historical narrative. Yet entirely truthful, forthcoming. How the author managed to survive in spite of Stalin is incredible. How he brings himself to write of such horrendous matters is amazing. How governments can do this to their own citizens is unbelievable. Sad. Tragic. Honest. Makes you appreciate how lucky we Americans have it. Hard to imagine these things really happened, but sadly they continue to do so. After this reading, I've stopped whining about my parent's generation's lectures on how lucky we are here. My opinion of Joseph Stalin took another notch lower, perhaps below that of Adolph Hitler. Some of these victims were my ancestors. May he burn in hell. God Bless America.
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Summary: In those days...
Review: One of the few personal accounts of the Terror-famine in print. A terrible and very depressing story, there is no happy ending, no justice, just a hollow sense of loss and revulsion, that something as horrendous as this could have happened - and that those responsible could get away with it. However, despite all of what I have said, I still strongly recommend this book. It will not make you happy but it will inform. For that is the greater tragedy - modern ignorance of what the people of the Soviet Union endured under Stalin. Read this and do not forget.
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Summary: Gripping, absorbing, gut-wrenching biography.
Review: The author leads the reader slowly into the horrors of life in the Ukraine during the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin (and Nikita Krushchev) engineered the mass starvation of about seven million Kulaks and Ukranians in about two years. Rich narration makes it easy to follow the events, as conditions deteriorate into unspeakable horror. In some ways, "Execution by Hunger" is better than Solzhenitsyn's books, and better than "Coming Out of the Ice." Dolot, I think, reaches every reader's heart. Read this book and you'll look at Russia, and its governments, with a much clearer eye and mind.
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Summary: Murderous ideology
Review: This book is a first-hand account of the forced collectivization of a Ukrainian village in the 1930s in the USSR.
It was a real nightmare for all the victims (alive or death), but also for the reader. One gets cold in the back when one sees what an ideology in a by one party controlled State can do and did with mostly innocent citizens.
All free peasants were considered as kulaks. Their farms were confiscated and they became 'State slaves' controlled by an omnipotent totalitarian bureaucracy. Millions of human beings (they were not human for the CP, only enemies) were starved or frozen to death.
One thinks of Jheronimus Bosch when one read certain passages in this book, but they portrait a nightmarish reality: "... a heap of frozen human corpses like some discarded woodpile ... Their frozen arms and legs were sticking out from under the snow like tree limbs in an intricate configuration." (p. 187)
This book contains even harder scenes. The author stresses also another aspect of this genocide (or was it the principal one): nationalism.
The Party members, who imposed the murderous collectivization, were Russians. Miron Dolot sees the organized famine as a deliberate attempt to annihilate the Ukrainians as a people. Apart from its uncontested historical value, this book should be read as a warning against the madness of pure ideologists, who, once in absolute power, implement their insane policies, accepting at the same time millions of human casualties without the slightest form of remorse. For a more general evaluation of the organized famines in the 1930s in the USSR, see Robert Conquest's 'Harvest of Sorrow'.
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Summary: Ideology of Execution
Review: This gripping and disturbing eyewitness acount of Stalin-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine leaves me horrified. Human beings and their governments can be so dogmatic and cruel that they are ready to destroy anything and anyone who stands in theier way. The book is preceeded by a wonderful introduction written by Adam Ulam, an expert on Soviet and Eastern European politics, and a brother of the world renoun mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, whom I, as a historian of scientific and technological ideas, consider one of the co-creators of the hydrogen bomb. The book itself is written by Miron Dolot, a pen name of a survivor of Stalinist famine in the Ukraine. He vividly describes decisive actions of the communist regime against the Ukrainian peasants. These actions are underhanded and heavyhanded at the same time. No trick, no deceit, and no brutality was spared to crush the peasants and Ukrainian nationalism. The Soviet elite, almost all of which consisted of humanistic intellectuals, despised private property and the markets. They wanted to destroy every vestige of peasant independence, and they dispossessed them by forcing them into government-owned collective farms. These kolhozes were exmamples of inefficiency and apathetic attitude. In the meantime, the hunger that resulted from dispossesssion and vicious persecution of somewhat-well-off peasants who were called "kulaks" and "enemies of the people" devastated entire villages. The regime rewarded productivity and initiative with death and exile to Siberia. This book strongly suggests that utopias do not work. They are concocted by resentful intellectuals who have no technical training (writers, historians, lawyers) and who despise what they cannot understand: the markets, rural life, international finance, and major corporations. When power is acquired by a small group, everybody outside this group is a potential victim. No more ominous sign of the truth of this statement exists than the Soviet government's successful attempt to starve millions of its subjects in the name of ideological slogans and visions.
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