Medvedev knocks back Ukraine famine service invite Correspondents

Report - Saturday, 22 November , 2008
Reporter: Scott Bevan

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Ukraine is marking the 75th anniversary of a massive famine that killed millions of people.

Delegations from around the world are attending commemorative services. But Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has turned down his invitation.

The Russian leader and others in his country believes the Ukrainian Government is revising the events of late 1932 and 1933 for its own political gains, and in the process is driving a wedge between the two nations.

Our Moscow correspondent, Scott Bevan reports.

SCOTT BEVAN: The rich farmlands of Ukraine were considered the Soviet Union's bread basket, as the wheat harvests helped feed a vast population.

Yet in the early 1930s, that bread basket frayed and finally fell apart. The results were a famine and mass starvation.

VIKTOR KREMENYUK: The amount of the people who died because of the famine was terribly high, by some estimates up to 10 or 12 million.

SCOTT BEVAN: Professor Viktor Kremenyuk is a historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He says the famine occurred after a brutal crackdown by then Soviet leader Josef Stalin on larger landholders, with millions forced off farms, deported, or killed.

Stalin's push for collective farming, he says, decimated Soviet agriculture.

VIKTOR KREMENYUK: The result was, I think, disastrous, not only for the Ukrainians but also I'd say for the Russians.

SCOTT BEVAN: Professor Stanislav Kulchitsky, from the Institute of the History of Ukraine, says the famine hit other parts of the Soviet Union but Ukraine was targeted by Stalin, to literally starve the people of any independence

(Stanislav Kulchitsky speaking)

"What was done in Ukraine in January 1933, the total confiscation of food, is something that didn't happen anywhere else", he said.

The famine is known as Holodomor, or death by hunger, and it's seen by some in Ukraine as part of their national identity.

Key figures including the President, Victor Yushchenko, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church believe that what Stalin's policy amounted to genocide.

Stanislav Kulchitsky, from the Institute of the History of Ukraine, says genocide is the correct term for what happened in his country.

(Stanislav Kulchitsky speaking)

"If all food is confiscated, if the population is blockaded, both physically and with information, I don't know how else it can be classified," he said.

The pain of the past is causing present political friction, notably with Moscow.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said it wouldn't be possible for him to attend the 75th anniversary commemoration in Ukraine, because he believes Kiev is using history for its own political gains.

Ukraine's President Victor Yuschenko has reportedly said that his country holds the memory of everyone who suffered during the famine.

What both Russians and Ukrainians do agree on is the need for more research into the famine, and Professor Viktor Kremenyuk says perhaps the world has a role to play in healing the wounds created 75 years ago.

VIKTOR KREMENYUK: Maybe something like a big court, international trial, of the type of the Nuremberg, of the Soviet regime, maybe that can bring all of us together.

SCOTT BEVAN: This is Scott Bevan in Moscow for Correspondents Report.

http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2426971.htm