On July 3, Ustia Stefanchuk, a Ukrainian blogger and journalist now living in Canada, wrote a post about the atrocities of the Soviet government in Lviv. Her post described how the Soviet authorities tortured her family. On July 5, Facebook deleted Ms. Stefanchuk’s account. She reported the news from a different account.

Facebook said that the violation of the social network’s standards was the reason for the move. Ms. Stefanchuk called it an example of the destruction of the national consciousness of Ukrainians.

A writer originally from Lviv who currently lives in Canada, Ms. Stefanchuk researches the life of the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. She also searches for and writes about abandoned Ukrainian churches.

In her post for which the social network deleted her account, Ms. Stefanchuk wrote about the day the Soviet army retreated from Lviv under pressure from Germany. As they fled on July 3, 1941, Soviet troops killed thousands of Ukrainians, including those imprisoned as counter-revolutionary elements, Ms. Stefanchuk wrote, adding that they included intellectuals, teachers and students. She wrote that the Soviets shot people and threw grenades into the cells, and the advancing Germans then opened Lviv prisons and let residents recognize their relatives.

In a photo attached to the post, Ms. Stefanchuk explained that a young woman from Lviv, wearing an embroidered dress, was clearly horrified by her surroundings. She had just seen hundreds of half-decomposed corpses. Others from the city were in the midst of trying to find their relatives among the dead. She notes also that, due to a lack of time and fear of the oncoming German army, the Soviets piled dozens of dead bodies in prison cells.

“Another photo included with the post showed a girl in uniform in an NKVD prison after the escape. This is a well-known photo,” Ms. Stefanchuk wrote in Ukrainian. A Facebook user recognized her own mother in the picture and noted it in the comments.
The post received 1,000 likes, 120 comments and 424 shares.

“At some point, I received a message from a friend asking why he couldn’t see my page and post,” Ms. Stefanchuk said. “I was a little taken aback and went to see what was going on. First Facebook sent me a standard text about a 30-day ban because of this post, which violates, it turns out, community standards. After that, I received a notification that my account has been blocked without the right to renew it.”

Ms. Stefanchuk also received a letter by e-mail stating that the page had been permanently blocked. She said that she has been blocked before for similar posts about the history of Ukraine. However, the block was lifted the past two times as soon as she wrote to Facebook support staff. She said that they even apologized.

. . . .

“Most of all, [I am hurt and sad because] there is no influence on it, that Ukrainians are again everywhere censored and disenfranchised.”

. . . .

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Viatrovych, a national deputy in the Ukrainian parliament and an ex-chairman of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, clarified that thanks to Ms. Stefan­chuk’s letter and that the comment on her page was made by Lesia Rudavska Kolenska, it was possible to find out that the young Ukrainian woman in the photo was Maria Lys, who was 20 when the picture was taken, according to Mr. Viatrovych.

Ms. Lys was studying in Lviv to be an accountant before the Bolsheviks came in 1939. Under the Soviets, she studied typing and began working as a typist. On the morning of June 30, 1941, she learned that the Soviets had fled and, at the same time, that thousands of prisoners had been killed in prisons. Ms. Lys, along with others, tried to find among the dead relatives or friends who had previously been taken by the Soviets.

. . . .

Ms. Stefanchuk said she wrote her post to discuss taboo topics of Ukrainian history. She also wrote about the SS Galicia Division division, adding that the people of Lviv joined the German divisions because they believed that there could be nothing worse than the Soviet military. The following day her page was blocked.

https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/facebook-removes-account-of-ukrainian-canadian-journalist-following-her-post-on-soviet-crimes/

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/escape-from-empire-ukraines-post-soviet-national-awakening/

Eighty years ago, on June 29, 1941, thousands of Ukrainian nationalists were massacred in western Ukraine by the retreating Soviet army as the German Nazis were preparing to capture Lviv. The Soviets were putting into practice the scorched-earth policy of destroying anything of value to the advancing Nazis.

In Lutsk, a Russian prison director sent 1,500 prisoners, Ukrainian nationalists, into the courtyard when Germans began to approach the city and all were shot down with machine gun fire. Those who were only wounded were later killed with pistols and hand grenades.

At Dubno, 528 bodies were found, and in Lviv, over 3,000 Ukrainians were murdered by the Soviet secret police, known as the GPU. Photos included in the dispatch by the Associated Press from Berlin showed rows of corpses as relatives attempted to identify them.

A United Press correspondent with the German armies on the Soviet front reported on July 7 that together with other correspondents he saw in Lviv evidence of mass executions by the Soviets before the Soviet army withdrew from the city. German officers declared 100 corpses were found in one military prison, 250 in another and 65 in another.

In one prison, the correspondent’s writings and included photographs showed there were between 20 to 30 corpses, and at another prison there were unmistakable signs that a large number of corpses had been buried in the prison cellar.

Many of those who were shot were political prisoners whom the Soviets had rounded up during their occupation of western Ukraine in the autumn of 1939. Many of them were shot outright, including a considerable number of clergy, a fact which the Moscow anti-religious organ “Bezbozhnik” (Godless) itself reported then.

https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/june-29-1941/

The East German uprising of 1953 (German: Volksaufstand vom 17. Juni 1953 ) was an uprising that occurred in East Germany from 16 to 17 June 1953. It began with a strike action by construction workers in East Berlin on 16 June against work quotas during the Sovietization process in East Germany. Demonstrations in East Berlin turned into a widespread uprising against the Government of East Germany and the Socialist Unity Party the next day, involving over one million people in about 700 localities across the country.[1] Protests against declining living standards and unpopular Sovietization policies led to a wave of strikes and protests that were not easily brought under control and threatened to overthrow the East German government. The uprising in East Berlin was violently suppressed by tanks of the Soviet forces in Germany and the Kasernierte Volkspolizei, while demonstrations continued in over 500 towns and villages for several more days before dying out.

The 1953 uprising was celebrated in West Germany as a public holiday on 17 June until German reunification in 1990, after which it was replaced by German Unity Day, celebrated annually on 3 October.[2]

As I understand, very few German newspapers acknowledge this event.

The Polish Winged Hussars dominated the eastern European theaters of war for much of the early modern period. While the western European art of war of this period relied on infantry-heavy pike and shot tactics, eastern armies continued to rely on cavalry. On the battlefields of Italy, France, Germany, and Flanders, heavy cavalry such as knights and lancers found a counter in combined pikes and muskets. Western European battles, according to the historian Geoffrey Parker, were won primarily with infantry. In eastern Europe, by contrast, cavalry was still key. The Polish cavalry, most notably, not only frequently bested the Muscovites and Ottomans on their eastern and southern front respectively but also defeated western powers such as the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus. Therefore, some scholars argue that early modern western military doctrine lacked a crucial component, namely a cavalry unit such as the Polish winged hussars that frequently and successfully charged home with steel in hand. It is not surprising that the winged hussars eventually influenced the western art of war; and they did so lastingly. To understand this development properly, the period between 1550 and 1620 is key. This video will look at how contemporary historiography discusses the early successes of the Polish-Lithuanian Hussars.

Please take a tour of Ternopil’s “Museum of Repression”

A friend and I funded this through indiegogo.

Early in 1932 Mendel Osherowitch journeyed to Soviet Ukraine on assignment for Forverts (Forward), a Yiddish-language newspaper in New York City boasting a daily circulation of 275,000 copies. Born in Trostianets before the Great War, and speaking Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian like a native, Osherowitch astutely recorded life under a Communist system he found markedly dysfunctional, sometimes criminal.

He documented a pervasive fear of the secret police, the GPU, recounting how parents were scared their children might betray them. He watched hordes of peasants clambering onto trains escaping to the cities in an anguished search for bread. He heard stories about rural uprisings brutally suppressed, saw how Western reporters self-sequestered in Moscow were failing to report what was happening and observed growing tensions between the beneficiaries of Bolshevik rule and those for whom it was an enervating nightmare.

What puzzled him most was how his beloved Ukraine, once Europe’s breadbasket, was being reduced to a land without bread:

“… Ukraine was already experiencing an appalling famine. Millions of people had been driven to the greatest desperation, to a life sometimes even worse than death. Plagues circulated in villages and in the towns. People died because they could no longer endure their terrible hunger. On many roads, covered with snow, lay dead horses, withered away from hunger. At the train stations, thousands and thousands of peasants wandered around, covered in bodily filth and dirt, waiting for trains they hoped would take them into the cities, where they could perhaps sell something, maybe get bread. The dreadful misery of these people, this harrowing state of affairs, tore at one’s heart.”

. . . .

When Osherowitch’s book was published, in 1933, its reception was mixed, despite its favorable reporting on how many Jews benefitted from the Revolution. Pogroms were of the past. Previously unheard of educational prospects had opened for younger generations, with almost unrestricted social mobility, including opportunities for joining the Communist Party, even serving in the secret police. Yet Osherowitch also deplored the negative consequences of these erstwhile gains. Jewish religious life and cultural institutions were being undermined, the Yiddish press and arts reduced to little more than tools for propagating Soviet ideology. Repeatedly, Osherowitch listened to tales of woe, almost to the point of suffering complete mental exhaustion, as his people repeatedly implored him to alert relatives abroad to their plight, begged for aid. The only exceptions were younger Jews. They spoke mostly of the Revolution’s purported achievements, of how the Soviet Union was overtaking and would soon overpass the U.S.A., of an even-better future to come.

What separated his interlocutors in Soviet Ukraine from left-leaning Jews and fellow travelers in North America, who proved unwilling to credit Osherowitch’s account, was that the former admitted how harsh their present circumstances were – after all, Osherowitch was there among them, could see what their lives were truly like. Yet they swore their sacrifices were necessary offerings, expected from everyone caught up in the messianic chore of “building socialism.”

Portentous omens were appearing. The Jewish minority in rural areas was reduced by outmigration to the big cities. Many who left, including Osherowitch’s brother, Buzi, joined the dreaded GPU. His other brother, Daniel, stayed home, an armed enforcer of collectivization. While everyone in the countryside suffered, it was the Ukrainians who were fated to starve in their millions, the principal victims of the Holodomor. By the early winter of 1932 they had begun questioning whose side their Jewish neighbors were on. Osherowitch heard tell of how, in the town of Haisyn, Ukrainians had called upon local Jews to join them in breaking down the gates of a government granary. Those Jews were warned that their refusal would be remembered as a treachery and, sooner or later, avenged.

. . . .

There were also famine deniers. As Malcolm Muggeridge, Rhea Clyman and others attempted to alert the world to what was going on, very powerful forces ranged up against them, stifling their reports by branding them alarmist, nothing but anti-Soviet propaganda. Adroitly, the principal obfuscator, Walter Duranty of The New York Times, buried the truth.

What of Mendel Osherowitch? He returned “a changed person… more politically aware,” published articles in Forverts, then a book, all a matter of record. But his words came out only in Yiddish. Why was his testimony not made available in English, to reach a broader audience? No record exists of him ever trying to reach beyond the borders of his kith and kin, among whom more than a few preferred to stay ignorant, indifferent, or even hostile to his cri de coeur.

Did Osherowitch fall into shocked silence after being denounced by his brothers or a Jewish diaspora still enthralled by Stalinism? Was he hushed after receiving news that family members had been repressed, fearing they would fare worse if he gave public witness? We will never know. All that is certain is that he did not. Though living in New York, and working for a socialist newspaper, Osherowitch remained conspicuously silent, even as Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones contested the truth of the famine on the pages of The New York Times.

http://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/too-many-decades-too-late/

There’s a fascinating museum in Ukraine run by a fascinating man. It’s the Museum of Repression in Ternopil. It was formerly a communist prison. Amazingly, it is run by a former prisoner who was held and tortured there.

Do you want to take a tour?

We are trying to make that possible. I’m helping a Ukrainian director crowd fund a documentary about him and the museum.

If it interests you, please contribute by clicking this link: https://igg.me/at/blindhopedocumentary

Or if you can’t, please share the link among those who may be interested, perhaps diaspora groups on social media, or among people interested in Communist history.

It’s an important part of Ukrainian history, and it helps tell the tragedy of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Thank you very much!

Excerpt from Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God (Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 59-66.

by Roman Skaskiw

(Two short essays recently published on American Thinker were excerpts from this longer essay.  If you’d like to read these excerpts, visit Leftism’s Casual Relationship with the Truth Is Intentional or The Radical Left Will Never Tolerate a Messiah Who Actually Arrives .  But if you have time, read the essay below. It’s the important one.)

French historian and philosopher Rene Girard observed, correctly in my opinion, that communism was not popular despite killing millions of people, but precisely because it killed millions of people.

I’m told that my grandfather climbed from the window of a school at which he was teaching when a breathless neighbor told him that “they” were coming for him. So began his trek across war-torn Europe with my then-four-year-old mother. Another relative, who would have been some sort of great uncle to me, was taken to a labor camp in Uzbekistan for belonging to an anti-communist club in his high school. He was sixteen. His family received two letters from him — the first saying it was extremely cold and asking for them to send a pair of boots, the second saying that the boots had been taken by another prisoner. He did not return.

Continue reading →

The Foreign Office and the Famine. British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (1988)
Edited by Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y.Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan
with a foreword by Michael R. Marrus

Ovey wrote in a letter to Henderson in march 1930 that the encouraging of British exports to the Soviet Union was a “pressing matter.” Britain’s policy, he gathered, was “to maintain correct and friendly relations with the Soviet Government, with a view to encouraging trade as much as possible.” Ovey then discussed ways of increasing exports to the soviet union. “That we buy commodities from Russia,” he wrote, “arises principally from the fact that it is the cheapest market.” The Soviet ability to buy from Britain depended on its ability to sell to Britain. ” The more Russia sells to us the more she should be sympathetically inclined ceteris paribus to buy from us,” Ovey concluded.(63)
(63) woodward and Butler, eds.,Documents on British Foreign Policy 7: 111-12

Moscow had borrowed a dreat deal of money in the west,especially in Germany, to finance its industrialization, and it could repay its loans only by selling grain. The Soviets were financing their programme of industrialization with short term loans which they paid off by exporting wheat. Between 1926 and 1930 Britain lent between 30 and 40 million pounds to Germany. The germans kept a percentage for themselves and passed the credits on to the Soviet Union, which used them to purchase goods,principally heavy machinery, in Germany. Britain was thus financing Germany’s export trade with the Soviet Union. (66) A serious public campaign to alleviate the famine by returning the grain to those who needed it most would,therefore, have brought about a reduction of Soviet grain exports,and that in turn, would have upset the international banking system, in which London had such a great stake. (67)

(66) R. Boothby, Conservative MP, speaking at the Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR in London in December 1935. Britain and the Soviets: The Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR (London: Martin Lawrence, 1936), 3.
(67) In a memorandum on the solvency of the Soviet government, G.P. Paton, the commercial counsellor of the British embassy in Moscow, revealed in June 1932 that the Soviet Government was not able to pay the bills that would mature in Germany in October 1932. In October -December 1931 Soviet bills amounted to 40 million marks, but a year later the Soviet government would be faced with bills totaling 165 million marks. ” If all reports regarding this year’s sowing are true.” wrote Paton, ” the prospects of a bumper crop are very remote, and wheat acreage is up all over the world. The Concensus of opinion, in fact, is that Soviet Russia will be fortunate if it can produce sufficient grain to meet domestic requirements; and that exports, if any, will be relatively insignificant as compared with the past 2 years. Assuming this forecast to be true, where is the Soviet government to find the wherewithal to pay the bills maturing in Germany from October onwards? And what of the bills maturing in other countries?” FO.371/16323 N 3840