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independence and viability of the Ukrainian language,culture, intelligentsia, and autocephalous church.Ukrainian nationalism has had a long history. Thebirth of the Ukrainian people, as distinct from theRussian people, can be dated from 1240 when Kiev,the capital of all the East Slavs, fell to the advancingMongols. Those of the east Slavs who were pushedwest became Ukrainians while those who lived Northof Kiev became the great Russians.Stalin succeeded in his designs to crush Ukrainiannationalism, but only temporarily. "With the extirpationof so many of its natural leaders and adherents at everylevel, " national feeling was numbed during the remainingyears of the 1930s. Yet ultimately the Stalinist drivefailed, as events in 1990 and 1991 have unmistakablyrevealed.644Dolot, Miron. Execution by Hunger; the HiddenHolocaust. New York and London: W. W. Norton,1985. LC 84-16568. ISBN 0-393-30416-7.Execution by Hunger is his horrifying memoir ofthe Ukrainian famine. Dolot, a survivor of the famine,strongly suggests that it was artificially induced as aspecial Stalinist measure to eradicate Ukrainian nationalaspirations.465kKingston-Mann, Esther. Lenin and the Problem ofMarxist Peasant Revolution. New York and Oxford:Oxford University0-19-503278-0.Press, 1985. LC 82-14314. ISBNKingston-Mann offers a scholarly and theoreticallysophisticated examination of the relationship betweenLeninist and Bolshevik thought and the role and statusof the peasantry. The book is useful background forthe collectivization strategy Stalin adopted at a laterstage.* 6. 6 ~Koestler, Arthur. "Soviet Myth and Reality." In TheYogi and the Commissar and Other Essays. New York:Macmillan, 1945. LC 45-4437.Koestler was in Kharkov during the winter of1932-33, as he tells us in "Soviet Myth and Reality."He was appalled to discover the grotesque incongruitythat existed between anyone's observation of massstarvation in the streets and what the local newspaperswere reporting about life in the Ukraine. Koestler notesthat Stalin's control of the press was total, in contrastto Hitler's, which was only partial. Hence the localnewspapers were boasting of over-fulfillment ofeconomic plans. They were filled with pictures ofsmiling, happy peasants who praised Comrade Stalinon his accomplishments. Koestler contrasts this prettyfantasy with the unspeakably ugly truth:4674Travelling through the countryside was likerunning the gauntlet: the stations were linedwith begging peasants with swollen handsand feet, the women holding up to the carriagewindows horrible infants with enormouswobbling heads, sticklike limbs, swollen,pointed bellies.Kravchenko, Victor. I Chose Freedom: 7he Personaland Political Life of a Soviet Official. New York:Scribners, 1946. LC 46-2999 rev.Kravchenko was a young communist official inthe Ukraine at the time of the famine. In Chapter 10,"Harvest in Hell, " he explains the decision to deploytrusted communist cadres in the Ukrainian countrysideto safeguard the new harvest:Everything depended on the new harvest.Would the starving peasantry have thestrength and the will to reap and to threshin the midst of millionfold death. To makesure the crops would be harvested, to preventthe desperate collective farmers from eatingthe green shoots, to save the kolkhozes frombreaking down under mismanagement, tofight against enemies of collectivization,special Political Departments were set up inthe villages, manned by trusted communists— militarymen, officials, professionals,N. K. V. D. men, students. An army of morethan a hundred thousand stalwarts, selectedby the Central Committee of the Party, wasthus deployed through the collectivized areas,charged with the duty of safeguardingnew harvest.He then describes the consequences of "safeguardingthe harvest" as they affected the most vulnerable partof the Ukrainian population:theThe most terrifying sights were little childrenwith skeleton limbs dangling from balloonlikeabdomens. Starvation had wiped everytrace of youth from their faces, turning theminto tortured gargoyles; only in their eyesstill lingered the reminder of childhood.Everywhere we found men and women lyingprone, their faces and bellies bloated, theireyes utterly expressionless.112 GENOCIDE