A EUROPEAN GENOCIDE

[history]
Starting in the late 1920s, Stalin set out to collectivize and hobble the Soviet peasantry. His aim was to crush "the peasantry of the U.S.S.R. as a whole, and the Ukrainian nation," wrote Robert Conquest in his groundbreaking book, "The Harvest of Sorrow." The result:

• An estimated 14.5 million people starved to death in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus when farmland was collectivized and harvests requisitioned; yet, the submission of Ukraine to Moscow helped prolong the Soviet Union's life for another 60 years.
• Walter Duranty, the New York Times's longtime Moscow correspondent, was Stalin's chief apologist, sending false dispatches from Ukraine; he won a Pulitzer Prize.
• The left-leaning academy condemned Conquest and the late James Mace, the leading researcher of the famine, when their work appeared in the 1980s, and the Berlin Wall's collapse shamed some of the denialists.

By remembering the Holodomor, Ukrainians say: Never again.

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