Shvets Valeriy
Born in 1949, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Professor, Honor worker of education of Ukraine.
Awarded with Petro Mohyla's commemorative sign.
Graduated from Balta's high school number 2 in 1966, from the Department of Physics of I. Mechnikov ONU in 1971, from the graduate school at the Department of Theoretical Physics in 1976 and from doctorate at the Institute of Physics of condensed systems of the NAS of Ukraine in 1992.
Direction of scientific activity- physics of metals, plasma, semiconductors. Author of 5 monographs, 7 textbooks, about 200 scientific publications.
Currently is Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Odessa National Academy of Food Technologies.
In the mid 1990s of the last century led Odessa cell of Narodnyi Rukh (People's movement), published the newspaper “Rukh
Part 1
“Grisha! Do you see anything?” “No, I don't”. I don't see anything either.” With these words, mother used to begin her story of 1933. That year mother was six, and her brother - eight. Holding hands, they climbed down from the bed to the floor and along the wall slowly left the house. Then they sat down near the threshold, and would sit in the morning sun until the swelling around the eyes got slightly smaller and they could see something. Parents went to work before the sun, and the children saw them only late at night when they, weakened by hunger and hard work, - dirty and gloomy were coming home. His father was the chairman of a collective farm and carried his share of responsibility for everything that was happening in the village of Moshniahy in the north of Odesa region.
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Maternal grandfather
Myaskovskyi Vasyl Yuhymovych (20.04.1904 – 20.11.1993) |
Paternal grandfather
Shvets Petro Ivanovych (1887 – 21.07.1958) |
My father, who lived in the same village, but in another collective farm, that year was twelve and in their large family the situation was even worse. Although his family was not “wealthy” as opposed to the mother's, they stubbornly did not want to join the collective farm, and was defarming. Their house and property were taken away, and they were being prepared for deportation to Siberia. Saved by a fluke, they did have to live one winter at someone else's huts.
I mean, I knew the forbidden in Soviet times truth about the Holodomor as presented by both sides. By those who served the government, and those who were its direct victim. These truths (as it turned out, when the two families intermarried) did not differ much. Dedication of maternal grandfather to the Soviet power was not limitless. He never joined the Bolshevik Party, and paternal grandfather did not perceive it from the beginning. He returned from the Great War in 1920, where, according to his confession, fought neither for the White nor for the Red.
The peasants' resistance to the Soviet power was not only passive but also armed. For example, my maternal grandfather was shot twice. The truth about the Holodomor, heard by me from my father-in-law and mother-in-law, born and raised in the heart of Ukraine, in the villages of Lypnyazhka and Novodobryantsi (there's even a relevant memorable sign of famine there) differed only in tiny details. And people resisted the government there too.
The party activist, sent by the government from Leningrad to speed up the confiscation of land from the peasants, was beheaded and his head was placed next to the body under the bridge through the Sukhyi Tashlyk in the center of Lipnyazhka. A lonely obelisk in the old cemetery of Lipnyazhka reminds of those events - a scratchy piece of red granite, with no name of the deceased, and without the destroyed by time traditional star at the top. Around it there are individual and collective small hills of graves of famine victims near which people have worn tracks. So the monument to the executioner is the only reminder of the greatest tragedy of this village. The number of identified victims is 230 people.
I think in our time speaking about those events we should not use the word collectivization, which in accordance with the new vocabulary created by the Soviet power, meant confiscation, and that's the last word. When words lose their meaning - people lose their freedom (Confucius). I think vice versa it would be correct too. Freedom returns with returning of the lost sense of words.
Peasants' resistance to the process of confiscation of their land is a topic that our researchers have not even started to develop seriously. They traditionally tend to focus only on tears and the Christian prayer for the enemy, who allegedly did not know what he was doing. I am sure that he knew. But my story is about another, very little studied aspect of the Holodomor - “How did it become possible?”...
Let's consider the opposite side's arguments first.
The Commander-in-Chief of the first line of defense is the president of the neighboring state, which has recently snapped off quite a large piece of our land. According to him, there was no famine in the Soviet Union, there were just minor food difficulties. His point of view is shared by 90 % of citizens of Muscovia. But in Muscovia it was like that under almost any king. There is no sense in commenting on this thesis.
The second line of defense takes quite an impressive team of liberal intellectuals of Muscovia - there was famine because of bad harvest, but from it equally suffered representatives of all ethnic groups living in the Soviet Union. This point of view is shared by 5 % out of those 10 % that did not support the first point of view. And here comments are needed. It is true that the famine hit not only Ukrainians. While in Great Ukraine-Rus at least 25 % of Ukrainians-Rusyns died, the percentage of Kazakhs that died was more significant - 50 %. Those people were mostly nomadic, they ate food of animal origin, and herds of domestic animals were difficult to hide. Only those survived who in that terrible time managed to leave with their camps for China. With no less force than the Ukrainians-Rusyns, the famine struck the Crimean Tatars and Germans in their places of compact settlement, where they lived together with the Ukrainians-Rusyns, in particular, in the Volga region. While Hitler had been just talking about the necessity of conquest of living space for the German nation, and saw such a possibility only in the upcoming big war, Stalin was really capturing that living space for the Muscovites in peacetime. Not a single people from the list of victims of the famine got there by accident. Where Ukrainian villages interspersed with Muscovites' ones, only our villages were dying out.
The deserted villages of Great Ukraine-Rus' were settled by Muscovia denizens. A future war in the East of Ukraine-Rus, which will for a long time remain our incurable wound, had been programmed in the time of the Holodomor. It was then, as a result of the extinction of the Ukrainian-Rusyns ethnic group in these lands, there appeared a powerful stratum of Muscovites there. And they presently stand up for the interests of their historical homeland, relying on its full support. The war in the East is, first of all, an ethnic war, and it will continue. Probably, we should listen to the views of such famous personalities as Dmytro Korchynskyi. Perhaps we should evacuate the entire population from the occupied territories and the frontal zone into internal regions of the Ukraine-Rus and once and for all resolve the confrontation with separatists in the East by military means? The basis for the Muscovites' becoming ethnic majority in the Crimea over the Ukrainians-Rusyns and Crimean Tatars had also been laid in the years of the greatest famine. By the way, according to all the experts' estimates and eyewitnesses, in particular, my family, the harvest of 1932-1933 was quite decent. Thus, the famine everywhere was artificial.
The third line of defense in the attitude to the famine is led by patriots-intellectuals of Muscovia. They count for about 5 % of Muscovites. It suddenly seemed to them that the sky-high interests of the Soviet Union (read Muscovia), demanded exactly extraordinary measures such as famine, to pay with the confiscated grain (actually with lives of people) for the huge supply of equipment and technology from the United States. The years of the famine coincided with the years of industrialization of the Soviet Union, and without industrialization it could not successfully confront Germany in a future war and save the world from fascism. It's like if plague offered the world to rescue it from the snivels...
Agriculture requires hard daily work of a peasant. It is clear that a man exhausted by hunger is not able to work as productively as a fed one. Besides, because of the high mortality rate the number of workers, especially men was decreasing. Agricultural production in such circumstances had to decrease. Thus, at the beginning of the confiscation of land in 1930, according to Soviet statistics, the export of grain from the Soviet Union amounted to 4.8 million tons. In 1931, the number of collective farms increased, and they began to take away most of the grown grain, and exports amounted to 5.2 million tons. In 1932, when nearly all the peasants were driven to the collective farms and almost all grain was taken away - at the beginning of the famine - exports amounted to only 1.8 million tons. Only some farmers resisted to the confiscation of lands, such as my paternal grandfather. In 1933, despite the fact that grain production further decreased due to the raging already in full force and effect famine, exports amounted to 1.8 million tons. That year even the seed corn was taken away from peasants, and the famine began to mow down whole villages. The following 1934 had no one to work effectively in the field, and exports amounted to only 0.8 million tons. So the destruction of Ukrainian, German and Crimean Tatar peasants did not contribute to the industrialization and directly hampered its effective implementation.
Conclusion: the Holodomor had definitely a different goal than industrialization.
Now on the volumes of grain exports in the best from this point of view year, 1930. They were almost twice lower than the Russian Empire's exports on the eve of the First World War. The Bolshevik government's destructive policy in arable farming reminded of itself. The exports were also too small to meet the needs of industrialization. During the years of the first two five-year plans, the Soviet Union had built nearly 9000 large and giant enterprises: Uralmash, DniproGES, Kryvorizhstal, Kharkiv Tractor-Building (in fact, tank-building) Plant and so on. Total grain exports would not be enough even for the construction of one such giant. I will mention here that independent Ukraine having got rid of collective farms, for the first time in its history exports about 30 million tons of grain annually. This is the best answer to the question whether the confiscation of land and many millions of human victims in the name of increasing its productivity were justified.
The source of financing of the industrialization in the Soviet Union - in fact, its preparation for the future war - is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of the 20th century. Had the source of funding been from the Soviet Union, the scale of orders should have provoked unprecedented economic growth of all industrialized countries and in the first place - of the United States. Instead, as the pace of industrialization was growing, the Western world was falling into the abyss of economic decline. So, the funding source was somewhere in the Western world. In my opinion, the West's huge funds were withdrawn from their natural circulation and directed to the industrialization of the Soviet Union. This could only happen due to a sharp decrease in domestic credit financing. Then there was a crisis of non-payments and the majority of industrial enterprises stopped. I hold the view that thousands of businesses that were built in the Soviet Union were simply dismantled in the crisis-ridden America, the workers were thrown into the street, and the equipment was completely transported to the Soviet Union together with technical staff, who mounted it on a new location. Why did the international financial syndicate decide to invest into a world revolution? Who will answer this question? The history's great mystery is what the Soviet Union could put on the opposite to industrialization cup of the politico-financial pair of scales? Such unprecedented gifts, as industrialization, are not made for nothing. Interestingly, at the same time, another country was being rapidly modernized. You guessed it - it was Germany. Here, the financing schemes are more or less known, most likely due to the fact that Germany lost the Second World War. Perhaps not coincidentally the United States' President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was directed among other things, against the financial capital. The era of monopoly of capital supposedly came to an end. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1935 prohibited banks to be engaged in investment activities. I must point out here that the industrialization of the Soviet Union was the result of exactly this activity of leading investment banks. Some large banks were divided and deprived of their monopoly position in the capital market.
The last line of defense of Muscovia's citizens in front of responsibility for the genocide of the Ukrainian-Rusyn people is a professed anti-Semitism. “Blame Epstein! And Kritsman and others...,” writes, for example, the newspaper of Muscovites “A Retired Person and Society”, Issue 11 (90), in 2007. For stupid pensioners in the newspaper there is a note: “The names of Jews are highlighted in blue”. Or a slogan that often occurs on the Internet: “The World Zionist Organization ZAGOLODOMORILA (has holodomored) Ukraine”. I met this point of view back in the nineties of the last century. Hard to say, on how many citizens of Muscovia and Ukraine-Rus this “line of defense” counts. Now it seems to be a back-up. But with the collapse of the first three, it can turn into the main one.
I am not a supporter of left ideas. Rather - on the contrary. No other global idea has left such a bloody footprint in the history of mankind, as the left one did. But for the sake of objectivity I will turn to the brightest spokesmen for this idea in the Soviet Union and, at the same time, Ukrainian Jew Lev Trotskyi. He was one of the initiators of Ukrainization of the state apparatus of the Soviet Ukraine, of the revival of Ukrainian culture, discipleship. He realized that for Jewish schools to exist in the Ukrainian speaking environment, first of all there had to be Ukrainian schools there. In order to develop freely Jewish culture in Ukraine, the Ukrainian culture should develop. Throughout his life he kept an eye on the Ukrainian question. At this, his views kept getting more radicalized. Shortly before his death he was the first of the famous political leaders to declare: “The question of the fate of Ukraine appeared in all growth. We need a clear and emphatic slogan that meets the new situation. In my opinion, this slogan can be at this time only “Unitary, free and independent workers' and peasants' Soviet Ukraine!”. “But independence of the unitary Ukraine means separation of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR!,” will shout the chorus of the Kremlin's “friends”. “What's so terrible about this?” - we'll ask in our turn. Ukraine's separation would not mean weakening of ties with Great Russia's working masses, but only relaxation of the totalitarian regime, suffocating the Great Russia, like all other peoples of the Union”. (“Bulletin of the Opposition (Bolsheviks-Leninists”), № 77-78, 1939).
Lev Trotskyi was not just one of the ideologists and organizers of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was the symbol of the Jews, who came into the revolution in large numbers and made a great part of the new Bolshevik economic, military and political bureaucracy. The struggle between Stalin and Trotskyi was a struggle between the two components of the new Bolshevik elite - Muscovian and Jewish. In accordance with the new vocabulary, Stalin fought not with Jews, but with Trotskyi and Trotskyism. Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union in 1929 meant the Jews' (called Trotskyists) losing all key positions in the party, government and army. Since then, they have not been responsible for everything happened in the country. It also meant closing first of Jewish schools, and after them, of Ukrainian ones, wherever they first appeared. It also meant the end of the Ukrainian national revival and the beginning of the shot Ukrainian revival. A line under Trotskyism was drawn in 1937-1938, when most of the Jews who came to power earlier, were physically destroyed. At this many non-Jews were killed too, so it was not perceived as persecution of Jews. However, after these events, there were actually no Jews in power, except the few who proved their loyalty to the uncompromising struggle against Trotskyism.
To be continued…
