William H. Chamberlin

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 497.

THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT WAS TO BLAME

Of the historic responsibility of the Soviet government for the Genocide Famine of 1932 -1933 there can be no reasonable doubt. In contrast to its policy in 1921-1922, it stifled any appeal for foreign aid by denying the very fact of the Genocide Famine and by refusing to foreign journalists the right to travel in the Genocide Famine regions until it was all over. The Genocide Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obliged to work under conditions which the state may dictate to them and deliver up whatever that state may demand of them.

"The collective farmers this year have passed through a good school. For some this school was quite ruthless." In this cryptic understatement President Kalinin summed up the situation in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, from the Soviet stand paint. The unnumbered new graves in the richest Soviet agricultural regions mark the passing of those who did not survive the ordeal, who were victims of this "ruthless school."

The Soviet government could easily have averted the Genocide Famine from its own resources if it had desired to do so. avertof foodstuffs in 1932 or the diversion of a small amount of foreign currency to the purchase of grain and provisions would have achieved this end. The Soviet attitude was pretty adequately summed up by Mr. Mezhuev, President of the Poltava Soviet, who said to me: "To have imparted grain would have been injurious to our prestige. To have let the peasants keep their grain would have encouraged them to go on producing little."

ACTIVE VOCABULARY

1. apparent - явный, очевидный, кажущийся;

2. outcry - крик, выкрики;

3. onerous - обременительный, затруднительный;

4. groan - стонать, тяжело вздыхать;

5. malnutrition - плохое питание, недоедание;

6. nourish - питать, лелеять (надежду);

7. ruthless - безжалостный;

8. allege - утверждать, ссылаться;

9. slander - клевета, сплетня;

10. perpetrate - совершать.

11.stifle - душить

12.by denying the very fact -

13.deliberately )- преднамеренно, умышленно, нарочно

14.are divorced from personal ownership of the land

15.not survive the ordeal - ordeal

16. avert - предотвращать; отводить (удар, опасность)

17.injurious - вредный; вредоносный, ошибочный, несправедливый