Famine remembered

last updated 8 January 2015

Kiev

The U.N. has recognized for the first time that Ukraine’s devastating famine of the 1930s was engineered by Stalin. A U.N. statement commemorates the 10 million who died because of the “cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime in the former Soviet Union.” In an effort to force peasants to give up their land and join Soviet collective farms, Stalin confiscated Ukraine’s entire grain harvest. Bodies piled up as an estimated 25,000 Ukrainians died of starvation every day, and cannibalism became horrifyingly common. The famine has become a source of controversy in the U.S., because the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for reporting went to New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who filed glowing stories about Ukraine at the time. The Pulitzer board said this week it would not revoke Duranty’s prize.