Page 64 - Communism in Ambush
P. 64

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
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                   ...Word of the famine reached the West… An international relief commit-
                   tee was set up under the archbishop of Vienna. It could do nothing, how-
                   ever, for the Soviet government denied that any famine was taking place.
                   46
                   These savage scenes affected the Russian author Michail
              Sholokhov, who wrote a letter to Stalin demanding an end to this cru-
              elty. But Stalin had done all these things deliberately, of course:
                   In April 1933 the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who was passing through the
                   city of Kuban, wrote two letters to Stalin detailing the manner in which the
                   local authorities had tortured all the workers on the collective farm to force
                   them to hand over all their remaining supplies. He demanded that the first
                   secretary send some sort of food aid...
                   In his reply on 6 May, Stalin made no attempt to feign compassion...In
                   1933, while these millions were dying of hunger, the Soviet government
                   continued to export grain, shipping 18 million hundredweight of grain
                   abroad "in the interests of industrialization."  47
                   Famine caused the death of six million—men, women, children, old
              people and infants—not because Soviet farms produced insufficient




               While Russians were dying of hunger, the Communist Party's barns were
               crammed full. Below, a church used as a storehouse for grain during the imple-
               mentation of collectivization in the 1930s.
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