Whole villages became a mass of corpses. Large parts of Ukraine were blockaded, no food was allowed in, no people were allowed out. While guarded warehouses were filled with grain. Ukrainian peasants were beaten, arrested and even shot for trying to take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields. Their extermination was a matter of state policy.
Food is still a favourite weapon with many authoritative regimes in the world today.
It has been said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We join today with members of the Ukrainian community and other Canadians in remembering the atrocities of this crime against humanity. This famine is considered to be the largest famine of the 20th century and one in which some seven million Ukrainians, perished. In 1932, under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union dramatically increased its grain procurement. Determined to bring Ukraine under Soviet control, Stalin starved the very Ukrainian farmers whose grain he then shipped to Russia and sold to western countries.