Today at 18:01
“If (the leader) says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.”
This quote by George Orwell was the unwavering dogma of the USSR with its Leader controlling the future and the past.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s 5-year economic plan involved rapid industrialization and large-scale agricultural collectivization.
To fulfill the Soviet leadership’s unrealistic demands in four years and boost labor productivity further, propagandist Iakov Guminer developed a poster. It reads “2 and 2 — plus the enthusiasm of the workers, equals 5.”
By 1933, Stalin proclaimed the plan a success. In reality, Ukrainians paid a huge price for the Soviet Union’s ambitions — namely during the Great Famine, or “Holodomor.”
“It was impossible to conceal this huge amount of deaths and corpses. That is why the Soviet Union claimed that the famine emerged as a result of crop failure, or the so-called ‘objective conditions.’ That the party made every effort to prevent it,” said historian Oleksandr Khomenko.
The Soviet propaganda machine was in full motion — even foreign reporters were involved, knowingly or not. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote in
his dispatch from Moscow “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” for example.
However, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who traveled through rural Ukraine at the time, reported a different story.
He wrote: “Everywhere I heard crying: ‘We have no bread! We are dying!'”
It was not the only instance of the Soviet regime twisting the truth.
In 1930, the State Political Directorate staged a show trial to discredit Ukrainian intellectuals.
“They invented the trial of the Union for Ukraine’s Liberation. Though this union did not exist. There was no such organization. There was no charter or program. It was a fabricated case, which led to executions. Some of the ‘defendants’ – like linguist Vsevolod Gantsov — spent 28 years in camps,” said the Director of the Ukrainian Language Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Science, Pavlo Hrytsenko.
This is how the Stalinist regime tried to intimidate the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and put an end to Ukraine’s re-surging national idea.
“They aimed to get rid of national self-identification and indigenousness, so that people did not feel connected to them and all nations in the Soviet Union became ‘equal,’ so to speak. It was very difficult to make it happen, as there were so many nations that formed the Soviet Union. Each of them had its own traditions, and beliefs,” said a senior researcher of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, Andriy Humeniuk.
Throughout its history, the Soviet Union suppressed and eliminated religious beliefs. In the wake of the famine of 1921 to 1923, the Communist regime started to confiscate church possessions — ostensibly to help starving peasants.
They launched a large-scale anti-religious propaganda campaign, and at the same time worshiped Lenin and Stalin like gods.
