The denial of human rights in Ukraine and Cambodia has had huge impacts on regional and international communities. Ukraine was very independent, and Stalin wanted to remove the threat that the Ukrainians were becoming. In Cambodia, Pol Pot attempted to create a utopian Communist agrarian society. When Stalin came into power after Lenin’s death in 1924, the government was struggling to control and unwieldy empire. He soon turned his attention toward Ukraine, the most troublesome of the non-Russian Soviet republics. The Ukrainians were fiercely independent, given to ignoring orders from Moscow and keeping their agrarian way of life. “At a time when Stalin wanted to build a strong industrial base, they clung to their rural peasant traditions. At a time when he wanted to abolish private ownership of land, they refused to surrender their farms. In short, the Ukrainians had become a threat to the revolution….”(Document 1: Linda Jacobs Altman, Genocide: The Systematic Killing of a People, Enslow Publishers) To …show more content…
By ravaging the countryside, the famine not only destroyed millions of innocent human beings-estimates range from 4 to 10 million-but also retarded by generations the natural evolution of Ukrainian nationhood. The traditional Ukrainian values of hope, individualism, and hard work disappeared. Fear, apathy, and alcoholism became the hallmarks of the collective farm. Cities of Ukraine remained bastions of Russification. In general, the traumatized survivors found themselves voiceless cogs in the huge bureaucratic machine that the Soviet union had become….”(Document 3: Dr. Oleh W. Gerus, “The Great Ukrainian Famine-Genocide,” Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba, August 4, 2001 (adapted)) Stalin’s policies had stripped Ukrainians of their hard-working, individualistic values, turning the country into a voiceless machine used to make more grain to be
The author, Jan Librach argues that the demonstration of force that was used to conquer the nation of Ukraine, was the beginning stages of Russia’s conquest to suppress the surrounding nations of Eastern Europe, creating the surge of Russia’s determination for preservation of its empire and destroying nationalism throughout the countries they possessed authoritarian rule. Librach proves the argument by providing evidence of demand for independence by the Ukrainian Central Rada (council), for the nation of Ukraine after the news of the Russian Revolution spread throughout the world. He provides a quote from the document, “Communist Take Over & Occupation of Ukraine” from the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, which provides documentation
Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, is no ordinary dictator; he was highly driven by the ideology of total revolution which had four separate, but related components. First, and most important of all, is the push for total independence and self-reliance, second, the dictatorship of the proletariat, third, total and immediate economic revolution, and lastly, a complete transformation of Khmer social values (Jackson 135). To implement this ideology of total revolution, the Khmer Rouge had to resort to permanent purges in order to eliminate all potential competitors and to “create a society with no past and no alternatives” (Jackson 137). Pol Pot divided Cambodian society into five classes: the working, the peasants the bourgeoisie, the capitalist, and the feudal class. However, in an effort to create an egalitarian society, the only acceptable classes were the “workers, peasants, and the revolutionary army” (Jackson 136).
Elliott writes about the Holodomor genocide in Ukraine and compares it to Canada’s genocide of Indigenous people. She argues, “First, remove the means for the people to independently look after and support themselves and their community. Next, force them to become dependent upon the very state that wants to destroy them. Withhold basic necessities. Wait.
Stalin denied the famine that was in Ukraine and continued to export grain that would’ve kept all of those people alive for 2 years. Ukrainians became so desperate they started eating leaves off of trees, killed animals like dogs and cats, other people went completely insane and resorted to cannibalism. People lying on the sidewalks that were still alive sometimes were thought to be dead and were carried away and buried alive. Many countries and international relief organizations tried offering their help but Ukraine turned them away. It’s an estimate that 2.5-7.5 million Ukrainians died altogether.
Then, as the background of these two disasters are different, their purpose are also different. In the light of ” the fact that Ukrainian officials informed Moscow of the situation in Ukraine and theStalin’s letter to Kaganovich of 11 August 1932 that outlined his suspicions of the Ukrainian peasantry and his fear of 'losing Ukraine’”(Marples 506), we can infer that Stalin was afraid that Scotchman were not faithful to the central government and consequently he carried out some actions, Forced Famine, to both control and to punish the
Imagine all your human right’s strip away from you within a second. Throughout history governments have denied human right to a certain group of people by adopting new polices and/or violence. A government using violence against it people to get them to agree or even do what they want is still seen today. Throughout history countries like Cambodia and Rwanda are places where the government look away their people’s human rights.
Before the 1917 revolution, the Russian empire had been ruled by dictatorial czars for over three hundred years. The Russian society was extremely unequal; the czar and aristocracy lived in wealth and splendor just as any European elite, but most of the people lived in terrible poverty (Harbor 7). Many of those living in poverty worked in the country and were paid as laborers; however, they had to work long hours for low wages. For those living in the city, employment was more regular; nevertheless, circumstances and wages were still very harsh. The conditions of poverty and oppression in the country led many political groups to demonstrate far-reaching reforms (Harbor 8).
Over the last few months i have been reading and studying eyewitness accounts from the seven different Genocides we studied in class, those Genocides are the Armenian, the Holocaust, Holodomor, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and the last one we will be studying Darfur. Along with the Genocides we also learned about the eight stages of genocide which are classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial. These eyewitness accounts and survivor accounts are telling the stories and how the genocides really happened with no sugar coats abou them. The shocking truths about the genocides will tell you about how similar the seven genocides really are and just the little things that made them
Post WWl, Russia was still not industrialized, suffering economically and politically and in no doubt in need of a leader after Lenin’s death. “His successor, Joseph Stalin, a ruthless dictator, seized power and turned Russia into a totalitarian state where the government controls all aspects of private and public life.” Stalin showed these traits by using methods of enforcement, state control of individuals and state control of society. The journey of Stalin begins now.
Lenin is suspicious of us in Russia as he sent 120,000 Russians to help with our relief work. I’m supervising 16,000 Russians in 900 kitchens we set up in Samara. I’m happy to say we ‘re achieving beyond our goal as Russian adults are now being fed and we’ve been supplied of a lot of grains that arrived on 6th February in Novorossiysk. A colleague of mine David Kinne was dismissed as Lenin’s CHEKA agents exploited his alcohol addiction in February 1922. I see Lenin’s motive and that is to try and hinder our work.
In analysis of Vera Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Figner expressed a few political goals that led her to assume violence as the only answer to the economic, political, and social injustices forced upon the peasants, by the government authority and Russian traditions. All of Figner’s energy was spent in effort to achieve these goals at any cost. These goals were to use influential propaganda, to educate the peasants1, and to kill the Tsar. All of which, were used to motivate a peasant uprising, to remove2 the suppressive Tsarist regime and to give birth to democratically3 free institutions4. To justify her violent means, she used her personal belief that there were no other peaceful ways, that they had not tried, to provide liberty and justice for the peasants.5
Srebrenica Genocide was one of the most hurtful and bloody highlights of Bosnian War. Srebrenica was a safe area which UN was responsible for protection against any kind of enemy attack. However, United Nations has failed to do what they were supposed to do in July, 1995. Ratko Mladić attacked Srebrenica with Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) and killed more than 8.000 people in Srebrenica Genocide. It was an attempt to achieve their ethnic cleansing campaign which has began in 1992.
The first historian he mentions is James E. Mace. According to a quote from Mace’s book, the famine was genocidal. Mace’s reason for this is that the famine was used to destroy the Ukrainians as a people, since Stalin wanted to subdue Ukrainian nationalism and to take away any political threat they might represent to his power. Mace also says that the area of the famine was only in Ukraine and nowhere else -- and that just cannot be a coincidence (Bilinsky 1).
At least 5 million Russians died of starvation and disease during the famine of 1921 and the Bolsheviks had no choice but to accept foreign assistance. Three million Russians fled their native land between 1919 and 1929. In 1921, “Lenin’s answer to the crisis was the New Economic Policy which represented a retreat from socialist economics. The peasants were given greater freedom, and private trade and private ownership of small businesses were again legalized” Donaldson et al, 51).
Once in power, the revolutionaries were forced to modify their ideals. Under Lenin’s control, many things changed in Russian society for the revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, and even the Mensheviks. Lenin’s original ideals could not hold for evident reasons, and this meant that the revolutionaries had no choice but to change them in one way or another. Prominent contributing factors were the First World War and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, War Communism, and the NEP, or New Economic Policy. When Vladimir Lenin took power over Russia, he went into it with a tunnel-visioned mindset, and promises to win over the country.