Four Men Who Risked Their Lives ...

[michaelmaltby]

... to photograph the Holodomor
'A Gift To Posterity': Four Men Who Risked The Wrath Of Stalin To Photograph The Holodomor

 

[special ed]

Thanks for posting.

 

[Gnomey]

Horrifying but interesting. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Dimlee]

My father-in-law (RIP) was born in Siberia in a family of Ukrainian farmers who were robbed by Bolsheviks and deported from their homeland with few bags of food and no winter clothing. Ironically, the exile probably saved their lives as they left before the Holodomor. His parents managed to forge their documents to change the "ethnicity" (a compulsory field in ID, applications, etc.) to "Russian", in all papers for themselves and for their children. Two letters in the surname were changed to sound more Russian. He learned about his Ukrainian roots after Stalin's death. But he opened that secret to his children only when "Perestroika" started.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

For all we humans have done good, we absolutely must remember too the depravities humans have visited upon one another.

 

[NVSMITH]

... to photograph the Holodomor
'A Gift To Posterity': Four Men Who Risked The Wrath Of Stalin To Photograph The Holodomor

-There is an interesting side note to western awareness of the "Great Famine" as it was called. Walter Duranty was Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) and knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine. As a result of his reporting Soviet propaganda rather than the facts he, and the New York Times, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
-When reports from other reporters reached the west "Duranty dismissed more diligent writers' reports that people were starving. 'Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,' he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the 'mess' of collectivization. 'But – to put it brutally – you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.'" (Quotes from New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty | The New York Times Company)