Evil Incarnate and Personified

One's Own Facts

In the nineteen thirties famine raged in the Ukraine.  It was entirely caused by Stalin.  He insisted that Ukrainian officials deliver up a certain volume of food.  When they failed to do so, he sent enforcers into the prime grain growing areas.  Their job was to find out where the farmers (kulaks) were hiding food.  Any grain or edible material found was removed by force; offenders were punished, even executed on the spot.  Those left, starved.

Famine swept through the Ukraine.  People began to eat other human beings.  Eventually, even Stalin had to concede that his brutality was counter productive.  He then embarked on a ruthless cover up of his crimes against his own people.  He demanded that public records of births and deaths be altered to create a picture of population increase in Ukraine.  In fact millions upon millions had died.

In 1937 the Soviet government ran a census to measure the population.  But the results had to be kept secret because of the "deeper truth" known to Stalin and his cohorts--millions had died due to Stalin's ruthless incompetence.  Somehow the census had to cover this up.

Anne Applebaum writes:

In 1937 the Soviet census bureau set out to count and measure the Soviet population, a vast task made urgent by the need to coordinate central planning.  But even as the complex process began--it involved asking millions of people to fill out forms--the Soviet leadership began to be anxious about the possible result.  "Not one figure from the census can be published", employees of the local statistical offices were told in December 1936. . . .

Even so, the final result of the 1937 census was shocking. . . . In 1934 census officials estimated that the population of the USSR stood at 168 million.  In 1937 they estimated 170 million or even 172 million.  The real numbers, when they finally arrived, were quite different.  [Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (London: Penguin/Random House, 2017), p. 306.] 

Eight million people were "missing" from the expected count.  And this was a conservative figure.  Applebaum tells us that the census counters had erred on the side of caution.

But, no problems.  Stalin simply abolished the census results, blaming the incompetence of those involved. 

The publication of the 1937 census was halted immediately, and the results never appeared.  The statisticians themselves paid the price.  The head of the census bureau, Ivan Kraval . . . was arrested and executed by firing squad in September.  His closest colleagues were also put to death.  . . . (H)undreds of lower-level census officials were sacked from their jobs and sometimes arrested and executed as well.  [Ibid., p. 307.]

It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that at the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, with great fanfare, Stalin announced that the Soviet population had reached 170 million.  It had achieved the Target! 

What a glorious leader.  He was able to produce people right out of a hat.  The truth was not acknowledged until well after Stalin died, starting in the late nineties up until the end of the first decade of this century. 

Lest We Forget.