Political Quotes

“Madam President, this year we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, the genocidal Ukrainian Famine of 1932- 1933. Eighty years ago, an engineered famine in Soviet-dominated Ukraine and bordering ethnically-Ukrainian territory resulted in the horrific deaths of millions of innocent men, women, and children. I visited the Holodomor monument in central Kyiv, a poignant reminder of the suffering perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin's deliberate and inhumane policy to suppress the Ukrainian people and destroy their human, cultural, and political rights. Requisition brigades, acting on Stalin's orders to fulfill impossibly high grain quotas, took away the last scraps of food from starving families and children. Eyewitness accounts describing the despair of the starving are almost unfathomable. Millions of rural Ukrainians slowly starved--an excruciatingly painful form of death--amid some of the world's most fertile farmland, while stockpiles of expropriated grain rotted by the ton, often nearby. Meanwhile, Ukraine's borders were sealed to prevent the starving from leaving to less-affected areas. International offers of help were rejected, with Stalin's henchmen denying a famine was taking place. At the same time, Soviet grain was being exported to the West.…”