Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 15. Ukrainization, Famine, Terror: 1920s-1930s

(foreshadowing music) - Okay. Greetings to all. One of the things you learn when you become a historian is that most of the great quotes that people cite were never said by the person. So the Internet has only made this worse because it filters out what sounds good, and what sounds good is very difficult from what a specific person actually said at a specific time. So if you track down the 100 most cited things, especially by people like Einstein in general, they never actually said those things. Someone said he said those things, it sounded good. So in the example I'm thinking of, I don't think Stalin ever said that a million lives is a statistic and one life is a tragedy, or that a million deaths is a statistic and one death is a tragedy.

He's quoted in that sense all the time, but I've never actually seen the source where Stalin says that, the main source, and this is, by the way, this is how historians work, is that we're always working our way up. We return to the primary sources and then build our way back to the stories. So if I, like everything I tell you here is a product of, almost everything is a product of someone else's research at some point in some archive, discovering things, formulating new arguments, working them into a book, right? So what I am trying to present to you here are general arguments, they are the result of the work of a large number of historians, usually Ukrainian historians.

And then we try to make it all make sense in a large class. But the reason I'm thinking about this is the difficulty of the topic today. So our topic today is the death from starvation, malnutrition or

famine

-related diseases of around 4 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic between mid-1932 and late 1933. One of the worst man-made

famine

s in

modern

history, at least, and a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. But it's inherently difficult to think about. It's hard to even think about the number 4 million. But also, unless you've had very specific types of life experiences, the idea of ​​a person starving to death is also very difficult to think about, right?

And then the combination of those things, 1 million people, one person dying of hunger, but 4 million times, 4 million different people. So it's a very difficult reality to absorb, but I'm not asking you to absorb it now, as I talk to you, you know, just for a couple of minutes, I'm just trying to give you the sense that there are certain types of issues that, As humanists, we do not overlook. As scientists, we go to the primary sources, verify those citations, and work our way up to the arguments. But as humanists, we have to be attentive to human life, to the meaning of human life, and to the way human life ends.

And this is very much a lecture on how human life ends. I will start it with an authentic quote from the time, from January 1933. A little later I will tell you where it came from. The quote is: "There are villages in which a significant part of the adult population has gone to the cities in search of money and bread, leaving the children alone to fend for themselves. In many villages, the vast majority of the kholkoz" , that is, collective farms. workers "and their families are going hungry. And among them there are many who are sick and bloated because of hunger.

And in a number of cases they are not given help since there are no reserves of any kind. In connection with this, many people die every day." So, this is not from a letter from a Ukrainian to a relative abroad. It is not from a Ukrainian talking to another Ukrainian in Ukraine. Actually, it is from a report, it's a handwritten document, note attached to a report to the head of the Ukrainian secret police. The Ukrainian authorities knew exactly what was happening, they were there carrying it out, they were there talking about it, reporting on it. This is another.

It is a handwritten appendix to the report, because it is not essential. The lives of the people involved, the deaths are not really important to the five-year plan of collectivization, it is simply noted. The first point I want you to understand, and I'm sure many of you understand, is that famines are political, a physical lack of food. It is the result of a political decision about distribution, which is based on priorities, where the. priority of preserving human life may be very low or, as in this case, may not exist at all. It may not be a priority.

So if famines are political, then that opens your eyes to the possibility of how famines can be created in the present or in the future, right? So if, for example, one country invades another and blocks its ports and says that food will not pass from those ports to the rest of the world, that's not a lack of food, right? It's not that Ukraine is not growing food right now, it's that a political decision has been made to try to block the export of that food. And therefore, in the Sahel, in Ethiopia or in Lebanon, there could be food shortages as a result of political decisions, okay.

So from the point of view of the Soviets, we consider the decision to starve people in Soviet Ukraine political, right? From their point of view, what they think is that everything should give way to politics. So this is, I mean, I'm going to get into the details and the context and all the arguments about it, but there are some fundamental things that we need to understand about the way that Soviet leaders understood the world in the early

1930s

that They are crucial here. One is the Leninist idea that everything yields to politics. That an elite party, a small group of people with the right ideas, can push history in the right direction.

That there is a natural direction in which history moves, towards socialism, towards the domination of the proletariat, and the right people can push it forward. And as they move forward, everything else has to give way because we know that this is the right path for the story to follow. Within this worldview, it is very important to see that individuals who actually exist in the world have no value. So, you know, you might have been exposed to some kind of human rights or civil rights framework, or you might think that's natural, right? All of these things are historically contingent, and we learn them or unlearn them, take them on or not, in this way of seeing the world, any individual, any particular individual, it doesn't really matter.

Because what matters is where we are all going to meet. Not even necessarily us, but some future generation. At some point, humanity will become itself again. Alienation will come to an end, private property will come to an end, that's all, right? That's all. The goal is everything. And the means are generally justified. And this has another implication for truth, which is really important when we talk about this famine. So this famine is one of the most compelling truths of the 20th century in European history, but nevertheless extremely controversial, at least for decades, and one of the reasons for that is that the people who carried it out had an idea specific. about the truth.

And his specific idea about truth is that just as these individuals don't matter, neither do the facts as such. They matter selectively to the extent that they can help a narrative, right? That's what facts are for. But the facts as such are not so interesting. And the narrative has a form, and it is the form of the story that I have described before, which is that there is a revolution, the revolution is going to bring, eventually it will bring human harmony and solidarity. That general shape is what matters. And if millions of people happen to die along the way, those individual facts are less important than the overall shape.

In fact, if we have to, if those individual facts amount to something we cannot ignore, as was the case in 1932 and 1933, the scale of the famine was so great that it really could not be ignored, then there is an argument to be made that This was necessary, right? Thus, at the Congress of the Victors, the Party Congress of 1934, the argument that was put forward with great success and fanfare was that the famine in Ukraine was part of breaking the back of the international bourgeoisie through its Polish agents and their Ukrainian agents. nationalists, that all the pain and suffering actually shows that the revolution has been successful.

And that is a form of argument, which I am sure is not entirely unfamiliar to you. The idea that precisely because there was pain, it was worth it, but on a large scale. And then, in relation to this, again, before going into the details, one must remember that if you are a Bolshevik in the

1920s

and

1930s

, you are assuming that entire groups of people who exist on Earth will soon cease to exist. anyway. So, you know, you shouldn't worry about individuals, but about the future proletariat. But when worrying about the future proletariat, we must understand that the peasants, for example, are going to cease to exist.

That's how the story works. And if they cease to exist a few years before or a few years after, it's not your fault, right? It doesn't really mean anything if they cease to exist at one time or another. So, this is, I mean, it's hard to convey these things now because, you know, there are some capitalists who have this kind of confidence about the way the world works, but there's no one on the left anymore who has this certain kind. of confidence about how the world works, so it's hard to rethink this, but if you're sure that the world works this way, and it has to work this way, and it should work this way, then the conclusion of that, you know, yes, the peasantry is condemned, I know it is condemned.

Science says it is doomed. That's how history has to work, so you'll see the death of millions of peasants differently than you would otherwise, because that group was doomed anyway, as you see it. It's not you, you're not exercising agency, the story was going to move in this direction. You know, you're just playing your part. So those are general things to keep in mind. The second thing I want to convey is the background of the

1920s

. So one way to think about the famine is what I just gave you: Let's look at the world a little bit like a Bolshevik leader would see it.

Taking a step down, a little less abstract, another way to look at the famine is as a contrast between the 1920s and 1930s. So the Soviets, after the 1917 revolution, tried to do something in the 1920s, which didn't go as they expected. And that leads to harsh repressive policies in the 1930s. Or, in the 1920s, the Soviets were kind of pausing a revolution, which they always knew they had to carry out, in the late 1920s. , they knew they had to carry it out. And that revolution, the economic part of the revolution, is what brought collectivization, the end of private agriculture and hunger.

So I want you to think now about this kind of contrast between the 1920s and 1930s. The trick about the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, as I mentioned before, is that it was never intended to be a Russian revolution. Only in retrospect did it become a Russian revolution after it ceased to be a world revolution. And that creates the tension, which is within this revolution, and indeed within this State, from the beginning. The idea was: we're going to blow up the powder keg in Russia, the rest of the world will join in, and then the rest of the world will help us take care of the rest of the revolution.

Because let's face it, the political part is the easiest, right? Transforming the political system, overthrowing a regime, is easier in almost any circumstance than transforming an entire economy. It's about fewer people, you can take advantage of the war, etc., etc. So we have a world revolution, which does not help, which does not happen. And then there is the need for socialism in one country. So how is socialism built in a country to take on the motto? How, now that there is no world revolution, how do you carry out your own project on the scale of the Soviet Union?

So there are a few parts to this. Part of this is that you barricade yourself from the rest of the world. So the Soviet Union, starting with the Treaty of Riga, is a state with borders and, as we will see in the course of this conference, these borders will become stronger and stronger, and stronger and stronger, one way of doing this. It is not letting the outside in, not letting the bourgeois world corrupt you, not letting in all the spies and saboteurs. The second thing you do is take advantage of the scale of your own country.

So the Soviet Union was not, you know, the Azores Islands, it was not, you know, the Soviet Union covered, you know, one-sixth of the earth, the Soviet Union was the largest country on the planet. And so when you look at the Soviet Union, you can say, well, some of these places will be like the colonial periphery, and others, they will be more like the Metropolitan Center. I must warn you that that is not the way they normally talked about themselves, because that is the capitalist way of talking about things. But Stalin sometimes forgot himself and said thingsprivate agriculture, especially in the transition year, when it is done for the first time.

So the famine begins at the end of 31 when the peasants refused to deliver the grain. Local party activists in Ukraine report completely and truthfully from the ranks that there is famine, that there is a shortage, they ask that the objectives of the requisitions be, so the requisition is when the grain is taken away, right? They ask that requisitions objectives be reduced. At this point the crucial thing is interpretation, right? And here we come to a great irony about these systems, which is that they end up depending on personal explanations. So the irony of this is that Marxism-Leninism is supposedly a science, right?

It is a science of society, a science of history. But then, if something doesn't go the way you want, doesn't go the way you predicted, who's to blame? You can't blame yourself, you can't really blame the science, you can't blame the method because that would call into question Marxism and therefore your legitimacy. So you have to imagine in some way that certain individuals have almost superhuman powers. And this happens again and again, those categories that I mentioned half-ironically before, like the spy and the saboteur, certain individuals turn out to have, you know, to explain these things, extraordinary, extraordinary power.

You could catch this in things that look like conspiracy theories, right? Or the notion, you know, that people cross borders, right? Or that one or two spies within the party can create an entire system. There are examples of this everywhere, but in the later show trials, when similar people confessed to having done a whole range of impossible things for which you have to be a supervillain, to be both a Nazi and a Zionist. at the same time. You know, these, and then, or you know, when Khrushchev says that the whole problem with the Stalin period was Stalin himself.

Like that's not even true, right? Not even Stalin is responsible for all the problems of the Stalinist period, right? And so the way the system deals with things going wrong is actually, ironically, by giving superpowers to evil individuals and giving them nicknames, etc. So I insist on that point because that's how Stalin handled the 1932 famine in 1932. You say that like it's someone's fault, right? So it's the fault of the Ukrainian party to begin with, they have to work harder. They are not going to go out and look for food, but that is the fault of the individuals in the group.

Stalin says that they must be kept, I quote from July 1932: "Personally responsible." So this, you know, is disconnected from reality. They are doing the best they can, but it is an impossible situation. Then it goes from there to why these people in Ukraine are not doing what they should be doing. And the reason they are not doing what they should be doing is Poland. It's that they are corrupted by the Ukrainian nationalists, and the Ukrainian nationalists, in turn, are fleeing, you know, they are being expelled from the Polish state, and in reality, Pilsudski is behind, you know, with his hands in the puppets controlling everything.

Which, you know, in "Sketches of a Secret War," I point out that this would have been news to Pilsudski, because at the time, the Poles weren't really capable of doing anything they wanted to do in Soviet Ukraine. , and were shocked and confused by the spectacle of famine they witnessed in 1932 and 1933. In August 1932, Stalin writes an important letter to one of the other two important members of the politburo, Molotov and Kaganovich. , Stalin referred to them as "Our ruling group." He wrote to Kaganovich, his trusted collaborator, and the good thing about this period, by the way, is that people still wrote letters.

So, okay, I won't, I don't have time to be nostalgic about the 30s and typewriters, but Stalin wrote to Kaganovich: "The main thing now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are terrible, it's terrible in the game". It is said that in two Ukrainian regions, I believe, kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, around 50 raikoms may have spoken out against the grain requisition plans, considering them unrealistic. In other raikoms, that is, local regional party commissions. "It seems that the situation is not better, how is this? It is not a party, but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. It is terrible in the Soviet bodies, Chubar is not a leader, it is terrible in the GPU," he said the secret police "And Redens is not leading, is not prepared to lead the fight against the counter-revolution in a republic as large and unique as Ukraine.

If we do not make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine. Please note that Pilsudki will not is daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior think, keep in mind that the Ukrainian communist party, 500,000 members, haha, even includes some, yes, not a few, not a few rotten elements. , conscious and unconscious Petlurites, as well as direct agents of Pilsudski, as soon as things get worse, these elements will soon open a front inside and outside the party, against the party." This, then, is Stalin's personalist interpretation. It's the Ukrainian party members, so it's not the laws of history, and of course it's not him, it's not the collectivization policy, it's that these guys are deliberately sabotaging the harvest to separate Ukraine from the Soviet Union.

Now, this interpretation is very important because it's not, I mean, it's not everyday reality that drives policy, right? It is, and this is true in any system, that it is the interpretation of the elite that is going to drive policies. And in a system like this where there's not a lot of feedback to the politburo, the feedback to the politburo would have been the local party secretaries, right? And that feedback has been cut off because Stalin says we can't trust them. They are precisely the people who did not take responsibility. They are Pilsudski's agents, right? We can't trust them.

So now there is no way, there is no informational feedback at the top of the system. This interpretation is what will drive policy. And the policy, I divided it into seven, is on the other side of your notes. There are seven specific policies that, in my view, clearly entitle us to characterize this as a political famine. Seven concrete things that happen in just a few weeks in late 1932 and early 1933 that mean that instead of a few hundred thousand people dying, as was possible at this time, as in the late fall of 1932 , 4 million people die. Once again, these are political decisions about what to do with the available food.

During this time, the Soviets had food reserves, during this time, the Soviets exported food, exported food from the ports of Soviet Ukraine at that time. People could have been fed with the food that was there, it's not that there was a lack of food, it's a decision about how to treat particular people. So this set of policies is a kind of extraordinary condensation of things that happen from the end of November 1932 to the end of January 1933. First of all there is the return of the grain advances, which meant that, if they had been fulfilled grain requisition goals, That year, you were given back some grain to live on and plant during the following year.

In November '32, this was reversed, which meant that suddenly everyone was vulnerable. But you also have to think about what this means in practice, which is difficult to convey. The famine is carried out by local party members, local state officials, police, returning enthusiastic university students, people who believed in the revolution, returning to their villages, sometimes to their own villages, it is carried out by people. People physically take the food. So each of these measures, or most of them, involves people rushing to the village, to a collective farm with permission to take things, and in practice this often means simply taking everything.

Good? Just taking everything. The second measure is the punishment of flesh. It's November 20, if you didn't meet the quota, then you had to pay your tax in meat. So if any of you come from some sort of rural background, does he understand what that means? For example, if you live on a farm, the goat or the cow is the last resort, so you will slaughter that goat or kill that cow if necessary, but in the meantime, you are going to drink the milk, but if necessary, you have that meat that could help you get through the winter.

Everyone, all these collective farms, the villages that couldn't meet the quotas had to give up their goats or their cows. Just to quote a peasant woman from "Bloodlands", who says: "Whoever had a cow, did not die of hunger." Good? It's kind of basic, but then they lost their cows at the end of 1932. Third specific policy, the blacklists of November 28, according to the blacklist, if you hadn't met your goal, you had to deliver 15 times more grain. , which of course is impossible, and it was a complete authorization of the entire party and state forces to come and literally take what was there.

The blacklists also meant that you were isolated from the rest of the Soviet economy,

making

it illegal to trade in any way with any part of the rest of the Soviet economy. Number four is perhaps the most diffuse, but it is incredibly important. It is the national interpretation of the famine. And this has to do with this character of Vsevolod Balyts'kyi, who was the head of the state police in Ukraine at the time. And at that time, he then he was different, but this time, quite close to Stalin and I had personal conversations with Stalin about all this.

He returns to Ukraine in December with the message that Ukrainization has been carried out incorrectly, right? Ukrainization has been carried out incorrectly, Ukrainization has promoted the wrong people, Ukrainization has been dangerous, and there are many, so there are many details related to this. Like the party commissions, they now come from outside Ukraine to run the party. Stalin sends around a hundred people he trusts from abroad to lead the party. But the essence of this is that, now, if you are for Ukrainization, you are in danger, but also if you are not enthusiastic about the grain requisition, you will be called a Ukrainian nationalist, and then I will be sent to a concentration camp.

Or maybe worse, right? So overall a right-wing nationalist deviation is being defined. And the method that all party members would have understood was that if you do not continue to requisition the grain, even under these conditions, you will be personally punished and probably sent to a concentration camp. That was a standard punishment. And you know this. and then with this, with the whole plot that the Ukrainian communists are also informed that many of them are, in fact, secretly Polish agents, there is the Ukrainian military organization, which is run by the Polish military organization, the military organization Ukrainian does not exist.

The Polish military organization has not existed since 1921, but Balyts'kyi, who was a very creative person, explained the existence of all these groups. More or less, between December and January of '32, '33, right now, about 1 million people are dead. But this interpretation, which says that you and the party will be punished. That's one of the most important things, which turns the number from 1 million to about 4 million. The fifth measure, dated December 20, 1932, is the affirmation of the existing cereal quota. Then they could have reduced the quota, nothing in the scheme of things, that would have meant nothing except fewer Ukrainians would have died.

Maybe they would have exported a little less grain. They could have reduced the quota, but they didn't, they imposed it on the protesting Ukrainian party leaders at the end of December 1932. Number six, in January 1933, the peasants were prohibited from going to the cities. This is an unusual situation. In general, in a famine, or in any situation, let's say there is a food shortage caused by bad weather. You want to be in the field, right? It is always better in those situations, almost always, to be a farmer than to be in the city. But this famine was different because the state had taken full control over the countryside and had been very successful in extracting food from the countryside, so you actually had this unusual situation where peasants were fleeing to the cities to beg for food.

Or peasants, and this happened again and again. The peasants sent their children to the cities to beg, to ask for food. Thinking that was the only chance their children had to survive. So, starting in mid-January, farmers were prohibited from doing this. And then at the end of January, on January 22, the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union was separated from its neighbors, Belarus and Russia, and it became illegal to leave the Ukrainian Republic. Again, a natural response to hunger is to go somewhere else. This blockade, the inner council of the Soviet Union, made it impossible. By the way, it also clarifies to what extent this is a specifically Ukrainian event.

The fact that the Ukrainians knew thatif they went north, to Belarus or Russia, they would be more likely to be fed. And it has the same kind of irony as begging in cities, by the way, because Ukraine produces food for Belarus, produces food for Russia. But Ukrainians in this situation went to Ukraine, to Belarus and to Russia. So, in the summer of 1933, and again, we don't have time, you know, and maybe there are words, it would be very difficult to describe what this means. But by the summer of 1933, about 3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had already died.

In addition to this, the Ukrainian party itself, the Ukrainian party itself, has been purged. About 120,000 people are forced to leave the Ukrainian party. and special attention is paid to the people who carried out the Ukrainization policies of the 1920s. Mykola Khvylovy commits suicide on May 13, 1933 after learning of the arrest, it was this very important writer, who led the Literary Discussion. After learning of the arrest of one of his friends, another writer, he committed suicide. Otherwise, they would surely have killed him, he was not wrong in believing that. Ukrainian writers were taken to a specific concentration camp in Karelia, where several of them were later executed.

There is a term for this, which is the"Executed Renaissance" captures the phenomenon very well because there was a renaissance. The 1920s were truly a renaissance. It was the most interesting decade of Ukrainian culture, at least until 1914, at least until 2014, until the present, which is also very interesting. But the 1920s were extraordinarily productive in basically all fields of culture. And then almost everyone who was involved, not almost everyone, most of the people involved were executed. Well, a few weeks later, Mykola Skrypnyk, who had been commissioner of education, is accused of national deviation and also commits suicide.

So those two suicides symbolize, you know, the end of the 1920s, the end of this idea that Ukraine could somehow move toward a communist future. The postscript to this, as I wanted to suggest from the beginning, is the Great Terror. So the Great Terror is a separate chapter in "Bloodlands" and you will read about it. But there are a couple of strange ways in which the Terror, the mass shootings and deportations of 1937, 1938, are actually a kind of epilogue to the famine. Or they're another example of this principle that, especially under conditions of extreme tyranny, you'll find yourself doubling down on terrible policies that you made rather than altering them, rather than, you know, taking some kind of responsibility.

I mean, you could say, I mean, from an ethical standpoint, one of the most interesting things about this type of ideology is that it allows you to never have to take responsibility, right? The word responsibility never appears or, in other words, when people in the sixties and seventies begin to say, in the communist world, interesting things in opposition to communism, the moral vocabulary they use centers on the word responsibility. . Which I mean, if you just turn it around, you can see one of the attractions of being inside this, right? That you don't have to take responsibility.

Well. Then the Terror. In two ways, the Terror is related to famine. The first is that the five-year plan included, in February 1930, the idea of ​​"dekulakization." So a "Kulak" is a more prosperous peasant, or someone whose neighbor says he is more prosperous, and dekulakization means a kind of artificial class conflict in the countryside where the middle peasants and the poorest peasants are supposed to denounce the wealthiest peasants. , and then the better-off peasants are sent to this emerging system of concentration camps on the Soviet periphery, which we know is the gulag. So, as a result of the dekulakization that began in 1930, many peasants, the disproportionate Ukrainian peasants, were sent thousands of kilometers away, to Siberia, to camps, for periods of five years.

Stalin understands that they were vulnerable to being recruited by Japanese military intelligence. Not as crazy as it sounds, Japanese military intelligence was actually quite active and skillful, and they were thinking about the national question within the Soviet Union. So it wasn't pulled out of nowhere, right? I mean, the thing about all these ideas behind Horror is that they never come out of nowhere, they just take some element of reality and exaggerate it to grotesque proportions. But the idea was that these peasants would serve five-year terms, they would return to the Western Soviet Union and they could cause trouble, right? 1931, then 1935, 36, 37.

This is one of the origins of the peasant action, which is the main action in the Great Terror. So when you think about the Great Terror, if you think about it at all, you might be thinking about the intellectuals and the show trials of party members. There were about 60,000. The Great Terror was about 700,000 people. The group most affected by the Great Terror was actually the peasants, and distrust of peasants dates back to collectivization. Or, you know, if you prefer, the idea that "we did something drastic and terrible to them, maybe it wouldn't be so surprising if at some point they wanted to do something to us." That is the fundamental logic.

The second set of important actions in Terror are national actions. Again, all the details are in “Bloodlands.” And the most important of the national actions, the bloodiest, in which more than 100,000 people are executed, which is a large number. It is the Polish action. And the roots of Polish action go back to the famine. Because the explanation given for the famine was: there is the Polish state, there is Polish espionage, the Poles have recruited the Ukrainian communists, that is why they are carrying out all this sabotage. This is not true in anything resembling social reality, but it remains true within the Soviet apparatus of repression.

That story, if I can torture you, that's not how I want to say it, if people are tortured on a large scale, according to a scheme where the idea is to make them repeat a certain story, like, "When were you recruited by Poland?" Etc. then these documents become part of the internal bureaucratic reality of the apparatus of repression. And then the Pole, or the Polish plot, although it did not actually exist, only becomes bigger in the internal bureaucratic reality of the apparatus of repression. To the point that this guy Balyts'kyi, who I mentioned before, is the guy who invented it in the first place, right?

The head of creative intelligence who invented it was then surprised by this logic. "If the Polish penetration into Ukraine and the Soviet Union was so incredibly important, Comrade Balyts'kyi, why didn't you find out about it sooner? Maybe it's because you yourself are a Polish spy, right?" So the person who invented this idea was executed as a Polish spy. But that is just a single example of a much larger phenomenon, which is that in national actions, approximately 100,000 people will be killed for being spies, like spies for Poland. And this, although a horrific event in itself, in a sense also goes back to this original set of collectivization.

But it is the distrust of Poland, the history of Poland and the regime's inability to admit mistakes, take responsibility and the way a big lie then metastasizes and remains within a system, all that lead us to these events in the Great Terror. Okay thank you very much. (quiet music)