Ukrainian Genocide Dbq

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

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