AS the electoral turmoil faded into the background, Ukraine
marked two important anniversaries last week. The first was
eight years since the Orange Revolution of 2004. The second was
eight decades since the Holodomor. Holodomor literally means
death by hunger. In 1932 and 1933, a vast famine in Soviet
Ukraine killed three to seven million people, according to
estimates. While people starved, the grain was shut away in
barns for export. Many historians agree that the famine was man-
made; some say it was genocide. Yet the Holodomor is not widely
known about outside Ukraine. In the 1930s, it was hushed up by
many western correspondents in return for access to the Kremlin.
Among them was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who
received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the USSR.
(There have been calls to revoke his Pulitzer posthumously, so
far unsuccessful). One of the exceptions was Welsh journalist
Gareth Jones whose reporting of the Ukrainian famine had him
banned from the USSR. He was later killed