Winnipeg Free Press - November 22, 2008 BASED on the numbers alone, body for body, victim for victim, murder for murder, the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 may be the single greatest crime against humanity that has ever been committed. No one will ever know for certain how many people were killed by the deliberate starvation of Ukraine ordered by Stalin in the 1930s, but estimates run as high as 20 million, which was the figure used by the scholar Robert Conquest, who did more than anyone to expose to the world the horrors of the Holodomor, as Ukrainians refer to the Famine. In his book about the Famine, Koba the Dread, British author Martin Amis quotes from Mr. Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow to emphasize the magnitude of the slaughter: "We may perhaps put (the Famine) in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about 20 human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book." Harvest of Sorrow is 411 pages long. It has been said that the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million a statistic. And one can argue which 20th century legacy is the greater enormity, the Holocaust or the Holodomor, but while the individual horrors, the tragedies, that each accumulated can perhaps be counted, they can never be measured in any meaningful way. They can, however, be remembered and those who refuse to remember them, or even acknowledge them, become accomplices in the original crime. The Holocaust that Nazi Germany waged against the Jews is well-documented and well-remembered. It is ingrained in the conscience and the consciousness of the world, or at least of the Western world, to the point that Holocaust denial is a crime in many countries. Deniers are regarded as accomplices. The world is a better and safer place for that memory. It is a worse and more dangerous place, however, because of the continuing refusal of many people, many governments even, to acknowledge that the Ukrainian Famine occurred and that it was a deliberate act of genocide committed by Stalin and the Soviet government against the Ukrainian people. Only in recent years has the Holodomor come to gain some acceptance in mainstream Western thought. Previous to that, Western intellectuals, leftists, writers, journalists and general public opinion subscribed to the Soviet propaganda that it was a natural famine of far smaller proportions. So confused have these lies left the world that estimates of the victims of this genocide range from an absurdly low 2.5 million to Mr. Conquest's credible 20 million and far beyond, with the most accepted figure being a compromise of a still staggering 10 million victims. There is, and never was, any rational reason for accepting the Stalin line on the Ukrainian Famine, yet the West eagerly bought into it, and many people still do. The time has past, however, when honest denial of the Holodomor is possible, just as honest denial of the Holocaust is no longer possible. The Famine, too, should be engrained in our conscience and our consciousness lest we remain its accomplices.