The guest speaker at our meeting was Professor Cheryl MADDENwho teaches history at the Community College of Rhode Island.
For the past several years she has worked extensively on researching the 1932-1933 famine-genocide in Soviet Ukraine, a tragedy that is little known or even remembered.
She became interested in the history of the starvation of an estimated ten million Ukrainians under the rule of Stalin when she visited the Ukraine in 1999,
under a Metcalf grant from the Rhode Island Foundation to do research for a novel she was writing. Her research led to the publication of an annotated bibliography of English
language sources assesing scholarly articles on the subject. The title of her work is The Ukrainian Famine (holomodor) of 1932-1933 and Aspects of Stalinism: An Annotated Bibliography-in-Progress in the English Language.
It was prepared for the Schevchenko Scientific Society, Inc.

She said that there are still some who question wheter the Holodomor was an act of genocide but she leaves little doubt that it was indeed a way that Soviet government made physical survival impossible for millions of their own people.
Stocks of grain, supplies of sunflower seeds and oil, flocks of poultry, herds of dairy and meat producing livestock and draft animals were confiscated. Also taken away were single animals owned by families dependent on them for food and milk;
grain producing tools, such as horse harness, plows, grindstones, millstones and hosehold mortar and pestles. Anyone caught sealing food could be executed.

For a time Soviet propaganda concealed the actions of the Stalin government but as with the Holocaust during World War II, a tragedy affecting millions of people eventually became known to the world at large, but tragically
not before millions of people lost their lives.
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