Yushchenko praises court decision on Soviet-era famine

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has praised the "landmark" court decision which finds Bolshevik leaders guilty of genocide against Ukrainians during the 1932-1933 Holodomor famine.

The court found dictator Joseph Stalin and several other senior Soviet officials guilty on Wednesday, but dropped criminal proceedings "over the suspects' deaths".

"This decision puts the historical record straight and provides an opportunity to build Ukraine on principles of justice and democracy," the president was quoted as saying on his website.

The court examined the case filed by the security service in two days and upheld "investigators' conclusions that the leaders of the totalitarian Bolshevik regime organized ... the genocide against the Ukrainian ethnic group intentionally creating conditions aimed at its partial physical elimination," the service said in a statement.

Ukraine, which says that more than 3.9 million people died during the famine, has been seeking international recognition of the famine as an act of genocide.

A number of Ukrainian nationalist parties say that Russia, as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, should bear responsibility for the famine.

Russia says the famine cannot be considered an act that targeted Ukrainians, as millions of people from different ethnic groups also lost their lives in vast territories across the Soviet Union.

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly refused to include a discussion of the famine on its official session agenda.

 

KIEV, January 14 (RIA Novosti)

http://en.rian.ru/exsoviet/20100114/157539891.html