Haverst of Sorrow - Martin Ellerby

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In the years between 1932 and 1933 the Soviet Communist Party put in place a system of dispossession and deportation of millions of Ukrainian peasant farmers and families, abolishing private property and concentrating those remaining into farms under Party control. There then followed an organised famine on these people, with impossible production targets imposed upon them, all other food sources being removed and all outside assistance denied from reaching them. The result was some 3.9 million deaths, more than the total number of lives lost in the First World War. The chief culprit of these purges was the then Soviet leader Josef Stalin. You may well ask why? This was a plot to substitute the Ukraine’s farms with state administered collectives and punish any independence-minded nationals posing a challenge to totalitarian authority. A salient feature of this, and other such atrocities, is that history has a habit of repeating itself.

Standard Wind Ensemble  plus Harp(or keyboard) and Piano.

6:30