1933 Famine Assistance

The Soviet Reaction to Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer

Foreign interference in the affairs of a Communist government would not go tolerated for long and so when famine struck again in 1932, Stalin put his foot down when non-Soviet organizations began investigating famine-stricken areas.

When the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Innitzer, began to plead for aid for the devastated regions Moscow reacted by saying that Russia had neither cannibalism nor Cardinals.7 The Soviet Union followed this statement by placing harsh restriction on the travel of foreigners within the regions that had been hit the hardest.8

Stalin apparently didn't appreciate prying into the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, and as an ambitious leader of a fledgling nation he didn't want other nations to grasp these moments of barbarity as a standard for the Soviet way of life. Somehow he never realized his savage methods of governing would come to overshadow these small incidents of broken taboo.

The Soviet Union would manage to omit the existence of the Famine in 1932 to 1933 until after the perestroika in the 1990's when Soviet data and records became available for the first time.