CIS Keeps Ukraine Famine Off Agenda

(RFE/RL) April 21, 2006 -- Foreign ministers of former Soviet republics meeting in Moscow today declined to discuss a Ukrainian request to recognize the famine of the 1930s as genocide.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk had asked his counterparts from the Commonwealth of Independent States to put the question on the agenda of their meeting today.

Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency reports that Georgia and Moldova supported Tarasyuk's request.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said there was no consensus on the issue. He said that "the consequences of Soviet-era collectivization must be examined by historians."

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin provoked what the Ukrainians call the Great Famine in 1932-33, which killed up to 10 million, as part of his campaign to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms.

(ITAR-TASS, AP)