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НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ • Листопад 2023 11 Rhea Clyman: The First Western Journalist to Expose the Holodomor Sophia Isajiw WHO A talented, young, fearless, self-taught Canadian reporter with a dis - ability. Rhea Clyman (1904–1981) was a ground-breaking female journalist who became a foreign news correspondent at a time when it was almost unheard of for women to do so. Born Rachel Gertrude Clyman in Poland in 1904 (which was then part of the Russian Empire), she moved to Toronto two years later with her poor immigrant Jewish family. At the age of six, she lost part of her leg in a streetcar accident. WHAT Rhea Clyman became the first western journalist to witness and re - port on the starvation in Ukraine, making a journey by car in September 1932 through the agricultural heartland of the Soviet Union during the Holodomor. She previously spent a month travelling in the Soviet Far North, where she encountered Ukrainians who had fled from famine conditions in their homeland or who had been exiled and were being ruthlessly exploited as slave labor. Her accounts of her two trips were published in 44 feature articles in the Toronto Telegram newspaper from September 1932 to June 1933. Of these, 21 were front-page stories. WHEN She arrived in Moscow in late December 1928. Many newspapers sent journalists to the USSR for short stints, but Rhea became fluent in Rus - sian and established herself as a freelance correspondent with a distinctly independent point of view. WHERE In late summer 1932, Rhea travelled by car south from Moscow to Kharkiv – then the capital of Ukraine – through the North Caucasus region, past Stalin’s birthplace in Gori, Georgia, to Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. Along the way she passed through the southeastern Ukrainian cities, towns, and vil - lages of Izoum (currently Izium), Slavnsk (Sloviansk), Artemowsk (Bakhmut), Gorlova (Horlivka), and Stalino (Donetsk) before going on to Rostov, the Don Cossack region, and Krasnodar in the Kuban, and then on to Tiflis ( see Rhea Clyman’s travel map ). WHY Rhea Clyman left Canada for the USSR initially sympathetic toward the equitable society that the Bolsheviks had promised to create at the outset of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan (1928). But her enthusiasm for the “Great So - viet Experiment” waned as she began to comprehend the scale of injustices and state-sponsored terror the Communist dictatorship was inflicting on its citizens. She began expressing a more critical attitude toward the Sovi - et government in two articles she published in Maclean’s magazine in the spring of 1932. Photo: Winnipeg Free Press Rhea Clyman This basic 5W fact sheet was created for classroom use by Sophia Isajiw, from a source article shared by per - mission of Jars Balan, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta, whom the author gratefully thanks, and other research documents. It is part of the series “Holodomor Heroes: Truth Tellers, the first journalists to write about the Holodomor ”(https://education.holodomor.ca/holodomor-heroes/) and is reprinted here by permission of the author and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC), for which it was created for educational purposes. Reprints by permission of the author. Our Life is grateful to Sophia Isajiw and the HREC for their collaboration in allowing us to reprint this information. Girl Writer Driven From Russia
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