Holodomor denial

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Holodomor denial (

Soviet Ukraine,[1] did not occur[2][3][4]
or diminishing its scale and significance.

Officially, the government of the Soviet Union denied the occurrence of the famine and it also suppressed information about the famine from the very beginning of it until the 1980s. The Soviet government's denial of the occurrence of the famine was also circulated by some Western journalists and intellectuals.[2][5][6] It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including The New York Times' Walter Duranty.

According to Jurij Dobczansky, Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and "generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades" and is often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence and Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.[7]: 160 

Soviet Union

Cover-up of the famine

Soviet head-of-state Mikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling of "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."[4][8] In an interview with Gareth Jones in March 1933, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov stated, "Well, there is no famine", and went on to say: "You must take a longer view. The present hunger is temporary. In writing books you must have a longer view. It would be difficult to describe it as hunger."[citation needed]

On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the United States, published a letter on 3 January 1934, in response to a pamphlet about the famine.[9] In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" "wholly grotesque." He claimed that the Ukrainian population had been increasing at an annual rate of 2 percent during the preceding five years and asserted that the death rate in Ukraine "was the lowest of that of any of the constituent republics composing the Soviet Union", concluding that it "was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate of tsarist days."[10]

Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in the Gulag labor camps. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death.[4] William Henry Chamberlin was a Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor for 10 years; in 1934 he was reassigned to the Far East. After he left the Soviet Union he wrote his account of the situation in Ukraine and North Caucasus (Poltava, Bila Tserkva, and Kropotkin). Chamberlin later published a couple of books: Russia's Iron Age and The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation.[11][12] He wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 1934 that "the evidence of a large-scale famine was so overwhelming, was so unanimously confirmed by the peasants that the most 'hard-boiled' local officials could say nothing in denial."[13]

Falsification and suppression of evidence

The true number of dead was concealed. At the Kyiv Medical Inspectorate, for example, the actual number of corpses, 9,472, was recorded as only 3,997.[14] The GPU was directly involved in the destruction of actual birth and death records, as well as the fabrication of false information to cover up information regarding the causes and scale of death in Ukraine.[15]

Soviet Central Statistical Administration. The census data itself was locked away for half a century in the Russian State Archive of the Economy.[16]

Soviet campaign in the 1980s

The Soviet Union denied the existence of the famine until its 50th anniversary, in 1983, when the worldwide Ukrainian community coordinated famine remembrance.[citation needed] The Ukrainian diaspora exerted significant pressure on the media and various governments, including the United States and Canada, to raise the issue of the famine with the government of the Soviet Union.

In February 1983,

Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, in a secret analysis "Some thoughts regarding the advertising of the Ukrainian SSR Pavilion held at the International Exposition "Man and the world" held in Canada" put forward a prognosis for a campaign being prepared to bring international attention to the Ukrainian Holodomor which was spearheaded by the Ukrainian nationalist community. Yakovlev proposed a list of concrete proposals to "neutralise the enemy ideological actions of the Ukrainian bourgeoise nationalists".[17]

By April 1983, the bureau of the Soviet Novosti Press Agency had prepared and sent out a special press release denying the occurrence of the 1933 famine in Ukraine. This press release was sent to every major newspaper, radio and television station as well as University in Canada. It was also sent out to all members of the Canadian parliament.[18]

A Holodomor monument in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

On 5 July 1983, the Soviet Embassy issued an official note of protest regarding the planned opening of a monument in memory of the victims of the Holodomor in Edmonton[19] attempting to smear the opening of the monument.

In October 1983, the World Congress of Ukrainians led by V-Yu Danyliv attempted to launch an international tribunal to judge the facts regarding the Holodomor. At the 4th World Congress of Ukrainians held in December 1983, a resolution was passed to form such an international tribunal.[19]

Former Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk recalled that he was responsible for countering the Ukrainian Diaspora's public education campaign of the 1980s, marking 50 years of the Soviet terror famine in 1983: "In the early 1980s many publications began appearing in the Western press on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most horrific tragedies in the history of our people. A counter-propaganda machine was put into motion, and I was one of its wheels." The first book on the famine was published in Ukraine only in 1989, after a major shake-up that occurred in the Communist Party of Ukraine when Volodymyr Ivashko replaced Volodymyr Shcherbytsky and the Political Bureau decided that such book could be published. However, even in this book, "the most terrifying photographs were not approved for print, and their number was reduced from 1,500 to around 350."[20]

Ultimately, as President of Ukraine, Kravchuk exposed the official cover-up attempts and came out in support of recognizing the famine, named the "Holodomor", as genocide.[citation needed]

Denial outside the Soviet Union

Walter Duranty and The New York Times

According to

Five Year Plan.[24] In 1932, he wrote in the pages of The New York Times that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".[25] He said that while there was a bad harvest, and consequent food shortages, it did not rise to the level of a famine and that "there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."[23][26] Some have disputed the validity of his distinction between death from starvation and death from disease that is exacerbated by malnutrition.[23]

In his reports, Duranty downplayed the impact of food shortages in Ukraine. As Duranty wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March 1933, "These conditions are bad, but there is no famine" and "But—to put it brutally—you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."[27][26]

Duranty also wrote denunciations of those who wrote about the famine, accusing them of being reactionaries and

cardinals". The next day, the Times added Duranty's own denial.[citation needed
]

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who went to live in the Soviet Union in 1932 as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian and became a fierce anti-communist, said of Duranty that he "always enjoyed his company; there was something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous, about his unscrupulousness which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing."[28] Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."[29]

An international campaign for the retraction of Duranty's Pulitzer Prize was launched in 2003 by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its supporters. The newspaper, however, declined to relinquish it, arguing that Duranty received the prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931. In 1990, the Times published an editorial calling his work "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."[30]

By prominent visitors to the Soviet Union

Prominent writers from Ireland and Britain who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, are also on record as denying the existence of the famine in Ukraine.[3][31]

Another famine denier was Sir John Maynard.[32] In 1934 the British Foreign Office in the House of Lords stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government regarding the famine in Ukraine, based on the testimony of Maynard, who had visited Ukraine in the summer of 1933 and rejected "tales of famine-genocide propagated by the Ukrainian Nationalists".[citation needed]

During a visit to Ukraine carried out between 26 August – 9 September 1933, former French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot, said that Soviet Ukraine was "like a garden in full bloom".[33] Herriot declared to the press that there was no famine in Ukraine, that he did not see any trace of it, and that this showed adversaries of the Soviet Union were spreading the rumour. "When one believes that Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders", he declared. The 13 September 1933 issue of Pravda was able to write that Herriot "categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeoisie press in connection with a famine in the USSR."[34] It was alleged by anti-communist activist Harry Lang, who claimed to have visited Ukraine at the same time, that Herriot was shown a carefully stage-managed version of Ukraine that hid effects of famine and poverty.[35][34]

Douglas Tottle

In the 1980s, the union organizer and journalist Douglas Tottle with the help of Soviet authorities[36] wrote a book arguing that the famine in Ukraine was not genocide,[37] under the title "Fraud, Famine and Ukrainian Fascism", to be published in Soviet Ukraine. However, before final publication, reviewers of the book in Kyiv insisted that the name of the book be changed, claiming "Ukrainian fascism never existed".[38][39] Tottle refused this name change, and as a result the book publication was delayed by several years.[citation needed]

In 1987, Tottle published the book in Toronto, Canada as Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard

Village Voice, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right".[42]

In 1988, the nonprofit

International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine to establish whether the famine existed and its cause. Tottle's book was examined during the Brussels sitting of the commission,[43] held between 23 and 27 May 1988, with testimony from various expert witnesses. The commission president Professor Jacob Sundberg claimed that Tottle received assistance from the Soviet government, based on information in the book that he felt would not be easily publicly available.[44]

Modern politics and law

Background

The issue of the Holodomor has been a point of contention between Russia and Ukraine, as well as within Ukrainian politics. According to opinion polls, Russia has experienced an increase in pro-Stalin sentiments since the year 2000,[45] with over half viewing Stalin favourably in 2015.[46] Since independence, Ukrainian governments have passed a number of laws dealing with the Holodomor and the Soviet past.

By 2009, Holodomor denial was a matter of Russian government policy and the subject of its disinformation operations.[7]: 162  The Russian government does not recognize the famine as an act of genocide against Ukrainians, viewing it rather as a "tragedy" that affected the Soviet Union as a whole, while current Russian President Vladimir Putin denies the genocide ever happened.[47] A 2008 letter from Russian president Dmitry Medvedev to Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko asserted that "the tragic events of the 1930s are being used in Ukraine in order to achieve instantaneous and conformist political goals."[48]

Denial literature

English-language publications are catalogued according to Library of Congress Subject Headings distinguishing Holodomor denial ("works that discuss the diminution of the scale and significance of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 or the assertion that it did not occur."),[49] and Holodomor denial literature ("Works that make such assertions").[50]

In 2006, the All-Ukrainian Public Association Intelligentsia of Ukraine for Socialism published a pamphlet titled Mif o golodomore (The Myth of the Holodomor) by G. S. Tkachenko. The pamphlet claimed that Ukrainian nationalists and the US government were responsible for creating the "myth". Russian publicist

Yuri Mukhin has published a book titled Klikushi Golodomora (Hysterical Women of the Holodomor), dismissing Holodomor as "Russophobia" and "a trump card of the Ukrainian Nazis." Sigizmund Mironin's "Golodomor" na Rusi (The "Holodomor" in Rus') argued that the cause of the famine was not Stalin's policies, but rather the chaos engendered by the New Economic Policy.[7]

Sputnik News, a Russian state media outlet, ran an article denying the severity and causes of the famine in Ukraine.[51]

Laws against denial

Holodomor denial is a form of historical negationism – falsification or distortion of the historical record about crimes against humanity – and as such it is subject to legal punishment in some countries.[52] Ukraine's 2006 Law On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine [uk] makes it illegal to publicly deny the Holodomor, recognizing it as an insult to the memory of victims and humiliation of the dignity of the Ukrainian people.[53]

In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide,[54] at the same time as it amended a law to criminalize the approval, denial, and "gross trivialization" of war crimes and instances of genocide in a new paragraph 5 of the German Criminal Code, the Strafgesetzbuch, section 130.[55][56]

See also

References

  1. ^ , pages 235-236.
  2. ^
    collectivization
    ".
  3. ^ .
  4. ^ "Famine denial". The Ukrainian Weekly. 14 July 2002. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  5. ISBN 978-0-02-865850-6. Retrieved 5 November 2015 – via Google Books
    . The Soviet Union dismissed all references to the famine as anti-Soviet propaganda. Denial of the famine declined after the Communist Party lost power and the Soviet empire disintegrated.
  6. ^ a b c Dobczansky, Jurij (2009). "Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress". Holodomor Studies. 1 (2 [Summer-Autumn 2009]): 155–164.
  7. ^ Conquest, Robert (30 July 1999). "How Liberals Funked It". Hoover Digest (3). Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  8. ^ Carynnyk, Marco (25 September 1983). "The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III". The Ukrainian Weekly. LI (39). Archived from the original on 29 August 2005.
  9. ^ New York Times, as quoted in James E. Mace, "Collaboration in the suppression of the Ukrainian famine" Archived 25 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine (paper delivered at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century", held in New York City on 13 November 1987), The Ukrainian Weekly, 10 January 1988, No. 2, Vol. LVI
  10. .
  11. ^ "What Is the Ukraine Famine Disaster of 1932–1933?". semp.us. 2 January 2005. Archived from the original on 9 November 2007.
  12. ^ Chamberlin, William Henry (20 March 1983) [1934]. "Famine proves potent weapon in Soviet policy" (PDF). The Ukrainian Weekly. 51 (12): 6. Archived (PDF) from the original on 1 March 2012. Retrieved 22 July 2012: Reprint of original article dated 29 May 1934{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
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  14. Harvard Ukrainian Studies
    25 (3-4): 167–186.
  15. ^ Catherine Merridale, "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule" Historical Journal 39, 1996
  16. .
  17. ^ Сергійчук В. Як нас морили Голодом 1932-1933 - Київський Національний Університет, Київ, 2006 с.323 (In Ukrainian) Serhiychuk, V. How we were tired by Famine 1932-33 - Kyiv University, Kyiv, 2006 page 323
  18. ^ .
  19. , pp. 44-46,
  20. . He (Duranty) had become creatures of the Soviet censors
  21. .
  22. ^ .
  23. ^ "Correspondence between Markian Pelech and the Board of the Pulitzer Prizes regarding Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize" Archived 3 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine (30 December 2002 – 28 April 2003)
  24. New York Times
    . Vol. 82, no. 27606 (Late City ed.). pp. 1, 9.
  25. ^
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  26. ^ "New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty". The New York Times Company. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
  27. ^ Muggeridge, Malcolm: The Green Stick: Chronicles of Wasted Time Volume I Chapter 5 (1972).
  28. ISBN 0-19-505180-7, page 320. [1]
  29. ^ Meyer, Karl E. (24 June 1990). "The Editorial Notebook; Trenchcoats, Then and Now". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 September 2016.
  30. ^ "Stalin-Wells talk / the verbatim record and a discussion by G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, J.M. Keynes, E. Toller and others". Monash University. 2007. Archived from the original on 2 September 2007.
  31. OCLC 1111577641.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  32. , pages 159-160
  33. ^ a b Thevenin, Etienne (29 June 2005). France, Germany and Austria: Facing the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (PDF). James Mace Memorial Panel, IAUS Congress, Donetsk, Ukraine. p. 8. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
  34. Wikidata Q108386870
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  35. .
  36. ^ a b Roman Serbyn (1989). "The Last Stand of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Deniers". infoukes.com. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  37. ^ Сергійчук В. Як нас морили Голодом 1932-1933 - Київський Національний Університет, Київ, 2006 с.324 (In Ukrainian) Serhiychuk, V. How we were tired by Famine 1932-33 - Kyiv University, Kyiv, 2006 page 324
  38. on 11 April 2005. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
  39. ^ The Ukrainian Canadian, April 1988, p. 24)
  40. ^ Serbyn, Roman. "Competing Memories of Communist and Nazi Crimes in Ukraine" (PDF). Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  41. ^ Sundberg, Jacob W.F. (10 May 1990). "International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine. The Final Report (1990)". ioir.se. Archived from the original on 4 December 2004. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
  42. ^ A.J.Hobbins, Daniel Boyer, Seeking Historical Truth: the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932-33 Famine in the Ukraine, Dalhousie Law Journal, 2001, Vol 24, page 166
  43. ^ Monaghan, Jennifer (31 March 2015). "Was Stalin's Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think It Was". Moscow Times. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
  44. ^ "More Than Half of Russians See Stalin in a Positive Light". Moscow Times. 20 January 2015. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
  45. ^ "Russia still denies the Holodomor was 'genocide'". 19 June 2022.
  46. ^ Kucera, Joshua (23 February 2009). "Is Ukraine Next?". Slate. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  47. ^ Congress, The Library of. "Holodomor denial - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress)". id.loc.gov. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
  48. ^ Congress, The Library of. "Holodomor denial literature - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress)". id.loc.gov. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
  49. ^ Young, Cathy (31 October 2015). "Russia Denies Stalin's Killer Famine". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 30 September 2016.
  50. .
  51. ^ Про Голодомор 1932-1933 років в Україні [On the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine]. Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 13 December 2022.
  52. ^ Sitnikova, Iryna (30 November 2022). Німеччина визнала Голодомор геноцидом українського народу [Germany recognized the Holodomor with the genocide of the Ukrainian people]. Hromadske. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  53. ^ "Germany seeks to declare Ukraine's Holodomor a genocide". DW. 25 November 2022. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
  54. ^ "Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide". DW. 25 November 2022. Retrieved 13 December 2022.

Further reading

Video resources

  • Harvest of Despair (1983), produced by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre.

External links