Denial of the Holodomor

See also: Holodomor genocide question

Denial of the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Заперечення Голодомору, Russian: Отрицание Голодомора) is a far-left conspiracy theory asserting that the 1932–1933 Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing the scale and significance of the famine. This denial and suppression of information about the famine was made in official Soviet propaganda from the very beginning until the 1980s. It was supported by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the man-made famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. According to Robert Conquest, it was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting the Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion, to be followed by similar campaigns over the Moscow Trials and denial of the Gulag labor camp system.

Only in the post Soviet era, independent Ukraine has officially condemned the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The causes, nature, and extent of the Holodomor remain topics of controversy and active scholarship, including the debate over whether or not it constitutes genocide.

Soviet Union

Cover-up of the famine

The Soviet leadership undertook extensive efforts to prevent the spread of any information about the famine by keeping state communications top secret and taking other measures to prevent word of the famine from spreading. When Ukrainian peasants traveled north to Russia seeking bread, Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov sent a secret telegram to the party and provincial police chiefs with instructions to turn them back, alleging Polish agents were attempting to create a famine scare. OGPU chairman Genrikh Yagoda subsequently reported that over 200,000 peasants had been turned back.

Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, learned about the famine from Ukrainian students at the technical school she was attending. They described acts of cannibalism and bands of orphaned children. Allilueva complained to Stalin, who then ordered the OGPU to purge all the college students who had taken part in collectivization.

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."

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."

On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the United States, published a letter on January 3, 1934, in response to a pamphlet about the famine. In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of the 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."

Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in the Gulag labor camps. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death.

Falsification and suppression of evidence

The true number of dead was concealed. At the Kiev Medical Inspectorate, for example, the actual number of corpses, 9,472, was recorded as only 3,997. The GPU was directly involved in the deliberate 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. Similar falsifications of official records were widespread.

The January 1937 census, the first in 11 years, was intended to reflect the achievements of Stalin's rule. It became evident that population growth particularly in Ukraine failed to meet official targets—evidence of the mortality resulting from the famine and from associated indirect demographic losses. Those collecting the data, senior statisticians with decades of experience, were arrested and executed, including three successive heads of the Soviet Central Statistical Administration. The census data itself was locked away for half a century in the Russian State Archive of the Economy.

The subsequent 1939 census was organized in a manner that certainly inflated data on population numbers. It showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match the numbers stated by Joseph Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party that March. No other census in the Soviet Union was conducted until 1959.

Soviet campaign in 1980s

The Soviet Union denied existence of the famine until its 50th anniversary, in 1983, when the world-wide Ukrainian community coordinated famine remembrance. 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.

While the Soviet government admitted that some peasantry died, it also sought to launch a disinformation campaign, in February 1983, to blame drought. The head of the directorate for relations with foreign countries for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), A. Merkulov, charged Leonid Kravchuk, the chief ideologue for the Communist Party in Ukraine, with finding rainfall evidence for the Great famine. This new evidence was to be sent to the Novosti press centers in the U.S. and Canada, denouncing the "antidemocratic base of the Ukrainian bourgeois Nationalists, the collaboration of the Banderists and the Hitlerite Fascists during the Second World War." Kravchuk's inquiry into the rainfalls for the 1932-1933 period found that they were within normal parameters. Nevertheless, the official position regarding drought did not change.

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".

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.

A Holodomor monument in Edmonton, Canada

On July 5, 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 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.

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." 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 can 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."

The United States Congress created the Commission on the Ukraine famine in 1986. Soviet authorities were correct in their expectation that the commission would lay responsibility for the famine on the Soviet state.

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.

Denial outside of the USSR

Walter Duranty

According to Patrick Wright, Robert C. Tucker, Eugene Lyons, Mona Charen and Thomas Woods one of the first Western Holodomor deniers was Walter Duranty, the winner of the 1932 Pulitzer prize in journalism in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on Soviet Union (called incorrectly Russia) and the working out of the Five Year Plan. While the famine was raging, 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", and that "there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."

Duranty was well aware of the famine. He told in private to Eugene Lyons and reported to the British Embassy that the population of Ukraine and Lower Volga had "decreased" by six to seven million. However, in his reports, Duranty downplayed the impact of food shortages in Ukraine. As Duranty wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March 1933, "Conditions are bad, but there is no famine... But—to put it brutally—you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Duranty also wrote denunciations of those who wrote about the famine, accusing them of being reactionaries and anti-Bolshevik propagandists. In August 1933, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna called for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives "likely... numbered... by the millions" and driving those still alive to infanticide and cannibalism. The New York Times, August 20, 1933, reported Innitzer's charge and published an official Soviet denial: "in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals". The next day, the Times added Duranty's own denial.

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (who went hopefully to live in the New Civilization in 1932, but soon became disillusioned) 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." Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism." Others have characterized Duranty as "the number one Useful Idiot for Lenin first, and later for Stalin."

Campaigns were launched in 1986 for the retraction of the Pulitzer Prize given to The New York Times. The newspaper, however, declined to relinquish it, arguing that Duranty received the prize for his reporting several years before the occurrence of the famine. While conceding that Duranty's coverage of the famine has since been "largely discredited", the Times noted that: "Duranty's cabled dispatches had to pass Soviet censorship, and Stalin's propaganda machine was powerful and omnipresent. Duranty's analyses relied on official sources as his primary source of information, accounting for the most significant flaw in his coverage - his consistent underestimation of Stalin's brutality."

Some historians consider Duranty's reports from Moscow to be crucial in the decision taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. Bolshevik Karl Radek said that was indeed the case.

Louis Fischer

Next to Duranty, the American reporter most consistently willing to gloss Soviet reality was Louis Fischer, who had a deep ideological commitment to Soviet communism dating back to 1920. When Fischer traveled to Ukraine in October and November 1932, for The Nation, he was alarmed at what he saw. "In the Poltava, Vinnitsa, Podolsk and Kiev regions, conditions will be hard", he wrote, "I think there is no starvation anywhere in Ukraine now — after all they have just gathered in the harvest, but it was a bad harvest."

Initially critical of the Soviet grain procurement program because it created the food problem, Fischer by February 1933 adopted the official Soviet government view, which blamed the problem on Ukrainian counter-revolutionary nationalist "wreckers." It seemed "whole villages" had been "contaminated" by such men, who had to be deported to "lumbering camps and mining areas in distant agricultural areas which are now just entering upon their pioneering stage." These steps were forced upon the Kremlin, Fischer wrote, but the Soviets were, nevertheless, learning how to rule wisely.

Fischer was on a lecture tour in the United States when Gareth Jones' famine story broke. Speaking to a college audience in Oakland, California, a week later, Fischer stated emphatically: "There is no starvation in Russia." He spent the spring of 1933 campaigning for American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. As rumors of a famine in the USSR reached American shores, Fischer vociferously denied the reports.

Fischer's article entitled "Russia's Last Hard Year", stated, "The first half of 1933 was very difficult indeed. Many people simply did not have sufficient nourishment." Fischer blamed poor weather and the refusal of peasants to harvest the grain, which then rotted in the fields. Government requisitions drained the countryside of food, he admitted, but military needs (a potential conflict with Japan) explained the need for such deadly thoroughness in grain collections.

Fischer maintained his general optimism about the Soviet Union through the publication of his Soviet Journey in 1935. The book devoted three pages to a discussion of the famine of 1932-1933, in which Fischer described his October travels through Ukraine. He told of food left rotting in the fields as the result of peasants' "passive resistance." Fischer blamed the peasants directly for having "brought the calamity upon themselves." Fischer stressed the positive results ensuing from Bolshevik victory in the countryside, and connected the famine to peasant action (or inaction).

Holodomor denial by prominent visitors to the USSR

Prominent British writers 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.

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 Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who visited Ukraine in the summer of 1933 and rejected "tales of famine-genocide propagated by the Ukrainian Nationalists".

The height of denial was reached during a visit to Ukraine carried out between August 26 and September 9, 1933, by French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot, who denied accounts of the famine and said that Soviet Ukraine was "like a garden in full bloom". The day before his arrival, all beggars, homeless children and starving people were removed from the streets. Shop windows in local stores were filled with food, but purchases were forbidden, and anyone coming too close to the stores was arrested. The streets were washed. Just like all other Western visitors, Herriot met fake "peasants", all selected Communists or Komsomol members, who showed him healthy cattle. 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 the Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders", he declared. The September 13, 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."

The lack of knowledge of the famine was observed by English writer George Orwell, who commented that "huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles". In 1945, Orwell wrote, "[I]t was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine. And if this was true before the war, the intellectual atmosphere is certainly no better now. Nigel Colley has written on the influence of the Ukrainian famine, and the Holodomor denial of Duranty, on Orwell's book Animal Farm.

Douglas Tottle and others

In 1980s Soviet Communist Party approached the Canadian Communist Party to engage journalist Douglas Tottle to prepare counter-propaganda materials under the title "Fraud, Famine and Ukrainian Fascism". Before final publication, the official reviewers of the tome in Kiev suggested that the name of the book be changed, as stated in their explanation "Ukrainian fascism never existed".

In 1987, the Canadian trade-unionist and activist Douglas Tottle, published the controversial book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, in which he asserts that claims the Holodomor was an intentional genocide are "fraudulent", and "a creation of Nazi propagandists".

His book, published by Progress Publishers in Toronto, appeared around the same time Ukrainian Communist party leader Volodymyr Shcherbytsky publicly acknowledged the famine, in December 1987. As a result, the book was subsequently withdrawn from circulation.

In a review of Tottle's book in the Ukrainian Canadian Magazine, published by the pro-Communist Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, Wilfred Szczesny wrote: "Members of the general public who want to know about the famine, its extent and causes, and about the motives and techniques of those who would make this tragedy into something other than what it was will find Tottle's work invaluable" (The Ukrainian Canadian, April 1988, p. 24).

In 1988 the International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, private Ukrainian nationalist group with no official powers or governmental recognition, was set up to establish whether the famine existed and its cause. Tottle was invited by the commission to attend the hearings, however he ignored the request. While the commission was organized along judicial lines, it had no judicial power to compel witnesses to attend or testify. However Tottle's book was examined during the Brussels sitting of the commission, held between May 23–27, 1988, with testimony from various expert witnesses. The commission president Professor Jacob Sundberg subsequently concluded that Tottle was not alone in his enterprise to deny the famine on the basis that material included in his book could not have been available to a private person without official Soviet assistance.

According to Canadian historians, "Eventually Tottle’s book lost credibility in all but the fringe Stalinist circles, but in the late 1980s material from it appeared in the American “Village Voice” and various student newspapers in Canada" [2]. According to Cathy Young, "the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. A backlash from the left was quick to follow. Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of "exiled nationalists." And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right." Coplon sneered at "the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism" and dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime. Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S. imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis." In a letter to the editors, Robert Conquest dismissed the article by Coplon as "error and absurdity".

Other similar writings include an article by Wilfred Szczesny ("Fraud, Famine and Fascism", The Ukrainian Canadian, April 1988); an unsigned article ("The Ukrainian Famine: Fact or Fiction"), which appeared in the McGill Daily, November 22, 1988, and Challenge-Desafio's article ("The Hoax of the Man-Made Ukraine Famine of 1932-33"), which appeared in a newspaper of the Progressive Labor Party in 1987.

Holodomor denial and Ukrainian law

See also: Holodomor in modern politics

On November 28, 2006, Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a law recognizing the 1932–1933 Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The voting figures were as follows: supporting the bill were BYuT—118 deputies, NSNU—79 deputies, Socialists—30 deputies, 4 independent deputies, and the Party of Regions—2 deputies (200 deputies did not cast a vote). The Communist Party of Ukraine voted against the bill. In all, 233 deputies supported the bill—more than the minimum of 226 votes required to pass it into law.

A draft law "On Amendments to the Criminal and the Procedural Criminal Codes of Ukraine" was submitted by President Viktor Yushchenko for consideration by the Ukrainian Parliament. The draft law envisaged prosecution for public denial of the Holodomor Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine as a fact of genocide of the Ukrainian people, and of the Holocaust as the fact of genocide of the Jewish people. The draft law foresaw that public denial as well as production and dissemination of materials denying the above shall be punished by a fine of 100 to 300 untaxed minimum salaries, or imprisonment of up to two years. The draft law, however, failed to receive support from incoming President Viktor Yanukovych, who, following his inauguration in 2010, declared: “it would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation”—this among a number of actions seen as his pursuing a more Russocentric policy. However, in 2011 he acknowledged: "Terrible years of totalitarianism have been a spiritual catastrophe: numerous churches were demolished, hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, and intellectuals were physically eliminated or sent to the Gulag camps, almost every Ukrainian family suffered," and in 2012 affirmed: "This crime has changed the history of Ukrainian people forever. It has been one of the severest challenges of Ukrainians. Holodomor not only killed people, but also had the purpose of causing fear and obedience."

See also

• Holodomor genocide question

Additional reading

• Andreopoulos, George J., Ed. Genocide: conceptual and historical dimensions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8122-3249-6
• Colorosa, Barbara. Extraordinary evil: a brief history of genocide, New York: Penguin Group, 2007. ISBN 0-670-06604-4
• Conquest, Robert. Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7
• Conquest, Robert. The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, W.W. Norton and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-393-05933-2
• Crowl, James William. Angels in Stalin's Paradise. Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1937. A case study of Louis Fisher and Walter Duranty, University Press of America, 1982. ISBN 0-8191-2185-1
• New Internationalist. Justice After Genocide. December (385). 2005.
• Mace, James. Collaboration in the suppression of the Ukrainian famine, paper delivered at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century", New York, November 13, 1987.
• Paris, Erna. Long shadows: truth, lies, and history, New York: Bloomsbury, 2001. ISBN 1-58234-210-5
• Springer, Jane. Genocide, Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2006. ISBN 0-88899-681-0
• Sullivant, Robert S. Soviet Politics and the Ukraine: 1917-1957. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.
• Tauger, Mark B. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 70–89
• Taylor, Sally J. Stalin's apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's Man in Moscow, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-19-505700-7
• Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charney, ed. Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. Introduction by Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons. The Garland Reference Library of Social Science, Vol. 772. London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.
• Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-19-514868-1

Video resources

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