Holodomor denial

Holodomor Denial is stating that the Holodomor, the great famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (at the time the Ukrainian SSR), which claimed over 7 million lives, never took place.

There were many reasons to deny the Holodomor, and to this day, the Holodomor remains a controversial and emotionally charged issue.

In November 2007, the government of Ukraine made Holodomor denial an illegal act.

Soviet Union

Early Years

While the famine was taking place, Soviet authorities denied its existence. It was a criminal offense to mention the famine in any way, even in the affected villages, punished by five years in labor camp. Blaming the authorities led to death sentence

Due to the direct death toll as well as indirect demographic losses due to the famine the population growth failed to meet the expected targets set by the Communist party. When this became evident from the population statistics data, three successive heads of the Soviet Central Statistical Administration were executed, while others were arrested..

Initially, the 1937 Soviet Census was thought to be exemplary due to its apparent thoroughness and near-perfect organization ensuring the utmost precision. The government officials put in charge of the census received the state awards immediately upon the census conclusion. However, when it became apparent that the final population figures were much lower than expected, the results were classified and the census organizers were repressed (this coincided with the Great Purge by Nikolay Yezhov). The new 1939 census was organized in such a way as to have certainly inflated data on population numbers. It showed a population figure of 170.6 million people, manipulated so as to match exactly the numbers stated by Joseph Stalin in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party. No other censuses were conducted until 1959.

Official Holodomor denial by Soviet officials

Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling of “political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine,” and commented that, “only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."

On instructions from Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim 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 Holodomor. In his letter, Skvirsky called the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of the Ukraine" "wholly grotesque." He claimed that the Ukrainian population was increasing at an annual rate of 2 percent during the preceding five years. He 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."

The early 1980s

The Soviet Union denied any existence of the famine until the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, in 1983. At that time, the Ukrainian diaspora exerted pressure on various governments, including the governments of the United States and Canada, to raise the issue of the Holodomor with the government of the Soviet Union. These governments did, likely simply looking for ways to add pressure on the Soviet Union in the atmosphere of the cold war, and the United States created a Commission into the into the famine. The Soviet authorities correctly predicted this commission would put the Soviet state responsible for the act.

In an attempt to counter this, the Soviet government admitted that some peasantry died to climatic conditions, such as drought, which was the reason for another famine in the Soviet Union during 1946-1947.

Glasnost and the late 1980s

The future President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, was charged with finding rainfall evidence for the 1930s famine. However, despite the official stand, which was shared by loyal Soviet government apparatchiks and sympathetic journalists in the West, Kravchuk's inquiry into the rainfalls for the 1933-1932 period found that they were within normal parameters.

It was only during the late 1980s, as part of Glasnost that the Soviet Government admitted that its agricultural policies played a direct role in the causing Holodomor.

Ultimately, as President of Ukraine, Kravchuk would admit to the cover-up attempts, and support in recognizing the Holodomor as genocide.

Contemporary denial outside of the USSR

Walter Duranty and The New York Times

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Walter Duranty

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 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."

In his reports, Duranty downplayed the impact of food shortages in Ukraine, although in private he told the British Embassy that several million had died of famine in Ukraine. While other Western reporters reported the famine conditions as best they could due to Soviet censorship and restrictions on visiting areas affected by the famine, Duranty acted more like a spokesman for the Soviet government than an independent reporter for a Western newspaper.

Duranty wrote articles denying the fact that the Holodomor was taking place in Ukraine. He also wrote denunciations of those who wrote about the famine, accusing them of being reactionaries and anti-Bolshevik propagandists. He continued to do this despite visiting the famine-stricken areas and informing the British embassy of the several million who had died. Duranty repeated Soviet propaganda without verifying its veracity.

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "The greatest liar that I ever met in 50 years of Journalism."

Campaigns have been launched in 1986 for the retraction of the prize given to The New York Times. Despite the fact that the Times admits that the fraudulent coverage led to it receiving the Prize, they have refused to give it up.

In August 1933, Theodor Cardinal 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. See The New York Times, August 20, 1933, reporting both Innitzer’s charge and the official denial: “in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals”. The next day, the Times added Duranty’s own denial.

Louis Fisher and The Nation

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 of 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 of 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 USSR. 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).

Time magazine

In March 1935 Time published some photos accredited to the Ukrainian famine with the comment, "Such pictures prove nothing, since almost any picture could be made to lie."

Communist Party of the USA

The Ukrainian American community in November and December 1933 organized marches in a number of U.S. cities to protest against American recognition of a government which was starving millions of Ukrainians. American Communists sometimes resorted to violence in an attempt to silence the Ukrainians. On November 18, 1933, in New York City, 8,000 Ukrainians marched from Washington Square Park to 67th Street, while 500 Communists ran beside the parade and snatched the Ukrainians' handbills, spat on the marchers and tried to hit them. Five persons were injured. Only the presence of 300 policemen on foot and a score on horseback leading the parade and riding along its flanks prevented serious trouble.

In Chicago, on December 17, 1933, several hundred Communists mounted a massed attack on the vanguard of 5,000 Ukrainian American marchers, leaving over 100 injured in what The New York Times called "the worst riot in years":

"Brick, clubs, rotten eggs and other missiles rained on the marchers from the Hermitage Avenue elevated station bridging Madison Street. The street fight which followed saw brass knuckles, blackjacks, fists and rifle butts used until a dozen squads of police restored order."

Holodomor denial by Foreign Dignitaries Visiting 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.

The height of manipulation was reached during a visit to Ukraine carried out between August 26 and September 9, 1933, by the French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, who denied accounts of the famine. 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 this genocide 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".

Modern denial

The 50th Anniversary

The rallying and lobbying of the Ukrainian Community around the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor made a significant impact on the Soviet Union. In February 1983 the Politbureau of the Communist Party of the USSR activated its counterpropaganda section to focus on the Ukrainian famine. The head of the directorate for relations with foreign countries for the CPSU A. Merkulov was given the task of directing the disinformation to the West and contacted L. Kravchuk in Ukraine. The materials were to be sent to the Novosti press (APN) centres in the USA and Canada to demonstrate the "antidemocratic base of the Ukrainian bourgeois Nationalists, the collaboration of the Banderovtsev and the Hitlerite Fascists during the Second World War".

In preparation for the expected rise in activity associated with the 55th anniversary, the Soviet Union began to feed disinformation to various groups. In Canada, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (a pro-Communist Labour temple movement in the Ukrainian community) published numerous articles denying the Holodomor in Ukraine in its magazines and newspapers. Through its bookstore outlets, it spread pamphlets and materials whose point of view corresponded with that of the Special Services of the Soviet Union. In 2007, correspondence and instructions from Soviet officials to the organization regarding the Holodomor were made available for study by scholars.

Douglas Tottle and Holodomor denial

In 1987 the Canadian trade-unionist and activist Douglas Tottle, published the controversial book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism the Myth of the Ukrainian Genocide from Hitler to Harvard, where he claimed that the Holodomor was "fraudulent", and "a creation of Nazi propagandists". By the author's own account, his book is only carried by 28 libraries around the world.

In a book 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).

The publication of Tottle also inspired a number of similar writings by other Holodomor deniers, such as Jeff Coplon ("In Search of a Soviet Holocaust", The Village Voice, January 12, 1988); Wilfred Szczesny ("Fraud, Famine and Fascism", The Ukrainian Canadian, April 1988); and an unsigned article ("The Ukrainian Famine: Fact or Fiction", which appeared in the McGill Daily, November 22, 1988).

Despite the fact that the Holodomor was included in Canadian Centre for Genocide & Human Rights Education fourth annual session for teachers, at the Armenian Cultural Centre in Toronto, the Toronto District School Board has chosen not to include the Holodomor in its 11th grade Genocide study course.

Sources

• Andreopoulos, George J., Ed. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
• Colorosa, Barbara. Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide … And Why It Is Important. Penguin Canada, 2007.
• New Internationalist. Justice After Genocide. December (385). 2005.
• Paris, Erna. Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
• Springer, Jane. Genocide. Groundwood Books, 2006.
• Tauger, Mark B. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 70-89
• Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• 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.

Video resources

• Harvest of Despair. (1983), produced by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre.
• [1] Numerous Holodomor videos available