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{{Short description|Historical negationism regarding the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine}} | |||
{{POV|date=February 2008}} | |||
{{about|historical negationism regarding the Holodomor|the debate on whether it as a genocide|Holodomor genocide question}} | |||
{{Original research|entire article|date=February 2008}} | |||
{{original research|date=November 2021|discuss=Talk:Article lead is blatant OR and Synth}} | |||
{{Synthesis|article|topic=actual studies of a campaign to minimise acceptance of the scale of the Holodomor|date=February 2008}} | |||
{{use dmy dates|date=December 2016}} | |||
{{holodomor}} | |||
{{denial of Mass Killings}} | |||
'''Holodomor denial''' ({{langx|uk|заперечення Голодомору|translit=zaperechennia Holodomoru}}) is the claim that the ], a 1932–33 man-made ] that killed millions in ],<ref>{{cite book |title=Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust |page=xv |first=Miron |last=Dolot |publisher=] |date=1985 |isbn=0-393-30416-7}}. {{ISBN|978-0-393-30416-9}}</ref> did not occur<ref name="regime">], '']'', Vintage books, Random House Inc., New York, 1995, {{ISBN|0-394-50242-6}}, pages 235-236.</ref><ref name="Radzinsky"/><ref name="reflections"/> or diminishing its scale and significance. | |||
Officially, the ] 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.<ref name="regime" /><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2002/280214.shtml |title=Famine denial |work=The Ukrainian Weekly |date=14 July 2002 |access-date=4 November 2015 |volume=LXX, No. 28 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210224182942/http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2002/280214.shtml |archive-date=24 February 2021}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Dinah |last=Shelton |title=Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=c-8YAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1055 |access-date=5 November 2015 |year=2005 |publisher=Macmillan Reference |isbn=978-0-02-865850-6 |page=1055 |quote=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. |via=]}}</ref> It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent ] journalists, including '']''{{'}} ]. | |||
'''Denial of the Holodomor''' is stating that the ], the disastrous manifestation of the ] in ] (at the time, the ], in the ]), which claimed millions of lives, never took place.<ref></ref><ref>''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'' @ ISBN 0028658485</ref><ref>After over half a century of denial, in January 1990 the ] adopted a special resolution admitting that the Ukrainian Famine had indeed occurred, cost millions of lives... ISBN 0415944295</ref> | |||
The Holodomor was denied immediately and repeatedly by Soviet authorities (starting with President ] and Foreign Minister ]), and this denial continued unabated, well into the 1980s. According to ], the denial was the first major instance of exercising ]'s ] propaganda technique by the Soviet authorities to influence world opinion, "but it was to be followed by a number of others such as the campaign over the ] of 1936-8, the denial of the ], and so on." <ref name="Conquest">], ''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine'' ] (1987), ISBN 0195051807, p. 308. </ref> | |||
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.<ref name="Dobczansky" />{{Rp|page=160}} | |||
The Soviet ] was supported at the time by Soviet-friendly journalists from the ], such as ] and ]. Today, Holodomor denial is the field of fringe writers, and not supported by any serious academic scholars. Nevertheless, the Holodomor remains a controversial and emotionally charged issue. | |||
== Soviet Union == | |||
In November 2006, the ] passed a bill branding the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.<ref>Jan Maksymiuk, , '']'', ], ]</ref> In November 2007, the ] tabled a law which would make public statements of both Holodomor and ] illegal acts in Ukraine. | |||
=== Cover-up of the famine === | |||
==Soviet Union== | |||
Soviet head-of-state ] responded to Western offers of food by telling off "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."<ref name="reflections" /><ref>{{cite journal |first=Robert |last=Conquest |author-link=Robert Conquest |url=http://www.hoover.org/research/how-liberals-funked-it |title=How Liberals Funked It |journal=Hoover Digest |issue=3|date=30 July 1999 |access-date=4 November 2015}}</ref> | |||
===Cover-up during the famine=== | |||
] poster: "Comrade, come join the ]!"]] | |||
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.<ref name="Carynnyk">{{cite journal |first=Marco |last=Carynnyk |url=http://ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/398325.shtml |title=The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III |journal=The Ukrainian Weekly |date=25 September 1983 |volume=LI |issue=39 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050829073245/http://ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/398325.shtml |archive-date=29 August 2005}}</ref> In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" was "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 ] days."<ref name="Mace">New York Times, as quoted in James E. Mace, {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120425091429/http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1988/028822.shtml |date=25 April 2012 }} (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), '']'', 10 January 1988, No. 2, Vol. LVI</ref> | |||
The Soviet leadership undertook extensive efforts to prevent the spread of any information about the Holodomor. State communications about the famine were kept a ]. ] and ] sent a secret telegram to the party and provincial police chiefs requiring that Ukrainian peasants going north to ] to seek bread were to be stopped.<ref>] ''The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History'', W.W. Norton and Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2, page 102.</ref> The telegram blamed the influx of peasants on ] agents, who allegedly wanted to start a famine scare. ] chairman ] reported that over two hundred thousands peasants had been sent back. The secret correspondence included a letter sent by a party official from ] where he warned that "there will be no one left" alive to sow and ensure grain production, unless some amount of grain will not be taken. Molotov replied that the needs of the state, as "defined in party resolutions", are more important than the lives of people.<ref>] ''The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History'', W.W. Norton and Company (2004), ISBN 0-393-05933-2, page 102.</ref> | |||
Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in the ] ]s. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death.<ref name="reflections">{{Cite Q|Q108386870|pages=96}}</ref> ] was a Moscow correspondent of '']'' 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 (], ], and Kropotkin). Chamberlin later published a couple of books: ''Russia's Iron Age'' and ''The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation''.<ref>{{cite book |first=William Henry |last=Chamberlin |author-link=William Henry Chamberlin |title=The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.178779 |year=1944 |publisher=Macmillan |ol=6478239M}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=160 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071109104841/http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=160 |archive-date=9 November 2007 |title=What Is the Ukraine Famine Disaster of 1932–1933? |work=semp.us |date=2 January 2005}}</ref> 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."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Chamberlin |first=William Henry |author-link=William Henry Chamberlin |date=20 March 1983 |orig-year=1934 |title=Famine proves potent weapon in Soviet policy |url=http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/pdf2/1983/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1983-12.pdf |journal=] |volume=51 |issue=12 |page=6 |access-date=22 July 2012 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120301214714/http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/pdf2/1983/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1983-12.pdf |archive-date=1 March 2012 |df=dmy-all |postscript=: Reprint of original article dated 29 May 1934}}</ref> | |||
Various acts were committed to conceal the true number of dead people. Out of 9,472 only 3,997 corpses were registered in the Kiev Medical Inspectorate. Similar cover-ups took place everywhere.<ref name="reflections"/> | |||
Stalin's wife, ], learned about the Holodomor through private channels. Ukrainian students in the technical school she was attending described acts of ] and bands of orphaned children. Allilueva complained to Stalin, who ordered the OGPU to purge all the college students who had taken part in ].<ref>(Harvest of Sorrow, page 325) </ref> That quarrel with Stalin was presumably one of the reasons that led to Allilueva's death on ] ]. | |||
=== Falsification and suppression of evidence === | |||
===Early years=== | |||
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.<ref name="ConquestDoE">{{cite book |first=Robert |last=Conquest |author-link=Robert Conquest |title=The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History |publisher=] |date=2004 |isbn=0-393-05933-2 |page=102}}</ref> 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.<ref>Boriak, Hennadii (Fall 2001). "The publication of sources on the history of the 1932-1933 famine-genocide: history, current state, and prospects". '']'' '''25''' (3-4): 167–186.</ref> | |||
], the first in 11 years, was intended to reflect the achievements of Stalin's rule. Those collecting the data, senior statisticians with decades of experience, were arrested and executed, including three successive heads of the ]. The census data itself was locked away for half a century in the Russian State Archive of the Economy.<ref>], "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule" <u>Historical Journal</u> 39, 1996</ref> | |||
While the famine was taking place, ] authorities denied its existence. It was a criminal offense to mention the famine, punishable with a five-year term in the ] ]s; placing the blame on the authorities led to a death sentence.<ref name="reflections">] ''Reflections on a Ravaged Century'' (2000) ISBN 0-393-04818-7, p. 96</ref> | |||
=== Soviet campaign in the 1980s === | |||
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 ] were executed, while others were arrested.<ref>Lisa Shymko, , '']'', ] ]</ref> | |||
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|date=September 2023}} The ] 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, ], the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, in a secret analysis "Some thoughts regarding the advertising of the Ukrainian SSR Pavilion held at the International Exposition ] 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".<ref name="Serhiychuk2006">{{cite book |last=Serhiychuk |first=Volodymyr Ivanovych |script-title=uk:Як нас морили голодом 1932-1933 |title=Yak nas moryly holodom 1932-1933 |trans-title=How we were exhausted by Starvation 1932-1933 |language=uk |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ckqmGAAACAAJ |edition=3rd |year=2006 |publisher=], Centre for Ukrainian Studies |page=322 |isbn=978-966-2911-07-7 |via=]}}</ref> | |||
Initially, the ] was thought to be exemplary due to its apparent thoroughness and near-perfect organization ensuring the utmost precision. The government officials in charge of the census received state awards immediately upon the census conclusion; however, when it became apparent that the final population figures were significantly lower than expected, the results were classified and the census organizers were repressed (this coincided with the ] by ]). The new ] 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 the numbers stated by ] in his report to the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party. No other censuses were conducted until 1959. | |||
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.<ref>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</ref> | |||
=== Official Holodomor denial by Soviet officials === | |||
], Canada]] | |||
]]] | |||
Soviet President ] 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."<ref></ref><ref name="reflections"/> | |||
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 ]<ref name=":1" /> attempting to smear the opening of the monument. | |||
In an interview with ] in March 1933, Soviet Foreign Minister ] 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.”<ref name="Jones-Litvinov">], , March 1933</ref> | |||
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.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Serhiĭchuk |first=Volodymyr |title=Yak nas moryly Holodom 1932—1933 |publisher=] |year=2006 |isbn=966-2911-07-3 |location=Kyiv |pages=323–325 |script-title=uk:Як нас морили Голодом 1932—1933 |trans-title=How they murdered us by Famine 1932–1933 |author-link=Volodymyr Serhiychuk}}</ref> | |||
On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the ], published a letter on ], ], in response to a pamphlet about the Holodomor.<ref name="Carynnyk">Marco Carynnyk, , ''The Ukrainian Weekly'', ], ], No. 39, Vol. LI</ref> 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 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 ] days."<ref name="Mace">James E. Mace, (paper delivered at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century", held in ] on ], ]), '']'', ], ], No. 2, Vol. LVI</ref> | |||
Former Ukrainian president ] 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 ] replaced ] 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."<ref>Kravchuk, Leonid Mayemo te, shcho mayemo: spohady i rozdumy, Kyiv, 2002, Stolittya (392 p.) {{ISBN|966-95952-8-2}}, pp. 44-46,</ref> | |||
===The early 1980s=== | |||
The Soviet Union denied any existence of the famine until the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, in 1983. For the first time Holodomor remembrance was co-ordinated by the Ukrainian community world wide. At that time, the ] exerted significant pressure on the media and various governments, including the governments of the ] and ], to raise the issue of the Holodomor with the government of the Soviet Union. The United States created a Commission into the famine. The Soviet authorities predicted this commission would put the Soviet state responsible for the act.<ref name="symp">, ], ], pp.4-5</ref> | |||
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|date=July 2023}} | |||
In an attempt to counter this, the ] admitted that some peasantry died to climatic conditions, such as ], which was the reason for another famine in the Soviet Union during 1946-1947. | |||
== |
== Denial outside the Soviet Union == | ||
The future ], ], was charged in 1983 with finding rainfall evidence for the 1930s famine. However, despite the official stand, which was shared by loyal Soviet government '']s'' and sympathetic journalists in the ], Kravchuk's inquiry into the rainfalls for the 1933-1932 period found that they were within normal parameters.<ref name="Bandera">Stephen Bandera, , ''Ukrainian Echo'', ], ]</ref> | |||
=== Walter Duranty and ''The New York Times'' === | |||
It was only during the late 1980s, as part of ] 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.<ref name="Bandera"/> | |||
According to ],<ref>{{cite book |quote=He (Duranty) had become creatures of the Soviet censors |title=Iron Curtain |last=Wright |first=Patrick |author-link=Patrick Wright (academic) |year=2007 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-19-923150-8 |pages=, 307 |url=https://archive.org/details/ironcurtainfroms0000wrig_a3q1 |url-access=registration}}</ref> ],<ref>{{cite book |title=Stalin in Power |last=Tucker |first=Robert |author-link=Robert C. Tucker |year=1992 |publisher=] |isbn=978-0-393-30869-3 |page=191 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=L9pcTIEP1OQC&pg=PA191 |via=]}}</ref> and ],<ref name="AiU" /> one of the first Western Holodomor deniers was ], who won the 1932 ] in journalism, in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on Soviet Union and the working out of the ].<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303183632/http://duranty.pelech.org/duranty2003/pulitzer2003.pdf |date=3 March 2016}} (30 December 2002 – 28 April 2003)</ref> In 1932, he wrote in the pages of '']'' that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".<ref>{{Cite news |last=Duranty |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Duranty |date=1933-08-24 |title=FAMINE TOLL HEAVY IN SOUTHERN RUSSIA: Death Rate During Last Year Has Trebled—Food Supply Now Held Assured. BREAD PRICE EXPLAINED Increase in Moscow Reported as Part of Move to End the Ration System There. FAMINE TOLL HIGH IN SOUTH RUSSIA |edition=Late City |volume=82 |pages=1, 9 |work=] |issue=27606 }}</ref> 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."<ref name="AiU">{{cite book |title=Assignment in Utopia |last=Lyons |first=Eugene |year=1991 |publisher=Transaction Publishers |isbn=978-0-88738-856-9 |pages=572, 573|chapter=The Press Corps Conceals a Famine |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZXLhwVJvfXMC&pg=PA572}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Cite news |last=Duranty |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Duranty |date=1933-03-31 |title=RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING: Deaths From Diseases Due to Malnutrition High, Yet the Soviet Is Entrenched. LARGER CITIES HAVE FOOD Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga Regions Suffer From Shortages. KREMLIN'S 'DOOM' DENIED Russians and Foreign Observers In Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster. |edition=Late City |volume=82 |page=13 |work=] |issue=27460 }}</ref> Some have disputed the validity of his distinction between death from starvation and death from disease that is exacerbated by malnutrition.<ref name="AiU" /> | |||
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."<ref>{{Cite web |title=New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty |url=https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/ |access-date=2021-03-03 |website=] Company |language=en-US}}</ref><ref name=":0" /> | |||
==Contemporary denial outside of the USSR== | |||
Duranty also wrote denunciations of those who wrote about the famine, accusing them of being reactionaries and ] ]. In August 1933, Cardinal ] of ] called for relief efforts, stating that the famine in Ukraine was claiming lives "likely... numbered... by the millions" and driving those still alive to ] and ]. '']'', 20 August 1933, reported Innitzer's charge and published an official Soviet denial: "in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor ]". The next day, the ''Times'' added Duranty's own denial. {{Citation needed|date=September 2023}} | |||
===Walter Duranty and ''The New York Times''=== | |||
] | |||
One of the first Western Holodomor deniers was ], the winner of the 1932 ] in journalism in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on ] and the working out of the ].<ref> (], ]–], ])</ref> While the famine was raging, he wrote in the pages of '']'' 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."<ref>], , '']'', ] ]</ref> | |||
British journalist ], who went to live in the Soviet Union in 1932 as a reporter for the ] 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."<ref>Muggeridge, Malcolm: ''The Green Stick: Chronicles of Wasted Time'' Volume I Chapter 5 (1972).</ref> Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."<ref>]. ''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine'' ] (1987), {{ISBN|0-19-505180-7}}, page 320. </ref> | |||
In his reports, Duranty downplayed the impact of food shortages in Ukraine, although in private he told ] and reported to the ] Embassy that at least seven million had died of famine <ref> Embassy dispatch dated ] ] included the following: "According to Mr. Duranty the population of ] and the Lower ] had decreased in the past year by three million, and the population of Ukraine by four to five million" (cited from ''"Reflections on the ravaged century"'', p. 123)</ref>. While other ] reporters reported the famine conditions as best they could due to Soviet ] 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. 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."<ref name="NYT"></ref> | |||
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."<ref>{{cite news |last=Meyer |first=Karl E. |author-link=Karl E. Meyer |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-trenchcoats-then-and-now.html |title=The Editorial Notebook; Trenchcoats, Then and Now |newspaper=] |date=24 June 1990 |access-date=30 September 2016}}</ref> | |||
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 ] ]. 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. As the ''New York Times'' notes: "Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time."<ref name="NYT"/> | |||
=== By prominent visitors to the Soviet Union === | |||
In August 1933, ] of ] called for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives “likely. . . numbered. . . by the millions” and driving those still alive to ] and ]. ''The New York Times'', ], ], reported Innitzer’s charge and published an official denial: “in the Soviet Union we have neither ] nor ]”. The next day, the Times added Duranty’s own denial. | |||
Prominent writers from Ireland and Britain who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such as ] and ], are also on record as denying the existence of the famine in Ukraine.<ref name="Radzinsky">] ''Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives'', Anchor, (1997) {{ISBN|0-385-47954-9}}, pages 256-259. According to Radzinsky, Stalin "had achieved the impossible: he had silenced all the talk of hunger... Millions were dying, but the nation hymned the praises of ]".</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/communism/com107.html |title=Stalin-Wells talk / the verbatim record and a discussion by G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, J.M. Keynes, E. Toller and others |publisher=] |date=2007 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070902093951/http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/communism/com107.html |archive-date=2 September 2007}}</ref> | |||
Another famine denier was Sir John Maynard.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Shkandrij |first=Myroslav |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1111577641 |title=Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017: history's flashpoints and today's memory wars |date=2019 |isbn=978-0-429-31948-8 |edition=1st |location=New York |pages=61 |oclc=1111577641}}</ref> 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|date=February 2009}} | |||
According to some historians, Duranty's reports from Moscow were crucial in the decision taken by ] ] to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933.<ref>], , '']'', ], ]</ref> | |||
During a visit to Ukraine carried out between 26 August – 9 September 1933, former ] ], said that Soviet Ukraine was "like a garden in full bloom".<ref name="Black">Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, ], ''The ]: Crimes, Terror, Repression'', ], 1999, {{ISBN|0-674-07608-7}}, pages 159-160</ref> 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 '']'' was able to write that Herriot "categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeoisie press in connection with a famine in the USSR."<ref name=Thevenin/> It was alleged by anti-communist activist ], 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.<ref>{{cite Q|Q108386870|pages=122}}</ref><ref name=Thevenin>{{cite conference |url=http://ncua.inform-decisions.com/eng/files/EThevenin.pdf |title=France, Germany and Austria: Facing the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine |first=Etienne |last=Thevenin |date=29 June 2005 |conference=James Mace Memorial Panel, IAUS Congress, Donetsk, Ukraine |access-date=20 June 2021 |page=8 |archive-date=14 March 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220314210530/http://ncua.inform-decisions.com/eng/files/EThevenin.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> | |||
] journalist ] characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."<ref>]. ''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine'' ] (1987), ISBN 0195051807, page 320. </ref> Others have characterized Duranty as "the number one ] for Lenin first, and later or Stalin.<ref name="Herring">Mark Y. Herring, (a review of ''Stalin's apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times man in Moscow'', by S.J. Taylor), ''Contra Mundum'', nr. 15, 1995</ref> | |||
=== Douglas Tottle === | |||
Campaigns were launched in 1986 for the retraction of the Pulitzer Prize given to '']''. Despite the fact that the Times admits that the fraudulent coverage led to it receiving the prize, they have refused to relinquish it.<ref></ref> The Times acknowledges that "some of Duranty's editors criticized his reporting as tendentious", and that "collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet ], in 1932 and 1933 - two years after Duranty won his prize."<ref name="NYT"/> | |||
In the 1980s, the union organizer and journalist ] with the help of Soviet authorities<ref>{{cite book |last1=Applebaum |first1=Anne |title=Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine |date=2017 |publisher=Doubleday |location=New York |isbn=9780385538855 |page=338 |edition=1}}</ref> wrote a book arguing that the famine in Ukraine was not genocide,<ref name="serbyn" /> 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".<ref name="Serhiychuk, V page 324">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</ref><ref>In his book, ''Searching for place'', ] commented: "For a particularly base example of famine-denial literature, see Tottle, ''Fraud, famine, and fascism...''", see Lubomyr Luciuk, ''Searching for place: Ukrainian displaced persons, Canada, and the migration of memory'', Toronto: ], 2000, p. 413. {{ISBN|0-8020-4245-7}}</ref> Tottle refused this name change, and as a result the book publication was delayed by several years.{{Citation needed|date=September 2021}} | |||
===Louis Fischer and ''The Nation''=== | |||
In 1987, Tottle published the book in Toronto, Canada as ''Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard''<ref name="tottle">{{cite book |url=http://rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050411204357/http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm |archive-date=2005-04-11 |title=Fraud, famine, and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard |author=Douglas Tottle |publisher=] |location=Toronto |year=1987 |isbn=978-0-919396-51-7 |access-date=11 December 2015|author-link=Douglas Tottle}}</ref> through ''Progress Publishers''. In a review of Tottle's book in the ''Ukrainian Canadian Magazine'', published by the ], 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".<ref>''The Ukrainian Canadian'', April 1988, p. 24)</ref> Historian ] responded that "in the era of glasnost, Szczesny could have rendered his readers no greater disservice". Serbyn likened Tottle's book to '']'', a work of ] by ].<ref name="serbyn">{{cite web|author=Roman Serbyn|author-link=Roman Serbyn|url=http://www.infoukes.com/history/famine/serbyn/|title=The Last Stand of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Deniers|work=infoukes.com|year=1989|access-date=4 November 2015}}</ref> Some of Tottle's material appeared in a 1988 article in the '']'', "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right".<ref>{{cite web|last1=Serbyn|first1=Roman|author-link1=Roman Serbyn|title=Competing Memories of Communist and Nazi Crimes in Ukraine|url=http://www.ukrainianstudies.uottawa.ca/pdf/P_Serbyn_Danyliw07.pdf|publisher=Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa|access-date=23 September 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110706211152/http://www.ukrainianstudies.uottawa.ca/pdf/P_Serbyn_Danyliw07.pdf|archive-date=6 July 2011}}</ref> | |||
Next to Duranty, the American reporter most consistently willing to gloss Soviet reality was ], who had a deep ideological commitment to Soviet ] dating back to 1920. When Fischer traveled to Ukraine in October and November of 1932, for '']'', he was alarmed at what he saw. "In the ], ], ] and ] 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 ] ] "]." 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 ], Fischer wrote, but the Soviets were, nevertheless, learning how to rule wisely. | |||
Fischer was on a lecture tour in the United States when ] famine story broke. Speaking to a college audience in ], a week later, Fischer stated emphatically: "There is no starvation in ]." 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 ]) explained the need for such deadly thoroughness in grain collections.<ref name="fischer">, at ArtUkraine.com</ref> | |||
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."<!--this is repetitious (already above), could be trimmed--> Fischer stressed the positive results ensuing from Bolshevik victory in the countryside, and connected the famine to peasant action (or inaction).<ref name="fischer"/> | |||
===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.<ref></ref><ref name="sulz"></ref> ] resorted to violence in an attempt to silence the Ukrainians.<ref></ref><ref></ref><ref></ref> On ], ], in ], 8,000 Ukrainians marched from ] to 67th Street, while 500 Communists ran beside the parade and snatched the Ukrainians' handbills, spat on the marchers and tried to hit them.<ref></ref><ref></ref> Five persons were injured.<ref></ref> Only the presence of 300 policemen on foot and a score on horseback leading the parade and riding along its flanks prevented serious trouble.<ref></ref><ref name="sulz"> | |||
In ], on ], ], 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."<ref name="Mace"/> | |||
=== Holodomor denial by Foreign Dignitaries Visiting the USSR === | |||
Prominent British writers who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such as ] and ], are also on record as denying the existence of the Famine in Ukraine<ref></ref>. | |||
In 1988, the nonprofit ] held an ] to establish whether the famine existed and its cause. Tottle's book was examined during the Brussels sitting of the commission,<ref>{{cite web|first=Jacob W.F.|last=Sundberg|url=http://www.ioir.se/ukrfamine.htm|title=International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine. The Final Report (1990)|publisher=ioir.se|date=10 May 1990|access-date=4 November 2015|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041204224314/http://www.ioir.se/ukrfamine.htm|archive-date=4 December 2004|df=dmy}}</ref> 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.<ref>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</ref> | |||
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. The testimony of Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who visited the Ukraine in the summer of 1933 rejected tales of famine-genocide propagated by the Ukrainian Nationalists<ref></ref>. | |||
==Modern politics and law== | |||
The height of manipulation was reached during a visit to Ukraine carried out between ] and ], ], by ] ], who denied accounts of the famine. 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 ] visitors, Herriot met fake "peasants," all selected Communists or Komsomol members, who showed him healthy cattle.<ref>''Reflections'', p. 122</ref> 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 ] ] issue of '']'' was able to write that Herriot "categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeoisie press in connection with a famine in the | |||
{{See also|Holodomor in modern politics}} | |||
USSR."<ref></ref>. | |||
===Background=== | |||
The lack of knowledge of this genocide was observed by English writer ], 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 ] ]"''.<ref>George Orwell, "''Notes on Nationalism''" in "The ''Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell''" (], 1968), Vol. 3, p. 370.</ref> | |||
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,{{r|Monaghan_2015}} with over half viewing Stalin favourably in 2015.{{r|Anon_MT_2015}} 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.<ref name="Dobczansky">{{Cite journal |last=Dobczansky |first=Jurij |date=2009 |title=Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress |url=https://www.academia.edu/28799900 |journal=Holodomor Studies |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=155–164}}</ref>{{Rp|page=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 ] denies the genocide ever happened.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2017/11/27/russia-still-denies-holodomor-was-genocide | title=Russia still denies the Holodomor was 'genocide' | date=19 June 2022 }}</ref> A 2008 letter from Russian president ] to Ukrainian president ] asserted that "the tragic events of the 1930s are being used in Ukraine in order to achieve instantaneous and conformist political goals."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Kucera |first1=Joshua |title=Is Ukraine Next? |url=https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/02/is-ukraine-next.html |access-date=19 June 2021 |work=] |date=23 February 2009}}</ref> | |||
Orwell clearly knew of a press cover-up about the famine as in his 1945, Proposed Preface to Animal Farm he wrote: | |||
“…it 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.”<ref></ref> For an interesting 'work-in-progress' including a discussion on the influence of the Ukrainian Famine and Holodomor denial by Duranty on Orwell's book "Animal Farm" see Nigel Colley's article . | |||
== |
===Denial literature=== | ||
English-language publications are catalogued according to ] 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."),<ref>{{Cite web |last=Congress |first=The Library of |title=Holodomor denial - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies {{!}} Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress) |url=https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2009005520.html |access-date=2022-12-13 |website=id.loc.gov}}</ref> and ''Holodomor denial literature'' ("Works that make such assertions").<ref>{{Cite web |last=Congress |first=The Library of |title=Holodomor denial literature - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies {{!}} Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress) |url=https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2009005519.html |access-date=2022-12-13 |website=id.loc.gov}}</ref> | |||
===The 50th Anniversary=== | |||
The rallying and lobbying of the Ukrainian Community around the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor became a concern for the governing body of the Soviet Union.<ref name="symp"/> In February 1983, the ] of the ] (CPSU) activated its counter-] section to focus on the Ukrainian famine. The head of the directorate for relations with foreign countries for the CPSU, A. Merkulov,<!-- what is his full name?--> was given the task of directing ] to the West and contacted ], the chief idealogue for the Communist Party in Ukraine. The materials were to be sent to the ] (APN) centres in the ] and ] to demonstrate the "antidemocratic base of the Ukrainian bourgeois Nationalists, the collaboration of the ] and the ] Fascists during the ]."<ref>ЦГАООУ. Ф.1. Оп. 25 Д. 2719. Л.27-28. Подлинник.</ref><!-- Please check Bandera link -- that's what is meant there, right? Also, it would be better to write the ref in Latin characters. --> | |||
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 ] 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 ].<ref name="Dobczansky" /> | |||
In preparation for the expected rise in activity associated with the 55th anniversary, the Soviet Union launched a campaign of disinformation. In ], the ] (a pro-Communist Labour temple<!-- what does temple mean here? --> movement in the Ukrainian community) published numerous articles denying the Holodomor in Ukraine in its English and Ukrainian language magazines and newspapers. Through its chain of bookstore outlets, it distributed pamphlets and materials whose point supplied to them from the counterpropaganda section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 2007, correspondence and instructions from Soviet sources to the organization regarding the Holodomor have been made available for study by scholars. | |||
], a Russian state media outlet, ran an article denying the severity and causes of the famine in Ukraine.{{r|Young}} | |||
In an open letter to ] in August 1987, veteran dissident ] wrote about the denial of the Holodomor by the Communist Party of the USSR, and also Western denial.<ref></ref> | |||
<blockquote> | |||
<small>"The biggest and most infamous blank spot in the Soviet history of Ukraine is the hollow silence for over 50 years about the genocide of the Ukrainian nation organized by Stalin and his henchmen ... The Great Famine of 1932-33, which took millions of human lives. In one year - 1933 - my people lost more than throughout all of World War II, which ravaged our land."</small> | |||
</blockquote> | |||
]: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 best-selling book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. The chapter covering the early 1930s famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union goes into considerable detail but the term 'Holodomor' Snyder avoids entirely and does not explain why. | |||
===Douglas Tottle and Holodomor denial === | |||
In 1987 the Canadian trade-unionist and activist ], published the controversial book ''Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard'', where he claimed that the Holodomor was "fraudulent", and "a creation of ] propagandists".<ref name="tottle">Douglas Tottle, , Toronto: Progress Books, 1987. ISBN 0919396518</ref> By the author's own account, his book is only carried by 28 libraries around the world. His book, published by the pro-Communist ''Progress Publishers'' in ], appeared practically at the same time Ukrainian Communist party leader ] publicly acknowledged the Famine, in December 1987, and the book was subsequently withdrawn from circulation.<ref></ref> Nevertheless, the book is available on the internet, and continues to be cited as an "invaluable" and "important" book by groups such as the ] in ], author ], and others. | |||
=== Laws against denial === | |||
In a review of Tottle's book in the '']'', published by the pro-Communist Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, ] 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).<ref name="Szcz"></ref> | |||
Holodomor denial is a form of ] – falsification or distortion of the historical record about crimes against humanity – and as such it is subject to legal punishment in some countries.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wierczyńska |first=Karolina |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/1318993956 |title=Responsibility for negation of international crimes |publisher=Wydawnictwo Instytutu Wymiaru Sprawiedliwości |year=2020 |isbn=978-83-66344-43-3 |editor-last=Grzebyk |editor-first=Patrycja |location=Warsaw |pages=305–306 |translator-last=Matuszczak |translator-first=Mateusz |chapter=The Punishment of Negationism in the Experience of Central, Eastern, and Southern European States. Summary of the Second Day of the Conference |oclc=1318993956}}</ref> Ukraine's 2006 {{Interlanguage link|Law On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine|uk|Закон України «Про Голодомор 1932—1933 років в Україні»}} 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.<ref>{{Cite web |title= |script-title=uk:Про Голодомор 1932-1933 років в Україні |trans-title=On the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine |url=https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/go/376-16 |access-date=2022-12-13 |website=Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine |language=uk}}</ref> | |||
In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide,<ref>{{cite web |last=Sitnikova |first=Iryna |date=2022-11-30 |title= |script-title=uk:Німеччина визнала Голодомор геноцидом українського народу |trans-title=Germany recognized the Holodomor with the genocide of the Ukrainian people |url=https://hromadske.ua/posts/nimechchina-viznala-golodomor-genocidom-ukrayinskogo-narodu |access-date=30 November 2022 |website=Hromadske}}</ref> 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 '']'', section 130.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2022-11-25 |title=Germany seeks to declare Ukraine's Holodomor a genocide |url=https://www.dw.com/en/germany-seeks-to-declare-ukraines-holodomor-a-genocide/a-63883055 |access-date=2022-12-13 |website=DW |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=2022-11-25 |title=Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide |url=https://www.dw.com/en/germany-criminalizes-denying-war-crimes-genocide/a-63834791 |access-date=2022-12-13 |website=DW |language=en}}</ref> | |||
In his book, ''Searching for place'', Lubomyr Luciuk comments: "For a particularly base example of famine-denial literature, see Tottle, ''Fraud, famine, and fascism...''".<ref>Lubomyr Luciuk, ''Searching for place: Ukrainian displaced persons, Canada, and the migration of memory'', Toronto: ], 2000, p. 413. ISBN 0802042457</ref> | |||
== |
==See also== | ||
{{See also|Outline of genocide studies}} | |||
Tottle's book inspired a number of articles by other Holodomor deniers, such as ]'s article ''"In Search of a Soviet Holocaust"''.<ref name="conlon">Jeff Coplon, , '']'', ], ].</ref> This article not only denies the Holodomor, but also tries to associate those who continued to bring the Holodomor to the attention of the public with the ], even giving quotes from ]'s '']'' to stress this point. | |||
*] | |||
<blockquote> | |||
*] | |||
<small>"Just as the Nazis used the OUN for their own ends, so has ] exploited the famine, from his purple-prosed commemoration of "this callous act" to his backing of the Mace commission. ... But if people could be convinced that Communism is worse than fascism; that ] was an insane monster, even worse than Hitler; that the seven million died in more unspeakable agony than the six million ... One cannot appease an ], after all.<ref name="conlon" /> | |||
*] | |||
</blockquote></small> | |||
*] | |||
Coplon also penned the article ''"Rewriting History - How Ukrainian nationalists imposed their doctored history on High School Students"'' heavily relying on Tottle with his additional comments regarding the inclusion the Holodomor as one of a number of subjects included in the curriculum for social studies classes in New York. In the article published in the magazine "CAPITAL Region" March 1988, he wrote: <blockquote> | |||
*] | |||
<small>''"The losers, of course, are the New York state schoolchildren, who will absorb this disinformation between algebra and chemistry - and may even be asked to parrot the fraud for a higher score on their regents exam."''</small> | |||
*] | |||
<ref></ref> | |||
</blockquote> | |||
Other similar writings include an article by ] ("Fraud, Famine and Fascism", ''The Ukrainian Canadian'', April 1988); an unsigned article ("The Ukrainian Famine: Fact or Fiction"), which appeared in the '']'', ], ],<ref name="Szcz" /> and Challenge-Desafio's ("The Hoax of the Man-Made Ukraine Famine of 1932-33"),<ref></ref> which appeared in a newspaper of the ] in 1987.<ref>, ''Challenge-Desafio'', ], ].</ref> | |||
== |
== References == | ||
{{Reflist|refs= | |||
In 1989, ] (a professor at ]) published "Entfachte Stalin die Hungersnot von 1932-1933 zur Auslöschung des ukrainischen Nationalismus?".<ref>Stephan Merl, "Entfachte Stalin die Hungersnot von 1932-1933 zur Auslöschung des ukrainischen Nationalismus?", ''Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas'' 37 (1989), vol. 4, p. 569-590</ref> This publication, relying heavily on Tottle, describes the work of ] and ] as part of a campaign by Ukrainian nationalists to discredit the Soviet Union and pillory liberal journalists like Walter Duranty.<ref></ref> | |||
<ref name = Young>{{cite news|last1=Young|first1=Cathy|title=Russia Denies Stalin's Killer Famine|url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/russia-denies-stalin-s-killer-famine.html|newspaper=The Daily Beast|access-date=30 September 2016|date=31 October 2015}}</ref> | |||
<ref name=Anon_MT_2015>{{cite news|title=More Than Half of Russians See Stalin in a Positive Light|url=https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/more-than-half-of-russians-see-stalin-in-a-positive-light-43055|access-date=29 September 2016|agency=Moscow Times|date= 20 January 2015}}</ref> | |||
<ref name=Monaghan_2015>{{cite news|last1=Monaghan|first1=Jennifer| agency=Moscow Times|title=Was Stalin's Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think It Was|url=https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/was-stalins-terror-justified-poll-shows-more-russians-think-it-was-45301|access-date=29 September 2016|date=31 March 2015}}</ref> | |||
<!-- Not in use | |||
<ref name=Hyde_2015>{{cite news|last1=Hyde|first1=Lily|title=Ukraine to rewrite Soviet history with controversial 'decommunisation' laws|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/ukraine-decommunisation-law-soviet|work=The Guardian|date=20 April 2015}}</ref> | |||
Not in use--> | |||
}} | |||
===The Stalin Society=== | |||
== Further reading == | |||
Holodomor denial continues into the 21st century with the publication of "''The Ukrainian famine-genocide myth''", a pamphlet penned by prominent British physician ] and published in July 2002 by the ]. The Stalin Society itself has been described as "''tiny, ageing and schism-ridden''"<ref>, '']'', ] ]</ref>. Once again heavily relying on Tottle, facts are reinterpreted with sources questioned, numbers questioned and the whole history of the famine made to look like the continuation of the Cold War<ref></ref>. | |||
*Andreopoulos, George J., Ed. ''Genocide: conceptual and historical dimensions'', Philadelphia: ], 1994. {{ISBN|0-8122-3249-6}} | |||
==Symposia about Holodomor denial== | |||
* Boriak, H. (2001). . ''Harvard Ukrainian Studies'', ''25''(3/4), 167–186. | |||
In November 2007, an International Conference entitled ''The Ukrainian Holodomor and the Denial of Genocides'' was organized by the ], and held at ], in ]. The Ukrainian Ambassador, ], addressed the conference and spoke about the importance of international education and recognition of the Ukrainian Holodomor. ], from the Guarini Institute, read the paper: “''Ideology and Diplomacy: How the Ukrainian Famine Was—and Still is—Denied''.” In his presentation, Argentieri introduced the history of denial of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. Conflicting reports on the events in 1933 highlighted the willingness of the ] to ignore the plain facts witnessed by British government officials in the Soviet Union. At the time, political and economic interests took precedence over internal human rights matters. Argentieri noted that today, the famine remains virtually ignored, even in academic circles in the West.<ref></ref> | |||
*Colorosa, Barbara. ''Extraordinary evil: a brief history of genocide'', New York: Penguin Group, 2007. {{ISBN|0-670-06604-4}} | |||
*{{Cite Q|Q108386870}} | |||
*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'', ], 1982. {{ISBN|0-8191-2185-1}} | |||
*{{Cite book|last=Marson|first=James|title=Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine|publisher=Kashtan Press|year=2008|editor-last=Luciuk|editor-first=Lubomyr|location=Kingston, ON|pages=195–202|chapter=Holodomor denial protects Russia's self-image}} | |||
* New Internationalist. ''Justice After Genocide.'' December (385). 2005. | |||
*{{Cite web|last=Oliver|first=James|date=2014-11-17|title=On Holodomor denial, and fisking a denialist Russian professor of History|url=http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/12/17/on-holodomor-denial-and-fisking-a-denialist-russian-professor-of-history/|access-date=2021-10-15|website=Euromaidan Press}} | |||
* Mace, James. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210225172225/http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1987/528708.shtml |date=25 February 2021 }}, paper delivered at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century", New York, 13 November 1987. | |||
*Paris, Erna. ''Long shadows: truth, lies, and history'', New York: ], 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. , ], Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 70–89 | |||
*Taylor, Sally J. ''Stalin's apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times' 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. | |||
*]. ''Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing'', Oxford: ], 2002. {{ISBN|0-19-514868-1}} | |||
== Video resources == | |||
==Holodomor denial and Ukrainian law== | |||
] monument in ], the capital of ]]] | |||
On ] ], Ukraine's parliament, the ], 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 ]—118 deputies, ]—79 deputies, ]—30 deputies, 4 independent deputies, and the ]—2 deputies (200 deputies did not cast a vote). The ] voted against the bill. In all, 233 deputies supported the bill—a minimum of 226 votes were required for it to be passed.<ref>, ] ]</ref><ref>, ], ]</ref> | |||
* ''Harvest of Despair'' (1983), produced by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. | |||
A draft law "On Amendments to the Criminal and the Procedural Criminal Codes of Ukraine" was submitted by ] ] for consideration by the ]. The draft law envisages prosecution for public denial of the Holodomor Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine as a fact of genocide of the Ukrainian people, and of ] as the fact of genocide of the ]ish people. The draft law foresees 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.<ref>, ], ]</ref> | |||
== External links == | |||
==References== | |||
* Sokolova, S. (2019). . Journal of Modern Science, 42(3), 37–56. | |||
{{reflist|2}} | |||
{{Historical revisionism}} | |||
==Sources== | |||
{{Conspiracy theories}} | |||
*Andreopoulos, George J., Ed. ''Genocide: conceptual and historical dimensions'', Philadelphia: ], 1994. ISBN 0812232496 | |||
{{Genocide topics}} | |||
*Colorosa, Barbara, ''Extraordinary evil: a brief history of genocide'', New York: Penguin Group, 2007. ISBN 0670066044 | |||
*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 | |||
*New Internationalist. Justice After Genocide. December (385). 2005. | |||
*Paris, Erna. ''Long shadows: truth, lies, and history'', New York: ], 2001. ISBN 1582342105 | |||
*Springer, Jane, ''Genocide'', Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2006. ISBN 0888996810 | |||
*Tauger, Mark B., , ], Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 70-89 | |||
*], ''Becoming evil: how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing'', Oxford: ], 2002. ISBN 0195148681 | |||
*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'', ], 1982. ISBN 0819121851 | |||
*Taylor, Sally J., ''Stalin's apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's man in Moscow'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN 0195057007 | |||
{{Authority control}} | |||
==Video resources== | |||
* Harvest of Despair. (1983), produced by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre. | |||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Denial Of The Holodomor}} | |||
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Latest revision as of 20:00, 29 December 2024
Historical negationism regarding the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine This article is about historical negationism regarding the Holodomor. For the debate on whether it as a genocide, see Holodomor genocide question.This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (November 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
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Holodomor denial (Ukrainian: заперечення Голодомору, romanized: zaperechennia Holodomoru) is the claim that the Holodomor, a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur 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. 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.
Soviet Union
Cover-up of the famine
Soviet head-of-state Mikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling off "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."
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. In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" was "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. 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. 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."
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. 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.
The January 1937 census, the first in 11 years, was intended to reflect the achievements of Stalin's rule. 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.
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. 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".
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.
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 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." 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."
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 the Soviet Union
Walter Duranty and The New York Times
According to Patrick Wright, Robert C. Tucker, and Eugene Lyons, one of the first Western Holodomor deniers was Walter Duranty, who won the 1932 Pulitzer prize in journalism, in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on Soviet Union and the working out of the Five Year Plan. 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". 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." Some have disputed the validity of his distinction between death from starvation and death from disease that is exacerbated by malnutrition.
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."
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 famine in Ukraine was claiming lives "likely... numbered... by the millions" and driving those still alive to infanticide and cannibalism. The New York Times, 20 August 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 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." Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."
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."
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.
Another famine denier was Sir John Maynard. 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".
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". 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." 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.
Douglas Tottle
In the 1980s, the union organizer and journalist Douglas Tottle with the help of Soviet authorities wrote a book arguing that the famine in Ukraine was not genocide, 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". Tottle refused this name change, and as a result the book publication was delayed by several years.
In 1987, Tottle published the book in Toronto, Canada as Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard through Progress Publishers. In a review of Tottle's book in the Ukrainian Canadian Magazine, published by the 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". Historian Roman Serbyn responded that "in the era of glasnost, Szczesny could have rendered his readers no greater disservice". Serbyn likened Tottle's book to The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a work of Holocaust denial by Arthur Butz. Some of Tottle's material appeared in a 1988 article in the Village Voice, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right".
In 1988, the nonprofit World Congress of Free Ukrainians held an 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, 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.
Modern politics and law
See also: Holodomor in modern politicsBackground
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, with over half viewing Stalin favourably in 2015. 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. 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. 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."
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."), and Holodomor denial literature ("Works that make such assertions").
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.
Sputnik News, a Russian state media outlet, ran an article denying the severity and causes of the famine in Ukraine.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 best-selling book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. The chapter covering the early 1930s famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union goes into considerable detail but the term 'Holodomor' Snyder avoids entirely and does not explain why.
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. 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.
In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, 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.
See also
See also: Outline of genocide studies- Anti-Katyn
- Genocide denial
- Genocide recognition politics
- Holocaust denial
- Holodomor genocide question
- Holodomor in modern politics
References
- Dolot, Miron (1985). Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust. W. W. Norton & Company. p. xv. ISBN 0-393-30416-7.. ISBN 978-0-393-30416-9
- ^ Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, Vintage books, Random House Inc., New York, 1995, ISBN 0-394-50242-6, pages 235-236.
- ^ Edvard Radzinsky Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, Anchor, (1997) ISBN 0-385-47954-9, pages 256-259. According to Radzinsky, Stalin "had achieved the impossible: he had silenced all the talk of hunger... Millions were dying, but the nation hymned the praises of collectivization".
- ^ Robert Conquest (2000). Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1st ed.). New York City, London: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 96. ISBN 0-393-04818-7. OL 24766940M. Wikidata Q108386870.
- "Famine denial". The Ukrainian Weekly. 14 July 2002. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
- Shelton, Dinah (2005). Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity. Macmillan Reference. p. 1055. 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.
- ^ Dobczansky, Jurij (2009). "Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress". Holodomor Studies. 1 (2 ): 155–164.
- Conquest, Robert (30 July 1999). "How Liberals Funked It". Hoover Digest (3). Retrieved 4 November 2015.
- 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.
- 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
- Chamberlin, William Henry (1944). The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation. Macmillan. OL 6478239M.
- "What Is the Ukraine Famine Disaster of 1932–1933?". semp.us. 2 January 2005. Archived from the original on 9 November 2007.
- Chamberlin, William Henry (20 March 1983) . "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) - Conquest, Robert (2004). The Dragons of Expectation. Reality and Delusion in the Course of History. W. W. Norton and Company. p. 102. ISBN 0-393-05933-2.
- Boriak, Hennadii (Fall 2001). "The publication of sources on the history of the 1932-1933 famine-genocide: history, current state, and prospects". Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25 (3-4): 167–186.
- Catherine Merridale, "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule" Historical Journal 39, 1996
- Serhiychuk, Volodymyr Ivanovych (2006). Yak nas moryly holodom 1932-1933 Як нас морили голодом 1932-1933 [How we were exhausted by Starvation 1932-1933] (in Ukrainian) (3rd ed.). Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Centre for Ukrainian Studies. p. 322. ISBN 978-966-2911-07-7 – via Google Books.
- 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
- ^ Serhiĭchuk, Volodymyr (2006). Yak nas moryly Holodom 1932—1933 Як нас морили Голодом 1932—1933 [How they murdered us by Famine 1932–1933]. Kyiv: Kyiv National University. pp. 323–325. ISBN 966-2911-07-3.
- Kravchuk, Leonid Mayemo te, shcho mayemo: spohady i rozdumy, Kyiv, 2002, Stolittya (392 p.) ISBN 966-95952-8-2, pp. 44-46,
- Wright, Patrick (2007). Iron Curtain. Oxford University Press. pp. 306, 307. ISBN 978-0-19-923150-8.
He (Duranty) had become creatures of the Soviet censors
- Tucker, Robert (1992). Stalin in Power. Norton & Company. p. 191. ISBN 978-0-393-30869-3 – via Google Books.
- ^ Lyons, Eugene (1991). "The Press Corps Conceals a Famine". Assignment in Utopia. Transaction Publishers. pp. 572, 573. ISBN 978-0-88738-856-9.
- "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)
- Duranty, Walter (24 August 1933). "FAMINE TOLL HEAVY IN SOUTHERN RUSSIA: Death Rate During Last Year Has Trebled—Food Supply Now Held Assured. BREAD PRICE EXPLAINED Increase in Moscow Reported as Part of Move to End the Ration System There. FAMINE TOLL HIGH IN SOUTH RUSSIA". New York Times. Vol. 82, no. 27606 (Late City ed.). pp. 1, 9.
- ^ Duranty, Walter (31 March 1933). "RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING: Deaths From Diseases Due to Malnutrition High, Yet the Soviet Is Entrenched. LARGER CITIES HAVE FOOD Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga Regions Suffer From Shortages. KREMLIN'S 'DOOM' DENIED Russians and Foreign Observers In Country See No Ground for Predictions of Disaster". New York Times. Vol. 82, no. 27460 (Late City ed.). p. 13.
- "New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty". The New York Times Company. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- Muggeridge, Malcolm: The Green Stick: Chronicles of Wasted Time Volume I Chapter 5 (1972).
- Robert Conquest. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine Oxford University Press (1987), ISBN 0-19-505180-7, page 320.
- Meyer, Karl E. (24 June 1990). "The Editorial Notebook; Trenchcoats, Then and Now". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 September 2016.
- "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.
- Shkandrij, Myroslav (2019). Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017: history's flashpoints and today's memory wars (1st ed.). New York. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-429-31948-8. OCLC 1111577641.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7, pages 159-160
- ^ 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. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 March 2022. Retrieved 20 June 2021.
- Robert Conquest (2000). Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1st ed.). New York City, London: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 122. ISBN 0-393-04818-7. OL 24766940M. Wikidata Q108386870.
- Applebaum, Anne (2017). Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (1 ed.). New York: Doubleday. p. 338. ISBN 9780385538855.
- ^ Roman Serbyn (1989). "The Last Stand of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Deniers". infoukes.com. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
- 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
- In his book, Searching for place, Lubomyr Luciuk commented: "For a particularly base example of famine-denial literature, see Tottle, Fraud, famine, and fascism...", see Lubomyr Luciuk, Searching for place: Ukrainian displaced persons, Canada, and the migration of memory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000, p. 413. ISBN 0-8020-4245-7
- Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine, and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books. ISBN 978-0-919396-51-7. Archived from the original on 11 April 2005. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
- The Ukrainian Canadian, April 1988, p. 24)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Monaghan, Jennifer (31 March 2015). "Was Stalin's Terror Justified? Poll Shows More Russians Think It Was". Moscow Times. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
- "More Than Half of Russians See Stalin in a Positive Light". Moscow Times. 20 January 2015. Retrieved 29 September 2016.
- "Russia still denies the Holodomor was 'genocide'". 19 June 2022.
- Kucera, Joshua (23 February 2009). "Is Ukraine Next?". Slate. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
- 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.
- 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.
- Young, Cathy (31 October 2015). "Russia Denies Stalin's Killer Famine". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 30 September 2016.
- Wierczyńska, Karolina (2020). "The Punishment of Negationism in the Experience of Central, Eastern, and Southern European States. Summary of the Second Day of the Conference". In Grzebyk, Patrycja (ed.). Responsibility for negation of international crimes. Translated by Matuszczak, Mateusz. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Wymiaru Sprawiedliwości. pp. 305–306. ISBN 978-83-66344-43-3. OCLC 1318993956.
- 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.
- 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.
- "Germany seeks to declare Ukraine's Holodomor a genocide". DW. 25 November 2022. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
- "Germany criminalizes denying war crimes, genocide". DW. 25 November 2022. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
Further reading
- Andreopoulos, George J., Ed. Genocide: conceptual and historical dimensions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8122-3249-6
- Boriak, H. (2001). The Publication of Sources on the History of the 1932–1933 Famine-Genocide: History, Current State, and Prospects. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 25(3/4), 167–186.
- Colorosa, Barbara. Extraordinary evil: a brief history of genocide, New York: Penguin Group, 2007. ISBN 0-670-06604-4
- Robert Conquest (2000). Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1st ed.). New York City, London: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-04818-7. OL 24766940M. Wikidata Q108386870.
- 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
- Marson, James (2008). "Holodomor denial protects Russia's self-image". In Luciuk, Lubomyr (ed.). Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine. Kingston, ON: Kashtan Press. pp. 195–202.
- New Internationalist. Justice After Genocide. December (385). 2005.
- Oliver, James (17 November 2014). "On Holodomor denial, and fisking a denialist Russian professor of History". Euromaidan Press. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
- Mace, James. Collaboration in the suppression of the Ukrainian famine Archived 25 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine, paper delivered at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century", New York, 13 November 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' 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.
External links
- Sokolova, S. (2019). Technology of Soviet Myth Creation about Famine as a Result of Crop Failure in Ukraine of the 1932–1933s. Journal of Modern Science, 42(3), 37–56.
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