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This article is about the claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved Ukrainians. For the description of events, see Soviet famine of 1931–1933.
The Holodomor is the name given to the claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved Ukrainians during the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. It's a propaganda campaign historically promoted by fascists against the Soviet Union to undermine its support both domestically and abroad.[1] The propaganda still continues to this day, particularly circulated and promoted by Western media[2] and Ukrainians who were affected by the famine.[3]
The claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved their people was first published in 18 August 1933 by the Völkischer Beobachter, a newspaper organ of the Nazi Party.[4] This claim was reproduced in a 6 August 1934 publication in the British tabloid London Daily Express,[5] and in several articles published since 18 February 1935 by the Statesian newspapers Chicago American and New York Evening Journal, both owned by corporate press magnate William Rudolph Hearst,[6] the founder of sensationalist yellow journalism. By the time these articles were published, there were already no longer signs of famine in the USSR. These newspapers used fabrications to illustrate their articles by using photographs from a past famine in the Soviet Union caused by the Russian Civil War.[7]
Etymology
The term Holodomor was first used in the 1980s by Ukrainian neo-Nazis, possibly as a way to link the word -- and famine -- to the earlier Holocaust. The word Holodomor was created from the Ukrainian words holod, hunger or famine, and mor, death. Thus the word means "death by hunger", despite the word holod already meaning the same thing.
Sources of claims
Ewald Ammende
Ewald Ammende published the book Muss Russland hungern? ("Must Russia starve?") in 1935 relying on sources from the Nazis, Italian fascists, and anonymous travellers. Many of his photos were from Ditloff, a member of the Nazi government, and some were found in books from 1922. Professor James E. Mace of Harvard republished Ammende's book in 1984 under the English title Human Life in Russia.[8]
Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest's 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow claimed that 14 million people died during the famine, while his earlier work The Great Terror claimed that 5–6 million died, half of which were Ukrainians. His book cites Black Deeds of the Kremlin 55 times.[8]
James E. Mace
James E. Mace based a claimed death toll of 7.5 million on flawed calculations from census data from 1926 and 1939. He assumed that the birth rate stayed the same year after year despite the civil war and famine. In addition, 2–3 million Kuban Cossacks were classified as Ukrainian for the 1926 census and as Russian in 1939, which lowered the (official) number of Ukrainians. According to official figures, the population of Ukraine increased by 3,339,000 from 1926 to 1939. A similar analysis of the population of Saskatchewan, Canada, that assumed a constant birth rate from 1921 to 1941 suggested a death toll of over 228,000 or 25% of the province's population.[8]
Thomas Walker
Thomas Walker, whose real name was Robert Green, supposedly entered the USSR in the spring of 1934 to photograph famine victims. Records show that he did not receive a visa until late September and entered the country on 12 October 1934 from Poland. He was in Moscow from 13 to 18 October and reached the Manchurian border by train on 25 October. It would have been physically impossible for him to visit all of the locations that he claimed in such a short amount of time. His photographs included pictures of a "frog-like" child from 1922 and an Austrian soldier in the First World War. After returning to the United States, Walker was arrested and admitted that he was never in Ukraine.[8]
Black Deeds of the Kremlin
Ukrainian Nazi collaborators published the book Black Deeds of the Kremlin in 1953, followed by a second volume in 1955. One of the authors of volume one, Alexander Hay-Holowko, was a member of the Nazi SS and Minister of Propaganda for the OUN. The book glorifies Roman Shukhevych, leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the pogromist Symon Petliura who led the Ukrainian National Republic from 1918 to 1920. Soldiers from a photograph of a supposed execution of kulaks are wearing Tsarist uniforms.[8]
Harvest of Despair
The 1983 movie Harvest of Despair relies on eyewitness accounts from German Nazis and their collaborators including Hans von Herwath, who recruited mercenaries for the Russian Liberation Army, and Nazi diplomat Andor Henke. The movie included footage from the Siege of Leningrad, parts of the movie Czar Hunger from the 1920s, and news footage from before 1917.[8]
Anne Applebaum
In 2017, Anne Applebaum published Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a novel aimed at showcasing the deliberately imposed (by the USSR and Joseph Stalin) nature of the famine conditions in 1931-1933. In response, the historian Mark Tauger published a review in George Washington University's History News Network platform arguing that Applebaum had inaccurately portrayed the famine conditions by misdefining the etymology of the term Holodomor, misrepresenting the dynamics of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, cherry picking or excluding sources, contradicting herself, and oversimplifying Soviet actions.[9]
Western claims about famine
Bourgeois and Eurocentric historians typically focus on these main categories in order to 'rationalise' their liberal consensus on the famine:
Soviet leadership intentionally caused famine
Bourgeois historians and media such as Encyclopædia Britannica and the film Bitter Harvest claim that the Soviet leadership deliberately caused the famine. However, archival evidence from the Soviet Union demonstrates that Stalin was initially unaware of the famine in Ukraine.[10]
Ukrainian nationalism
Bourgeois historians also claim that Stalin targeted the Ukrainians in order to eliminate Ukrainian nationalism. The areas which were affected by the famine were mostly areas where there was a significant Russian minority. The Ukrainians also considered Russians as their own, and they didn't advocate for an independent Ukraine.[11] The area with the most Ukrainian nationalists was western Ukraine, which was under Polish rule at the time. In addition, Stalin considered Russian nationalism a bigger threat than Ukrainian nationalism.[12]
See also
References
- ↑ Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Progress Books. ISBN 9780919396517 [LG]
- ↑ Holodomor, Britannica.
- ↑ Holodomor Remembrance Day, Holodomor Museum.
- ↑ “Featured in the Nazi press in 1933, the famine-genocide campaign moved to Britain in 1934, and to the United States the year after. In Germany, a country with a history of strong communist, socialist and trade union movements, the Nazis created the first organized propaganda campaign (1933-1935) as part of their consolidation of power. In Britain and the United States, on the other hand, the campaign was advanced as part of right-wing efforts to keep the Soviet Union isolated and out of the League of Nations. It also served to discourage growing working class militancy in the Great Depression.”
Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard (p. 2). Progress Books. ISBN 9780919396517 [LG] - ↑ “Portions of the 1935 Hearst-Walker series, including some of the photos, had in fact appeared the year previous in the August 6, 1934 London Daily Express. Attributed to an anonymous young English "tourist,” the story includes a virtually identical account of Walker’s "frog child” fabrication. However, this earlier version of the hoax locates the tale in Belgorod — which is in Russia proper. Subsequent versions of the hoax over the decades politically relocate the story to Kharkov, which is of course in Ukraine.”
Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard (p. 11). Progress Books. ISBN 9780919396517 [LG] - ↑ “In the fall of 1934, an American using the name Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After tarrying less than a week in Moscow, he spent the remainder of his thirteen-day journey in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. This seemingly uneventful journey was the pretext for one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated in the history of 20th century journalism.
Some four months later, on February 18, 1935, a series of articles began in the Hearst press by Thom as Walker, "noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia.” The articles, appearing in the Chicago American and New York Evening Journal for example, described in hair-raising prose a mammoth famine in the Ukraine which, it was alleged, had claimed "six million” lives the previous year. Accompanying the stories were photographs portraying the devastation of the famine, for which it was claimed Walker had smuggled in a camera under the "most adverse and dangerous possible circumstances." [...]”
Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard (p. 5). Progress Books. ISBN 9780919396517 [LG] - ↑ “Dr. Ditloff [...] was Director of the German government’s agricultural concession in the North Caucasus under an agreement between the German government and the Soviets. When Hitler took power in early 1933, Ditloff [...] did not resign in protest. He remained as Director for the project’s duration, indicating that the Nazis did not consider him inimical to their interests. Following his return to Nazi Germany later that year, Ditloff gathered or fronted for a spurious assortment of famine photographs. These, as has been shown, included photos stolen from 1921-1922 famine sources. In addition, at least 25 of the Ditloff photos can be shown to have been released by the Nazis, many of which were passed to or picked up by various anti-Soviet and pro-fascist publishers abroad.”
Douglas Tottle (1987). Fraud, famine and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard (p. 34). Progress Books. ISBN 9780919396517 [LG] - ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 Ludo Martens (1996). Another View of Stalin: 'Collectivization and the 'Ukrainian Holocaust' (pp. 85–95). [PDF] Editions EPO. ISBN 9782872620814
- ↑ Mark Tauger (2018-7-1). "Review of Anne Applebaum’s 'Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine'" History News Network.
- ↑ Fighting the “Holodomor” Myth: Archival Evidence that Stalin was Unaware of Conditions in the Ukraine and Tried to Relieve the Situation When He was Informed. - StalinSociety.org (Archived).
- ↑ Hakim (2 May 2017). "Why the Holodomor Narrative is Wrong". YouTube.
- ↑ “Comrade Stalin further referred to two anti-Party deviations on the national question: dominant-nation (Great-Russian) chauvinism and local nationalism. The congress condemned both deviations as harmful and dangerous to Communism and proletarian internationalism. At the same time, it directed its main blow at the bigger danger, dominant-nation chauvinism, i.e., the survivals and hangovers of the attitude towards the nationalities such as the Great-Russian chauvinists had displayed towards the non-Russian peoples under tsardom.”
Joseph Stalin (1939). History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): 'The Bolshevik Party in the Period of Transition to the Peaceful Work of Economic Restoration'. [MIA]