The Famine That Never Was
A lot of noise has been made in the past few weeks about the 70th anniversary of the so-called "Ukrainian famine" of 1933-34. The media has been full of stories about the millions of Ukrainians who supposedly died in this famine and the Asper family has agreed to include a section on the "Ukrainian famine" in the planned Museum of Human Rights to be built in Winnipeg.
However, the "Ukrainian famine" is an event which never happened. It was entirely the creation of the Hearst newspaper chain and was exposed as a hoax at the time. Photos of the alleged Ukrainian famine victims published in the Hearst newspapers were discovered to have been taken in Hungary during the First World War. Dozens of American and British newspaper reporters spent weeks criss-crossing Ukraine during the height of the alleged famine and found no evidence of widespread hunger or deaths.
What was going on in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in 1933 and 1934 was a virtual civil war between the rich peasants - the Kulaks - and the Soviet system over the issue of the collectivization of agriculture. The kulaks, armed and financed by Nazi Germany and various Nazi sympathizers in the West, including William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford, had organized a systematic campaign of assassination of local Soviet government officials. The kulaks also gave a call for an agricultural strike in the spring of 1933, urging supporters not to plant crops and to destroy existing stocks of food. Their hope was to create food shortages in the cities and undermine support for the Soviet government. In areas where large numbers of peasants took up this call, localized food shortages did result. However, the vast majority of the Soviet peasantry, including the Ukrainian peasants, supported collectivization and produced bumper crops in those years, so widespread hunger was avoided. The kulak revolt never did enjoy much support from the peasantry and ended in 1934.
On the basis of massive amounts of evidence that no famine existed, during the 1930s claims of famine in Ukraine were dismissed as right-wing propaganda by all but the most rabid anti-communists and fascists. However, with the unleashing of the Cold War in the late 1940s, all of the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s was dredged up once again with the objective of discrediting communism. In North America, fertile ground for this propaganda was found among the million or so Ukrainian refugees and war criminals who had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and who were given safe haven in the United States and Canada. The thousands of Nazi war criminals who were recruited by the American and British intelligence services following the war also played a key role in the Cold War propaganda machine.
During the early 1950s, several books were churned out in Britain and the United States claiming to "prove" the existence of a Ukrainian famine in 1933-34. All of them shared a number of characteristics. First, they all claimed that more Ukrainians died in Joseph Stalin's "engineered famine" than the number of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, with the numbers ranging from seven million to over 20 million. This was done in order to claim that communism was even worse than Nazism, as well as to attempt to minimize the Holocaust. The fact is that the entire Ukrainian population within the Soviet Union at the time amounted to some 25 million people. If these claims about the number of deaths were accurate, it would mean that from 25 to 80 percent of all Soviet Ukrainians died in a matter of less than two years. However, the first post-war census in the Soviet Union, taken during the late 1940s, shows the population of Ukrainians at about 40 million. In the interim, Ukraine suffered extremely high casualties during the Nazi occupation and also lost at least another million people to post-war emigration. So, these figures of Ukrainian deaths are clearly fictitious, as no population could recover so rapidly from such a major loss.
Another characteristic of all of these books is that they openly admit that there is a total absence of credible eye-witness testimony about the Ukrainian famine. This would be inconceivable if the number of victims were even a fraction of the alleged seven to 20 million. Given the fact that approximately one million anti-communist Ukrainian refugees poured into North America in the late 1940s, the inability of numerous famine researchers to find a single credible eye-witness is simply too much to believe if the famine had actually occurred.
More recently and closer to home, in 1983 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of this so-called famine, the Ukrainian National Foundation, an organization founded by right-wing Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators, funded a thesis project by a University of Manitoba graduate student to document the "Ukrainian famine". The project received a tremendous amount of publicity when it was launched. This graduate student spent several years interviewing Ukrainians in both Canada and Ukraine about their experiences in 1933-34 in Ukraine. However, despite the enormous resources placed at his disposal and the co-operation of the Soviet government, he was forced to abandon his thesis because, by his own admission, he had failed to find a single credible eye-witness to what was supposedly the greatest genocide of the 20th century. Needless to say, the news of the abandonment of the thesis received little fanfare.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government fully opened its archives to access by Western scholars. During the mid-1990s an American research team spent almost two years combing through those archives, searching for evidence of various alleged "crimes of Stalin". These researchers admitted that they had found no evidence to support the claims that Stalin had committed crimes against the Soviet people. Despite this total absence of evidence, the news media and various anti-communist scribblers not only continue to repeat these lies as fact, but even claim that the "Ukrainian famine" and other "crimes of Stalin" have been confirmed by documents found in the Soviet archives.
The myth of the Ukrainian famine was created by the most reactionary sections of American society, beginning with open supporters of Nazism, such as William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford. The myth was resurrected by the anti-communist Cold Warriors of the 1950s in conjunction with a cabal of former Nazis, Nazi collaborators and Holocaust deniers. It was also subscribed to by some sections of the "Left" to justify their own anti-communism. To this mix has now been added the main apologists for the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. It is interesting that an individual who has been dead for 50 years can strike such fear in the hearts of all of these reactionaries that they find it necessary to continuously dredge up 70 year old lies to discredit his memory.