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"Modern Communism," Editor: Ken Kalturnyk
Bulletin of the Manitoba Regional Committee,
Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) (MRCCPCML)
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Vol. 4, No. 38, December 8, 2003
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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.
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(Click on image to enlarge it)
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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.
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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.
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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.
LINK: http://www.modern-communism.ca/mc43803.htm
Manitoba Regional Committee, Communist Party of Canada,
(Marxist-Leninist), E-mail: cpcmlmb@mts.net
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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