As most of us know, another famine struck the Soviet in 1932–1933 because of awful weather, plant disease, vermin infestations, limited trading options, and to a certain extent, anticommunist sabotage.
On the other hand, the “famine–genocide” or “Holodomor” is a popular conspiracy theory that this famine was not accidental but some sort of Sadistic plot to massacre Ukrainians, Ukrainian patriots, the petty bourgeoisie, anticommunists, or some combination thereof. It is quite popular among neofascists along with other anticommunists so as to demonize us, Russian people, and sometimes Jewish people as well (though I am sure that generic anticommunists would dismiss the conspiracy theory’s perpetual popularity among antisemites as an unimportant coincidence).
Recently Philip Colley, the grand nephew of Gareth Jones (somebody whom anticommunists cite to death), gave a devastating critique of this conspiracy theory:
Gareth Jones […] pointed to excessive grain appropriations and the “export of foodstuffs” by Soviet authorities as a cause but that it was “not so much the Soviet Government as the world crisis, which is to blame.”
Gareth wrote how he had “visited villages in the Moscow district, in the Black Earth district, and in North Ukraine, parts, which are far from being the most badly hit in Russia” and how “even twenty miles away from Moscow there was no bread.”
He described how he had “collected evidence from peasants and foreign observers and residents concerning the Ukraine, Crimea, North Caucasia, Nijni-Novgorod district, West Siberia, Kazakhstan, Tashkent area, the German Volga and Ukrain[e] colonists, and all the evidence proves that there is a general famine.”
In ‘Mr. Jones’, a film part-funded by émigré Ukrainian nationalists, the eponymous Welsh reporter only witnesses famine affecting Ukrainians in Ukraine. The real Mr. Jones reported on famine in all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, affecting multiple ethnicities.
Listening to the Senedd Members (MSs) that day one might think they had based their knowledge not on Jones’ extensive writings but instead on a 90 minute, highly fictionalised film. They appeared to have drunk the ‘Mr. Jones’ Kool Aid.
Misuse of Jones’s legacy has regularly featured in the flurry of ‘Holodomor as genocide’ resolutions in Europe since Russia’s invasion. His quotes have even been doctored in Parliament to remove references to non-Ukrainian areas.
Questions also need to be asked about Alun Davies’ opening statement. It is almost word for word the same as that delivered by Conservative MP Pauline Latham in a similar Westminster debate on 7th March 2023. Did they share the same researcher or were they simply reading out, without scrutiny, what had been presented to them by Ukrainian lobbyists?
Mr. Davies opens the debate by stating:
“The Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that means to inflict death by hunger. Today, we use it to mean the entire Stalinist campaign to eliminate the Ukrainian nation, which culminated in the forced famine of 1932 and 1933… it’s estimated that 7 million, and may be as many as 10 million, people died in Ukraine, with many more deaths in the neighbouring Soviet states.”
The shared provenance of what both said is deeply concerning but so too is its accuracy. That between 7–10 million Ukrainians died in the famine has long been discredited by independent scholars as politically inflated.
The true figure is now accepted to be between 2.6–3.9 million, a still horrific number, but one with academic credibility. The figure presented in the Senedd was arrived at in the 1980s by ultra-nationalist activists keen to present the famine as more devastating than the Holocaust.
Why ‘Holodomor’ activists would want to compete so is complex. It relates to the rôle of Stepan Bandera’s fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) who collaborated with the [Axis] to eliminate most of Ukraine’s Jews during the War.
The OUN-B has been accused of instrumentalising the ‘Holodomor’ to deflect from that involvement. Politicians allowing themselves to be unquestioning mouthpieces for foreign lobbyists should be a matter of concern.
The charge of genocide is a serious one. On whether the famine in Soviet Ukraine was genocide the jury remains out. Leading famine scholars Robert Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft, Lynne Viola, Michel Ellman, Mark Tauger, and even ‘Harvest of Sorrow’ author Robert Conquest, reject the genocide thesis.
Conquest is clear, “it wasn’t a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people… there are guilty people, but they aren’t the Russian nation.” Wheatcroft, co-author of “the Years of Hunger” wrote, “…nothing is gained by exaggerating the levels of deaths, by claiming that this was genocide, or that it was inflicted on Ukraine deliberately.”
[…]
Mick Antoniw […] leans heavily on the words of the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the person who originally coined the term ‘genocide’. In 1953, Lemkin stated that the famine was a ‘classic example of Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation’.
This is a powerful statement, much relied upon by ‘Holodomor as genocide’ advocates, and coming from such a towering figure in the world of genocide legislation it commands attention. But, unlike Jones, Lemkin was not a witness and was speaking at a time when no academic research had yet been undertaken on the famine. In fact, respected Ukrainian historian Professor John-Paul Himka disputes the very impartiality of Lemkin’s position.
Himka wrote, “The invention of the concept of genocide did not automatically give Lemkin the historical knowledge necessary to determine whether any particular case fit his definition or not… His thinking about Ukraine came later in the Cold War… at which time Lemkin was both marginalized and impoverished. He was, in fact, at that time dependent on the Baltic and Ukrainian communities for material support… Lemkin did not himself study the Ukrainian situation independently, but relied on information he obtained directly from émigré nationalists.”
Mick Antoniw is himself the descendant of an émigré ultra-nationalist. His father, Mychajlo Pavlovich, was a member of the fascist OUN-B in Zolochiv, scene of the notorious OUN-B and [Axis]-orchestrated Zolochiv pogrom, one of the first acts of the Holocaust in July 1941. Due to that association his father was unable to return home after the war and arrived in the UK at the same time that thousands of Ukrainians who had collaborated with the [Axis] were seeking sanctuary in the West to escape Soviet retribution.
Mick Antoniw has never publicly elaborated on his father’s precise role in the war, as far as I am aware, but himself has been pictured holding the red and black ‘blood and soil’ flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This is not an innocent flag. It belonged to the notorious armed wing of the OUN-B, an outfit heavily implicated in the Holocaust and the mass murder of as many as 100,000 Poles in Volhynia. According to Marvin Rotrand, national director of the League for Human Rights at B’nai Brith Canada, “the flag is consistently recognized as a fascist emblem and a hate symbol throughout the international community.”
The rest is indubitably worth reading, but I am going to end the excerpt here because I want to keep the length manageable. As somebody who respects Jewish people, I also want to take this opportunity to explain to you why equating this famine with an actual extermination campaign is wrong. Click here if you have time to read.
For decades, anticommunists have been clumsily attempting to equate the famine with the Shoah even though many Jewish adults do not want that. One example:
Jewish leaders say [that] it is unfair to link the Holodomor and the Holocaust, which Yuschenko reportedly plans to do by introducing a bill in the Ukrainian parliament that would recognize both the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust and the suffering of the Ukrainian nation in the Holodomor.
“We regret the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, but Yuschenko can’t equate the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holodomor in Ukraine,” said Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis.
(Needless to say, the Rabbi’s response made many neofascists unhappy.)
We know that the Third Reich intended to commit the Shoah because we have proof of intent. Quoting Tony Greenstein’s Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation, page 149:
Eichmann was told by Heydrich in late summer 1941 that ‘I have just come from the Reichsfuhrer: the Fuhrer has now ordered the physical annihilation of the Jews.’ Radio reports from the field of operations contained exact numerical reports of executions.¹⁵⁸ On 16 December 1941 Hans Frank told leaders of the GG of the need to ‘exterminate the Jews wherever we find them.’¹⁵⁹
Almost certainly there was no written order to destroy European Jewry.¹⁶⁰ There didn’t need to be. The word of the Fuhrer had the force of law: Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft.¹⁶¹ When one judge, Lothar Kreyssig, complained to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner about the immunity of the SD and Gestapo he was told that ‘the will of the Führer is the source of law’.¹⁶²
Hitler had always been open about what would happen in the event of war.¹⁶³ In talks with István Csáky, the Hungarian Foreign Minister, on 16 January 1939, Hitler ‘was sure of only one thing, the Jews would have to disappear from Germany to the last man.’¹⁶⁴ On 30 January 1939 Hitler made his ‘prophecy speech’ to the Reichstag:
Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race throughout Europe.¹⁶⁵
Those are only a handful of examples. In contrast, there was no Soviet equivalent to the Wannsee conference, let alone any of these statements. In fact, many famine–genocide conspiracy theorists theirselves will tell us that the Soviet famine of 1932–33 differs from the Shoah in that plans for the famine were ‘secret’, which is a tacit admission that their accusation is based on guesswork rather than evidence.
Throughout history, famines have commonly happened for natural reasons: drought, plant disease, vermin infestations, and more. It is true that oppressors have also used food deprivation as a killing method, as in colonial America, the Shoah and the Nakba today, but in all of those examples, many other killing methods accompanied food deprivation. The Axis and its collaborators exterminated five to six million Jews (and people who were legally Jewish) through bullets, explosives, hangings, fire, willful negligence (leading to dehydration, hypothermia, emaciation, illnesses, and suicides), involuntary experiments, and hand‐to‐hand combat, in addition to poisoning. Uncommon methods included drowning, vivisepulture, and running vehicles over victims.
While Soviet officials undoubtedly shot some of the petty bourgeoisie, emaciation and the diseases resulting therefrom were by far the commonest ways that millions died. If the Soviets wanted to annihilate as many innocents as possible, they surely would have exhausted all means at their disposal like many oppressors have historically. Not only is that not what the Soviets did, but we cannot even accuse the Soviets of criminal negligence: read № 144. Decree of Politburo of the CC VCP(b) or R.W. Davies’s & Stephen G. Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger for evidence that the Soviets supplied food aid to Ukrainians and others.
There are plenty more differences that I could point out between the famine, a tragedy restricted to the Soviet Union and lasted only about one year, and the Shoah, an extermination campaign that affected most of Europe along with few parts of Afrasia for several years (and undoubtedly would have extended further and lasted longer had the Axis been more successful), but I don’t want to continue testing your patience.
It should be unsurprising that we have evidence indicating that the famine–genocide allegation originated from antisemites. Grzegorz Rossoliński‐Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist says on page 205 that the Ukrainian anticommunists ‘believed that the Jews ruled the Soviet Union and were responsible for the famine in 1932‒1933’. Curiously, he did not mention that in his citation, and I was unable to access the sources given. There is no need to doubt his assertion, however. Quoting Wendy Lower’s Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, page 236:
They claimed that “as Jews” Kieper and Kogan were to blame for the famine and deaths of 8 million Ukrainians. See Ereignismeldung of 19 Aug. 1941, in Arad, Krawkow-ski, and Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 96–97. Statement of J. A. Bauer, 2 Aug. 1965, Callsen Trial, BAL, 207 AR-Z 419/62.
Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust, page 159:
As the [Western Axis powers] entered the Ukraine in the summer of 1941 one of their propaganda themes was Jewish responsibility for the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. As Stephen Wheatcroft has discovered, an illustration appears in the pages of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer showing the famous Jewish Bolshevik, Karl Radek, leering in the background while infants starve.
(I spent almost one hour looking for a good scan of that illustration, but to no avail.)
Returning to Rossoliński‐Liebe’s work, pages 434–435:
In the early 1980s the Ukrainian diaspora, in particular the Ukrainian communities that commemorated Bandera as their Providnyk, or the state proclamation of 30 June 1941 as an anti-German act, developed another essential nationalist narrative, namely of the artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine of 1932–1933, which they called the “Famine Holocaust” or the “Ukrainian Holocaust.” They thus drew a parallel with the destruction of European Jews during the Second World War, known since the late 1970s as the Holocaust.
The term “Holodomor” became popular in Ukraine and among the diaspora especially in the late 1980s. The phonetic similarity of Holodomor to Holocaust was not a coincidence. The immediate trigger for the nationalists’ famine discourse was the popular miniseries Holocaust, which was broadcast in 1978 by NBC and was watched by millions of North Americans. Presenting the story of one Jewish family from Berlin since the coming of the [German Fascists’] to power in 1933 until the end of the Second World War, the miniseries drew the attention of many North Americans to the destruction of European Jews.
The miniseries presented Ukrainians as [Axis] collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. Holocaust thereby clashed with the ideological Bandera symbolism and the way that the Ukrainian diaspora dealt with its past, particularly as to the denial of Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust and collaboration with [the Third Reich].⁹⁷
At that time and into the 1980s, relatively little demographic research had been conducted on the subject of the famine; this made it easier to exaggerate the number of victims. The approximate number of 2.5 to 3.9 million Ukrainian victims of the famine became known only in the early 1990s.
The nationalist elements of the diaspora claimed that during the “Holodomor” more Ukrainians were killed than Jews were during the Holocaust. In articles, leaflets, books and on monuments, they inflated the numbers to five, seven, eight, or 10 million Ukrainian victims of the famine.⁹⁸ They sometimes counted Ukrainian victims between 1921 and 1956 generally, and claimed 15 million victims, which figure they presented in contrast to the 6 million Jewish victims.⁹⁹
Roman Serbyn, Professor of East European history at the University of Montreal, at which Dontsov was teaching after the Second World War, wrote: “Much has been written in recent years about the man-made famine that ravaged Ukraine in 1932–1933 and caused the deaths of seven to ten million people.”¹⁰⁰ In an academic volume published in 1986, Marco Carynnyk compared the Ukrainian victims of the famine to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.¹⁰¹
The participants of the Holodomor discourse instrumentalized the suffering of the famine victims for various reasons, the most important of which were to draw attention to the Soviet [narrative] of the famine and to the political situation in Soviet Ukraine, and to respond to the accusations concerning Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust.¹⁰²
That antisemites would invent this allegation, then demand that it receive at least as much recognition and respect as the Shoah—it’s just a slap in the face.
[Footnote]
Quoting Douglas Tottle’s infamous Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, page 23:
Simultaneous with Hearst’s 1935 famine–genocide campaign, the [Fascist] press in Germany and similar papers elsewhere in Europe issued materials on the same theme. The [Third Reich] had been flogging the issue as early as 1933, complete with fraudulently mis-dated photos.¹ The official [NSDAP] organ Voelkischer Beobachter, publicized and lauded Hearst’s campaign in its article “William Hearst ueber Die Sowjetrussische Hungerkatastrophe” (William Hearst on the Soviet Russian Hunger Catastrophe).² The [Fascist] contributions to the campaign did not go unnoticed.
[…]
The propagandistic extension of the by-then non-existent famine was further embellished by the appearance in 1935 of a German-language book, Muss Russland Hungern? by Dr. Ewald Ammende.⁴ Its 1936 English-language edition, Human Life in Russia, has had a lasting influence on those who propagate the famine-genocide myth. The significance of Ammende’s book can be appreciated by the fact that it was republished in 1984 (after a 50-year lapse) concurrent with the Reagan-era Cold War.⁵
Human Life in Russia makes little pretence of objectivity. Ammende not only credits the accounts by Hearst press characters like Andrew Smith and Harry Lang, but brings in press accounts from [the Third Reich], [Fascist] Italy, and the émigré Nationalist press.⁶
Page 109:
A particularly vile example of Nazi-like hate literature appeared in the January 1935 issue of Klich (The Call), published by Anthony Hlynka, a Social Credit member of parliament from Vegreville, Alberta. It blamed the Jews for the famine:
This is the descendant of blood suckers who exploited Ukraine.
His ancestors robbed our fathers of the last strip of land.
His ancestors held the keys to our temples.
His ancestors were the informers against us.
His race barred the path to formation of our state.
His race murdered the leader of the Ukrainian Republic.
His race besmirched before the world the name of our great Chmelnitsky.
His race is responsible for the unprecedented terror in the Ukraine.
His race murdered by exiles, tortures and famine not only millions of our brothers and sisters but also millions of innocent children of the Ukraine.
His race has abused, debauched, polluted, corrupted and defiled the majesty of the Ukraine.³⁰
Two Ukrainian quislings of Moscow, D. Shumsky and M. Khvylovyj, who believed that Moscow as working for a better communist Ukraine but eventually realised that she was only expanding her empire, committed suicide. They were replaced by L. Kahanovych as Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and I. Shelehess, A. Shlihter, Y. Rahkis, among others, as assistant secretaries. All of them were Jews. The following Jews held positions in the Ministry of Police — V. Balicky, Karlsom, M. Latsis, F. Koch, C. Fuchs. […]
L. Kahanovych realised [that] he would have a monumental task in bringing the Ukrainian villagers to heel. They were hard-working farmers, fiercely proud of their livelihood and land and would defend these to the death. Moscow’s plan was to take all the land and reduce the villagers to virtual serfdom under the guise of collectivisation.
To achieve this, Kahanovych and the politburo organized a man-made famine in which 7 million Ukrainians died.¹⁵
Citation:
¹⁵ See Jurij Chumatskij, Why Is One Holocaust Worth More Than Others? Baulkam Hills, NSW, Australia: Busnessl Press Printing Pty, 1986, 31. The title page informs us that it is “Published by Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.” In today’s Ukraine, dominated by pro-[Axis] “nationalist” ideology, this group (often called by its Ukrainian initials UPA, for Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia) is praised as “fighters for independence.”
Of course, anticommunists shall be quick to dismiss both Douglas Tottle and Grover Furr saying that they aren’t real historians, as if that somehow invalidates their citations, so I have decided to restrict these observations to a footnote.
Although Fascist newspapers reported on the famine in 1933, it is unclear to me if they already went so far as to accuse the Soviets of malice (rather than incompetence) with regards to it. It would be perfectly in character for the Fascists to hastily make that accusation, but I have no quote from their 1930s papers to give as an example.
See also: Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine
Click here for events that happened today (November 6).
1936: As Francisco Franco suspended the executions of Basque priests considered supporters of the Republic, a small air corps and the Condor Legion, comprising 92 planes and 3,900 men, arrived from the Third Reich in Spain, coincidentally at about the same time that the Republican government fled from Madrid to Valencia. Apart from that, London signed the Agreement regarding Commercial Exchanges and Payments and the Commercial Agreement, with Annex at Rome.
1937: Rome joined Berlin and Tōkyō in the Anti‐Comintern Pact, around the same time that Mussolini, Ciano, and Ribbentrop held a meeting to discuss the Spanish Civil War.
1939: Per Sonderaktion Krakau, the Fascists arrested 183 professors of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, sending 168 of them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
1940: British, Sudanese and Indian troops counterattacked the Axis garrisons at Gallabat and Metemma.
1941: As the Empire of Japan’s military mobilized for war, Axis authorities took thousands of Jews to the Sosenki Forest outside of Rovno, and would massacre at least 15,000 (probably 17,500) over the next two days… be it any compensation, the Wehrmacht now showed signs of frostbite, and the Soviets inhibited the Finnish advance into Russia. Less importantly, the Reich commissioned submarine U‐595.
1942: The Axis officially lost the Battle of Madagascar, but its submarine U‐68 torpedoed and sunk the British passenger ship City of Cairo south of Saint Helena, massacring 104 of the 311 people on board.
1943: The Axis lost Kyiv to the Soviets (specifically the 1st Ukrainian Front).
1944: As the Axis garrison at Middelburg surrendered to the Allies, the Kingdom of Italy announced the formation of a private army about six divisions strong, to fight for the Allies, and the provisional government of France struck down all of its antisemitic laws.