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By Dr. Roman Serbyn, Professor of Russian and East European History
University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
The Ukrainian Canadian magazine, February, 1989
Concluding his review of Douglas Tottle's book "Fraud, Famine and Fascism,"
Wilfred Szczesny writes: "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) In the era of glasnost, Szczesny could have rendered his
readers no greater disservice.
For an editor-in-chief of a Ukrainian magazine to invite people to consult
Tottle's tract is as appropriate as for a publisher of a Jewish periodical
to recommend "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" by the Holocaust denier
A.R. Butz. lf in Szczesny's statement quoted above the reader substitutes
"Holocaust" for "famine" and "Butz" for "Tottle", the affront to the
reader's dignity in both cases will become apparent. Tottle is no more
interested in discovering the truth about the forced starvation of
Ukrainians than Butz about the gassing of Jews.
Tottle is a self-confessed famine-genocide denier. No longer able to negate
the famine as such, Tottle questions its genocidal character. Traditional
famine-denial has been updated to famine-genocide denial, but the essence of
the ideological trappings is the same. Today's famine-genocide deniers are
the spiritual heirs of the first famine negators, Stalin and those who
helped him carry out the most heinous of crimes against the Ukrainian nation
or to deny its existence.
With his book Douglas Tottle has become a sort of guru to a strange
collection of latterday famine-genocide deniers. He has inspired militant
articles by Jeff Coplon ("In Search of a Soviet Holocaust", Village Voice,
12 January, 1988); Wilfred Szczesny ("Fraud, Famine and Fascism", The
Ukrainian Canadian, April, 1988); and Donne Flanagan ("The Ukrainian
Famine: Fact or Fiction", McGill Daily, 22 November, 1988). How vile and
trite is the campaign of the famine-genocide deniers should become clear
from the following three examples of how Tottle practices the misdeeds of
which he accuses others.
First, let us consider the photographs of the famine. Tottle latches on to
them as if they were the main proof of the historicity of the tragedy and
the principle argument for its classification as genocide. Tottle does this
because he thinks that the photographs form a weak link in the
famine-genocide story: break this link and the whole structure will
collapse. Well, this is not so. The famine has a solid documentary basis
(documents published in the West and in the Soviet Union) of which the
photographs form a very minor (and I might add, dispensable) component.
There are few photographs from the 1932-33 famine and we could hardly
expect otherwise, since the totalitarian regime wanted to keep the famine
hidden and took the necessary measures to ensure this.
Many more photographs have come down to us from the earlier Soviet famine
of 1921-23. Some of these pictures were eventually used in connection with
the
second famine and this fact provided Tottle with his basic argument against
the famine-genocide: photographs depicting a natural famine of 1921-22 in
Russia are used as proof of man-made starvation in Ukraine in 1932-33. To
make his accusation stick, Tottle resorts to a mixture of irrelevant truths,
half-truths and outright lies.
-
Tottle constantly refers to the Russian famine of 1921-22, but never
mentions the contemporaneous famine in Ukraine. Yet most of Tottle's
"illustrative" material is taken from Ukraine and not Russia. On page 32,
Tottle reproduces three title pages of what he describes as "publications
devoted to the Russian famine of 1921-22", even though two of them deal
only with Ukraine. One is "Holod na Ukraini," an excellent documentary by
Ivan
Herasymovych based on personal observations and containing excerpts from
the Soviet Ukrainian press and a number of photographs. Tottle identifies
the
second text (the reduced reproduction is almost illegible to the naked eye)
as "Dr. Fridjof Nansen's International Committee for Russian Relief,
Information No.22, Geneva, April 30, 1922", but fails to give the title of
the report contained on that page. It reads: "Famine Situation in Ukrania".
With the help of a magnifying glass the reader can decipher the following
revealing information about the famine conditions in Ukraine, sent by
Nansen's representative from Kharkiv on 22 March, 1922:
-
"(N)ot before the 11th of January of this year could the goubernia of Donetz
stop their obligatory relief work for the Volga district and begin to take
care with all their forces of their own famine problem, at a time when
already more than every tenth person in the Donetz was without bread. In the
beginning of March this year, you could still see, in the famine-stricken
goubernia Nicolaev (Mykolaiv), placards with 'Working masses of Nikolaev
(sic), to the help of the starving Volga district!' The goubernia of
Nicolaev itself had at the same time 700,000 starving people, about half the
population. On my way to Ukrania I sought information in Moscow about the
situation from presumably well informed persons. They told me that in
Ukrania the situation was very bad, about half a million people starving. In
reality the number was more than six times greater."
-
Further on, the envoy continues:
-
"The whole of the 4 goubernias of Odessa, Nicolaev, Yekaterinioslav
(Katerynoslav), and Donetz, as well as the southern parts of Krementchoug,
Poltava and Kharkov, are stricken by famine. Of a total population of about
16 million in these goubernias, between four and five millions are now
starving, and before the new harvest the number will perhaps have risen to
between six and seven millions. Almost the whole population of Ukrania is
suffering to a certain extent from lack of food and all the conveniences of
life, but the above mentioned millions are literally starving to death."
(p.2)
-
In a follow-up report, dated 13 April, 1922, and reproduced in the same
document, we read:
-
"Five million persons are now without food and probably more than ten
thousand die daily of starvation... In a word, the famine has reached such
dimensions and such insignificant relief is given, that the starving
population loses every hope and dies." (p.30)
What Nansen's man was describing was the first man-made famine in Ukraine
which lasted from 1921 to 1923 (and not 1922) and took 1.5 to 2 million
lives. In spite of the drought in its southern provinces, Ukraine had enough
grain to feed its population, provided the foodstuffs were kept in the
country and not exported. But during these two years Soviet authorities
removed enough agricultural produce from Ukraine to feed several times the
population which died from hunger. Ukrainian grain was sent to Russia both
years to feed the cities and the famished population on the Volga. (A severe
famine was also ravaging southern Russia, especially the Volga region.) The
second year it was also sold in Western Europe. Aid offered by foreign
countries was accepted immediately for the Volga region but let into Ukraine
only eight months later.
Since both famines in Ukraine were manmade, it was quite legitimate to use
in the film Harvest of Despair photographs from the famine of the 1920's
along with those of the 1930's. The weakness of the film lies not in these
photographs but in the insufficient explanation the film gave of the first
famine. This shortcoming has no bearing on the authenticity of the
famine-genocide of the 1930's. To suggest the opposite, as Tottle, Coplon,
Flannagan and Szczesny do, is to display ignorance or lack of intellectual
integrity.
-
Second, let us see how even the great Ukrainian historian Mykhailo
Hrushevsky is made to serve the famine-genocide deniers' propaganda
machine. Szczesny writes:
-
"Tottle cites a number of historians and other writers whose works
contradict the claim that the famine was a deliberate act of genocide,
including Isaac Mazepa amd M. Hrushevsky, both of whom discuss the
causes of the famine with no suggestion that it was a deliberate effort to
destroy the Ukrainian people."
Taken at face value, Szczesny's contention sounds serious. If Ukraine's
foremost historian could analyze the famine and find no deliberate action
against the Ukrainian people, then surely his findings carry more weight
than the claims of lesser scholars. And yet to anyone the least familiar
with contemporary Ukrainian it sounds incredible that Hrushevsky should
have written such things about the famine. What are the facts?
In 1941, Yale University Press published a translation of Michael
Hrushevsky's "History of Ukraine." As the Ukrainian text stopped in 1905,
the
editor, Professor O.J. Frederiksen of Miami University (Ohio), decided to
update it. Two chapters were added. One, entitled "Ukrainian Independence",
covered the period 1914-1918 and was based on Hrushevsky's other writings.
The second chapter, "Recent Ukraine", brought the events up to 1940; it was
written by the editor from notes provided by Dr. Luke Myshuha and had
nothing to do with Hrushevsky.
In the Frederiksen/Myshuha chapter references to the 1932-33 famine are very
skimpy, but there are two passages (p.566) that have some bearing on the
subject. Skrypnyk, the Commissar of Education in Soviet Ukraine, is reported
as having "committed suicide in 1933 in protest against Soviet policies
there, and in particular against the export of foodstuffs". It is also
claimed that after a year of drought and chaotic agricultural conditions,
"during the winter of 1932-33 a great famine, like that of 1921-22, swept
across Soviet Ukraine, again costing the lives of several million men, women
and children." (My emphasis - R.S.) In the next paragraph the reader learns
that "Hrushevsky was arrested in 1930 and transferred from Kiev to a town
near Moscow; he died on November 26, 1934, at Kislovodsk, in the northern
Caucasus."
-
Now let us see how Tottle reconstructs these references:
-
"However, "A History of Ukraine" by Mikhail (sic) Hrushevsky - described
by the Nationalists themselves as 'Ukraine's leading historian' - states:
'Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions; and
during the winter of 1932-33 a great famine, like that of 1921-1922, swept
across Soviet Ukraine...' Indeed, nowhere does History of Ukraine claim a
deliberate, man-made famine against Ukrainians and more space is actually
devoted to the famine of 1921-22." (p.91)
Tottle then adds laconically that Hrushevsky's was published posthumously in
1941 and that it was updated to 1940 based on notes by Dr. Luke Myshuha.
Tottle does not deem it necessary to mention the work of Professor
Frederiksen, or to specify when and where Hrushevsky died, although these
facts are essential to appreciate the reference to the famine. He does,
however, go out of his way to point out that Myshuha was "editor-in-chief of
Svoboda", and that he had "visited Berlin in 1939, speaking over Nazi radio
in Ukrainian," (p. 92) information quite irrelevant to the analysis of the
famine, but necessary to make the perfidious famine-Nazi link which I shall
discuss further on.
Here again we have a mixture of irrelevant truths, misleading half-truths,
and lies. The comments by Myshuha/Frederiksen on the famine are deformed
(damaging reference to Skrypnyk's suicide to protest the export of grain
while several million starved is left out), and even though Tottle does not
actually attribute them to Hrushevsky, he words his statement in such a way
as to create that impression. Whether Szczesny was privy to Tottle's ruse or
was duped by the insinuation, the result is the same; a lie about
Hrushevsky's alleged denial of the famine-genocide.
Third, a few words are in order on the subliminal Nazification of the
Ukrainian famine-genocide. If there is one common denominator to all the
famine-genocide denial literature, it is the effort to tie the Ukrainian
famine to the Nazis and sandwich between them that part of the Ukrainian
diaspora which defends the right of the Ukrainian nation to exist as a
sovereign state. Genocide deniers would be happiest if they could blame the
famine on the Nazis and the "Ukrainian collaborators" as Stalin pinned Katyn
on the Germans. But since this can not be done, they try the next best
thing: link with Nazis those who speak out about the famine (including
famine survivors and descendants of famine victims).
On the cover of Tottle's book one can see a photograph of a woman with an
undernourished child, and looming over the photograph a hand with a
paintbrush. The brush is about to be dipped into oilpaint profusely pouring
out of a tube marked with a swastika. What a disgusting spectacle, and yet
how descriptive of the author and the book! Isn't Tottle getting ready to
apply Nazi colours to the famine victims?
When one checks the book's table of contents one notices that only one
chapter is classified as "famine", the other nine deal with "fraud" and
"Fascism". In fact, at least ten times as much space is devoted to the task
of making the famine-Fascism connection as is given to the study of the
famine. Unabashed, the author admits that he "does not attempt to study the
famine in any detailed way". (p.1) He is more interested in the "Nazi and
fascist connections" and the "coverups of wartime collaboration" (p.3). Both
topics, even if they had been objectively treated, are completely irrelevant
to the study of the famine and can neither prove nor disprove the existence
of the famine or define the nature of the tragedy. (Many of Tottle's attacks
on the various segments of the Ukrainian diaspora constitute hate literature
and should be dealt with in our courts of law.)
-
The attempt to hush up serious examination and legitimate condemnation of
the famine-genocide, or to dismiss it as Nazi-related propaganda, makes the
writings of Tottle and the other famine-genocide deniers particularly
repugnant. They have the impudence to desecrate the memory of millions of
innocent people deliberately starved to death by criminals who have never
even been punished for their diabolical act. Perhaps it was people like the
famine-genocide deniers that Oleksandr Dovzhenko had in mind when he
made this entry in his diary written on the German front on May 4, 1942:
-
"If all the heroism of the sons of Ukraine in the Fatherland war, all the
sacrifices and suffering of (its) people, and all (their) victorious energy
after the war, cunning hands and pens of certain clever fellows throw into a
common...pot, and on account of Ukrainians, these same hands thrust
artificially created Hitlerite Petliurivshchyna and anti-Semitism with all
the consequences of slaughter-houses, it would be better for me to die and
no longer witness human baseness, bottomless hate, and fathomless eternal
lies which entangle us. (Dnipro, 1988, No.10, p.89)
-
In his review of Tottle's book Szczesny writes:
- "The theory of the big lie
is that the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated, the more it
will be believed." (p.22) Szczesny should have added that in order to render
their own lie more credible, the hoaxsters accuse their opponents of the
deception they themselves practice, while presenting their own fabrication
as a corrective to their opponents' alleged lie. Need we be reminded that
the real hoax is not the Holocaust but what Butz has to say about it and the
great fraud is not the famine-genocide but Tottle's treatment of it?
Documents on the famine published recently in the West (M. Carynnyk, et al,
"The Foreign Office and the Famine," Kingston, Ont., 1988, and others), and
in
the Soviet press (isn't it about time that the 'UC' reprinted some of them?)
leave no room for doubt that the famine in Ukraine was man-made. As Yuri
Shcherbak, the author of a novel on Chornobyl states, "the famine of 1932-33
was in no way a natural disaster. There was no drought, no hurricane as its
origin... The Ukrainian harvest of 1932 while not a record one was totally
adequate. Yet there was an unusual famine. From the beginning to the end it
was organized from the top.... Peasants, packed on train rooftops, tried to
flee the famished regions. But on the border between Russia and Ukraine...
units of border guards were stationed..." (Sobesednik, Moscow, 1988, No.49)
Is it legitimate to call this famine genocide?
Ten years ago few people outside the Ukrainian diaspora would have ventured
such an opinion: in the West because of what was thought to be a lack of
reliable evidence (diplomatic archives were closed and testimony from
"refugees" was viewed with suspicion), and in the Soviet Union because the
very subject was taboo. All this has radically changed in the last few
years.
Taking advantage of glasnost, Ukrainians began to speak openly about the
crime of the "33rd", calling it "man-made famine", "artificial famine",
"extermination by starvation (holodomor). Although they use the more
familiar traditional expressions, in their minds these terms are synonymous
with genocide". What else is the deliberate starvation of millions of
people, if not genocide? Occasionally, one even comes across the words
"holocaust" and "genocide" as when Wasyl Pakharenko answered those who do
not recognize the specificity of the Ukrainian famine. "The uniqueness of
our (Ukrainian) tragedy lies in this that in Ukraine, the social-class
genocide coincided with the cultural-national (genocide)." (Molod'
Cherkashchyny, Cherkassy, 1988, No.30)
The notion that the famine was genocide is also gaining acceptance in the
West. Michael R. Marrus, professor of at the University of Toronto, and the
author of "The Holocaust in History," in his forward to The Foreign Office
and
the Famine (cited above), comes to the conclusion that the evidence
presented by the British documents suggests that there was a genocidal
attack upon Ukrainians. Leo Kuper, professor emeritus at the UCLA and
author of Genocide, a pioneer work on the subject, writes in his latest work
"The Prevention of Genocide" about the "many millions who died in the Soviet
manmade (sic) famine of 1932-33". Kuper accepts the argument that "this
artificially induced famine was in fact an act of genocide, designed...to
undermine the social basis of a Ukrainian national renaissance." (p.50)
In the light of all the evidence we now possess on the famine, how bleak and
ignoble appear the statements of genocide deniers of the Stalin era
(unscrupulous journalists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times,
credulous and dishonest intellectuals like the British writer Bernard Shaw,
the French politician Edouard Herriot). It took fifty years to debunk their
big lie; how long will it take the defenders of truth to dispose of the big
lie promoted by Tottle and his supporters? The challenge is before the
Ukrainian community. Will The Ukrainian Canadian, for one, have the courage
to take it up and make the last stand of the famine-genocide deniers a short
one?
THE LAST STAND OF THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE-GENOCIDE
By Dr. Roman Serbyn, Professor of Russian and East European History
University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
The Ukrainian Canadian magazine, February, 1989
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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