If you have ever wondered why the Ukrainians are so determined not to be dominated by the Russians, Google StalinÂ’s famine. Mothers driven insane by starvation killed and ate their own children.
In 1922 the Soviet Union experienced severe famine conditions in some areas following on from the wars of intervention when imperialist powers had sought to crush the new Soviet state. Famine conditions recurred again in 1933, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Ukraine. There are two versions to this second famine that are radically different. An objective analysis indicates the famine to have resulted from a combination of poor climatic conditions and sabotage on the part of the rich peasants or kulaks in the face of the collectivisation of agriculture. Ukrainian nationalists however argue that the famine was deliberately contrived by Stalin in order to break the spirit of the Ukrainian people, and resulted in millions of needless deaths, in fact death and destruction on such a scale that it dwarfs the Nazi holocaust. Documentary evidence produced to support this claim is often endorsed by academics such as Robert Conquest, or James Mace of Harvard University. Such evidence is shaky in the extreme and often relies on discredited accounts from the 1930Â’s pro-fascist press in America, or even Nazi documents. Despite this it continues to resurface, most notably in the 1980s as part of an attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, and at the same time to fuel the cold war rhetoric of the Reagan era.
The same old grainy photographic images appear time and time again, purporting to show victims of the Ukraine famine, but these are almost always undocumented, or if traced back actually come from famine relief documents from the 1922 famine or even earlier. Cobbled together in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’ such pictures were shown on UK television despite having been rejected by some public service networks in the US because of a blatant lack of objectivity. Ukrainian nationalist organisations in Canada and elsewhere continue to propagate the notion of deliberate famine genocide, while carefully glossing over their own anti-semitic, pro-Nazi and collaborationist origins. A search on the web for ‘Ukrainian Famine Genocide’ resulted in 845 references to this ‘man made’ famine, as usual graphically illustrated with pictures for an earlier era. In this talk I will explore some of the background to these various claims and counter claims, with reference to the excellent book on the subject by Douglas Tottle (Fraud, famine and fascism. The Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard. Progress Books, Toronto, 1987. ISBN 0-919396-51-8)
Journalistic fraud in the 1930s
In the autumn of 1934, an American using the name of Thomas Walker entered the Soviet Union. After less than a week in Moscow, the remainder of his 13 day stay was spent in transit to the Manchurian border, at which point he left the USSR never to return. Four months later a series of articles began in the Hearst press in America, by Thomas Walker, “noted journalist, traveller and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia”. The articles described a famine in the Ukraine that had claimed six million lives, and was illustrated with photographs of corpses and starving children. Walker was said to have smuggled in a camera under “the most difficult and dangerous circumstances”.
Louis Fischer, an American writer living in Moscow at the time was suspicious. Why had the Hearst press sat on these sensational stories for ten months before publication? He established that WalkerÂ’s short visit to the Soviet Union could not possibly have allowed him to even visit the areas he described and photographed. He also pointed out that WalkerÂ’s photographic evidence was distinctly odd: not only were the pictures suggestive of an earlier decade (Fischer thought probably of the 1921 Volga famine) but contained a mixture of scenes taken in both summer and winter. Fischer also noted that the 1933 harvest in the Ukraine had been good.
Some of the pictures were subsequently identified as showing scenes from the Austro-Hungarian empire and World War 1, and it was known that Hearst newspapers were digging up old pictures and retouching them for use as propaganda. Pictures some times appeared labelled as having been taken in Russia, and at other times the same picture is relocated to the Ukraine for obviously political reasons. Not only were the photographs a fraud, and the trip to the Ukraine a fraud, but Thomas Walker himself was a fraud, turning out to be an escaped convict by the name of Robert Green who had served time for forgery. At his subsequent trial following recapture he admitted that his series of pictures used in the Hearst newspaper articles were fakes and were not taken in the Ukraine as stated. Despite these facts, the same photos are still those used in commemoration posters, on web sites and in the film ‘Harvest of Despair’
