Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin's Crime That Never Took Place

Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin's Crime That Never Took Place

Ekaterina Blinova


Playing into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, a monument to the so-called
Ukrainian "Holodomor," one the 20th century's most famous myths and vitriolic
pieces of anti-Soviet Propaganda, has been erected in the US capital.

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Remarkably, the roots of the "Holodomor" ("deliberate starvation") myth lie in
the longstanding Cold War standoff between Soviet Russia and the West. After the
defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, infamous Nazi collaborators — members of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their paramilitary UPA
(Ukrainian Insurgent Army) units — fled into Western Europe and the United
States, escaping punishment for their hideous crimes, including ruthless terror
against peaceful Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians.

In 1949 the CIA and the US State Department sponsored the OUN-UPA leaders'
immigration to the United States, planning to use them as subversion groups and
intelligence agents in the Cold War against the Soviet Russia.

One of them, Mykola Lebed was characterized as "a well-known sadist and
collaborator of the Germans" by the CIA, according to Swedish-American historian
Dr. Per Anders Rudling in his book "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths." However, this fact did not prevented
the CIA from recruiting the former Nazi collaborator.

"Mykola Lebed [who was responsible for the murder of Poles in Volhynia and
Eastern Galicia] lived in Queens, New York, until the 1990s, totally supported
by the CIA or State Department," the US expert in Soviet history Professor
Grover Carr Furr of Montclair State University, narrated in an interview with
Sputnik in May, 2015.

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The CIA believed that Ukrainian nationalism could be used as an efficient cold
war weapon.

While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information
about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist
veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create
semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.

By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists
had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing
history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.


One of these myths was "Holodomor" that claimed that the USSR and its leader
Joseph Stalin deliberately starved to death from three to seven million
Ukrainians.

"In 1987 the film "Harvest of Despair" was made. It was the beginning of the
'Holodomor' movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists,
mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle, exposed the fact that the
film took photographs from the 1921-22 'Volga famine' and used them to
illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, 'Fraud, Famine, and
Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,' about the phony
'Holodomor' issue," Professor Furr elaborated.

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After the collapse of the USSR, the Ukrainian diaspora played a substantial role
in shaping the ideology of the new Ukrainian state. "Unlike many other former
Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national
myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian
diaspora," Dr. Rudling underscored.

However, it was under Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko (who gained his
power after the Western-sponsored Maidan uprising of 2004, also known as the
Orange Revolution) when the anti-Russian myth making caught its second wind in
Ukraine. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of "memory management" and "myth
making" were established in the country.

Both Russian and Western historians have questioned the "Holodomor" concept as
well as evidently exaggerated number of victims of the famine of 1932-33 in
Ukraine.

American historian Professor Mark B. Tauger, West Virginia University, carried
out thorough research on the famine of 1932-33 in the USSR, and came to the
conclusion that the disaster was due to environmental circumstances and was
evidently not related to the Soviet policy in the region.

"Popular media and most historians for decades have described the great famine
that struck most of the USSR in the early 1930s as "man-made," very often a
"genocide" that Stalin perpetrated intentionally against Ukrainians and
sometimes other national groups to destroy them as nations… This perspective,
however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even
rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and
it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to
create such as disaster. A small but growing literature relying on new archival
documents and a critical approach to other sources has shown the flaws in the
"genocide" or "intentionalist" interpretation of the famine and has developed an
alternative interpretation," Tauger wrote in his research work "Review of R.W.
Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture,
1931-1933."

Tauger stressed that climatic conditions played the main role in the famine of
1932-33.


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Paradoxically, supporters of the "Holodomor" myth remain silent about the fact
that Russia (including the territory of modern Ukraine) had suffered from
periodic devastating famines since the end of 19th century, long before
Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. They also ignore the fact that there were
serious famines in 1920-21, 1924, 1927 and 1928.

Interestingly enough, official Soviet Ukrainian primary sources show that the
1928-29 famine, caused by natural disaster, mainly draught, was very serious,
and Ukraine received more aid from the Soviet government, than it sent to other
parts of the USSR. This obviously disproves the false theory of the Ukrainian
nationalists' "malicious" conspiracy against Ukrainian peasants in the Soviet
Union, noted Grover Furr in his book "Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every
Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder's
Bloodlands Is False."

In response to historians who suggest that the Ukrainian peasants starved and
suffered especially because of Collectivization — Stalin's policy of the early
1930s aimed at consolidating individual lands into collective farms — Tauger
emphasized:

"These studies minimize or ignore the actual harvest data, the environmental
factors that caused low harvests, the repeated recovery from the famine and crop
failures, the large harvests of the 1930s, the mechanization of Soviet farms in
these years, Soviet population growth, and the long-term increases in food
production and consumption over the Soviet period" ("Soviet Peasants and
Collectivization, 1930-1939).


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According to the scholar, although the Stalin regime implemented
collectivization "coercively," the policy "brought substantial modernization to
traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively
high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s" ("Stalin, Soviet
Agriculture and Collectivization, 1930-1939").

Remarkably, the famine of 1932-33 was the last famine that struck the Soviet
Union with the exception for the famine of 1946-47 the country suffered from
after the Second World War.

Although the "Holodomor" myth was never based upon credible evidence and there
are enough authentic sources to prove that it is a hoax, it is simply taken for
granted. Unsurprisingly, Washington supports the myth as a part of its recent
Cold War-style anti-Russian campaign. Alas, even repeated a thousand times a lie
will never become the truth.

In
Sputnikknews
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150809/1025560345.html
9/8/2015