The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Muggeridge alerted Ambassador Esmond Ovey at the British Embassy in London, who conveyed the message to Sir John Simon, Britain’s foreign secretary. Apparently, there were also numerous stories of suicide and cannibalism. The embassy smuggled these reports out in its diplomatic pouches. The Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper, printed some of Muggeridge’s reports but where readers would have to search to find them. He left the Soviet Union and returned to England where his reports were greeted with skepticism, especially from Beatrice Webb, his wife’s aunt, who called his coverage “a hysterical tirade” and publicly scorned him. Others vilified and slandered him. Consequently, he was unable to obtain work.377

  The first five-year plan included a collectivization policy in agriculture to facilitate the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, helping to make it a leading nation. Initially it had just seventy-nine tanks. The Soviets created collective farms on which peasants worked cooperatively on the same land, using the same equipment. Stalin wanted to increase the efficiency of agriculture and eradicate the hostile landowning kulak class. Collectivization was a main cause of the famine of 1932-33, which resulted in millions of deaths. From 1928 to 1940, the number of laborers in the USSR increased from 4.6 million to 12.6 million. They worked in construction, industry, and transport, mostly focusing on the militarization of the USSR.

  Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who first visited Russia in 1930, reported on the last three years of Stalin’s first five-year plan. The London Times published his first three articles. Jones kept a diary detailing the suffering of the Soviet peasants in Russia and Ukraine.378 He took a three-week walking trip through the famine area and on March 29, 1933, delivered a report about the starvation to a press conference in Berlin. He later gave a conference in London at Chatham House. Hubert R. Knickerbocker heard Jones and cabled The New York Evening Post, saying he believed him because “of his position, because of his reputation for reliability and impartiality and because he is the only first-hand observer who has visited the Russian countryside since it was officially closed to foreigners.”379

  The Manchester Guardian published Jones’s report, angering the Soviet press office. The Soviets clamped down on Western correspondents and demanded that they focus their coverage of Soviet events on the upcoming Metro-Vickers trial. On March 31, 1933, Duranty sprang into action, siding with the Soviets and doing everything he could to discredit Jones’s report. He admitted that there had been some “mismanagement of the collective farming” and that some “wreckers” and “spoilers” had “made a mess of Soviet food production.”380

  The Manchester Guardian had just published Muggeridge’s three articles (March 25, 27, and 28, 1933), as had several American newspapers, which also published the details of Jones’s Berlin press report.381 On March 31, 1933, Jones returned from his third investigative tour of Ukraine where he had taken a forty-mile walk through villages, speaking to peasants and sleeping in their cottages. Duranty viciously attacked and defamed Jones in the New York Times with an article headlined “Russians Hungry but not Starving.” He characterized Jones as a lying scaremonger and wrote, “There is no actual starvation or death from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition.” The Soviet press censor, Oumansky, gathered the foreign press and devised a way of discrediting Jones’s report. Duranty led the way in this endeavor with his article denigrating Jones and accusing him of falsifying the news. Eugene Lyons, author of Assignment in Utopia (1937), wrote, “Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” In April 1933, Jones wrote twenty additional articles about the famine that numerous newspapers, including the Welsh Western Mail and the Daily Express of London, published. In 1934, he went on a lecture tour throughout Britain, Ireland, and America titled “The Enigma of Bolshevik Russia.”382

  Duranty agreed that there had been “serious food shortages” but adamantly asserted that “there was no actual starvation or deaths from starvation.” He said that any deaths that occurred were due to diseases caused by malnutrition particularly in Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Lower Volga. Jones had talked with peasants and had witnessed the massive suffering, starvation, and death in twenty villages and would not retract his story that Russia was experiencing “a severe famine.” Meanwhile, other Western journalists, like Duranty, were referring to the famine as a “food shortage” and instead of talking about those who were starving to death, they cited the “wide-spread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” Duranty declared that the famine was “mostly bunk.”383

  Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign affairs commissar, cabled the Soviets’ London Embassy, which demanded that David Lloyd George ban Jones, who was fluent in Russian, from the Soviet Union, accusing him of espionage. In letter dated May 13, 1933, Jones wrote, “Everywhere I went in the Russian villages I heard the cry; ‘There is no bread, we are dying,’ and that there was famine in the Soviet Union, menacing the lives of millions of people.” He had “conversations with peasants who had migrated into the towns from various parts of Russia.” He said, “Peasants from the richest (most fertile) parts of Russia were coming into the towns for bread. Their story of the deaths in their villages from starvation, of the death of the greater part of their cattle and horses and each conversation corroborated the previous one… I talked with hundreds of peasants who were not the ‘kulaks’—those mythical scapegoats for the hunger in Russia—but ordinary peasants. I talked with them alone in Russian and jotted down their conversations, which were an unanswerable indictment of Soviet agricultural policy. The peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than in 1921 and that fellow-villagers were dying.”384

  The government’s policies reduced the population by six million farmers, who were allowed to perish. With fewer people, there seemed to be more food. The government said this was due to an increase in production. This is how governments spin facts. Stalin, apparently unaffected by such human loss, said that “only by conducting a battle of extermination against Social Democracy can one fight fascism.” Stalin viewed the horrific manmade famine of 1933 as a triumph for communism, even if it meant certain death for children. Industrialization and the success of world communism depended on starvation, shootings, and Siberia. The government said that the deaths, in “one of the world’s worst geographical misfortunes,” were essential to establish the system. Despite the irrationality of the justification, the Soviets claimed that the global anti-Soviet conspiracy had to be “ruthlessly broken.”385

  The Kremlin, intent on exterminating the kulaks, seized an abundance of food from the peasants. People suffered, starved, and perished by the millions. Stalin faked the census and inflated the statistics as the Soviets did not want “to frighten the bourgeoisie with big figures.” By early 1933, the Soviets, in an attempt to divert attention from their incompetence, failures, and “national suffering,” resorted to “sensationalism and spy scares.”386 Interestingly enough, at the same time, in the spring of 1933, international Jewry began to disseminate atrocity stories about the Germans and their alleged mistreatment of Jews living in Germany.

  Miron Dolot, a Ukrainian who miraculously survived the Soviet extermination policy, wrote about his day-to-day experiences in Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, published in 1985. The book is well worth the read. Many peasants slaughtered their livestock rather than deliver them to collective farms. In January and February 1930, the kulaks killed millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats. They either consumed the meat or traded it and the hides.387 Soviet officials, angered over the widespread slaughter, issued orders to prosecute “the malicious slaughtering of livestock.” Stalin instituted severe measures to halt kulak resistance. He wanted his agents to end their ability to produce sufficient food in order to eliminate them as a class.

  The Jewish-owned and—controlled New York Times misre
presented and concealed Stalin’s ruthless mass murder and his deliberate starvation of millions of people. His five-year plan facilitated the calculated starvation of at least five million middle-class Ukrainians, people whom Stalin saw as a threat. The Times and its editorial staff, along with Duranty, falsely claimed, “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.”388 They said, “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”389 On August 27, 1933, Duranty, in a special cable to the Times, said that weeds were a major problem and that their size made it impossible to use modern machinery. This, he said, was why farms were falling behind in Russia. He also claimed there was insufficient labor, creating an inability to harvest crops.390

  Andrew Cairns was a Canadian agricultural expert working for the Empire Marketing Board, formed in May 1926 by Leopold Amery (the architect of the Balfour Declaration). In the summer of 1932, he conducted three tours of Soviet agricultural areas to evaluate the consequences of collectivism. Cairns said “starvation is already rampant with pot-bellied children and people dying in the streets.” He anticipated a “catastrophe for the coming winter.” Will Zuzak wrote, “Although in 1932 the people were still defiant and offered passive resistance to collectivization, the huge death toll during the winter broke their spirit.” By the summer of 1933, Stalin’s terrorists controlled Ukraine. Pavel Postyshev, the key designer of the famine, was Ukraine’s dictator. He “directed all his energies in rooting out any traces of Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian culture and even the Ukrainian language. These actions clearly demonstrate the genocidal nature of the Holodomor.”391

  Dr. Otto Schiller, an agricultural specialist at the German Embassy in Moscow, accompanied Cairns, whose reports reached the desk of Ambassador Ovey, who conveyed them to Sir John Simon, the British foreign secretary. Cairns cited “a record of over-staffing, over planning and complete incompetence at the centre; of human misery, starvation, death and disease among the peasantry… the only creatures who have any life at all in the districts visited are boars, pigs and other swine. Men, women, and children, horses and other workers are left to die in order that the Five-Year Plan shall at least succeed on paper.”392

  Cairns and Schiller described a young boy on the verge of death, “standing holding up his little shirt displaying thighs only about three or four inches thick. As Schiller took a photograph of him, two women with tears streaming down their face, said, ‘that is what is going to happen to all of us. Will you give that picture to the newspapers in America, so that they will send us food?’” In early August, Cairns sent two telegrams, describing the “appalling loss animal draft power.” He also noted the population’s “widespread resistance” to collectivization. Cairns described the circumstances in Ukraine, Caucasus, Crimea, and Volga, where many ethnic Germans lived, exiled from the Reich by the treaties signed after World War I at Versailles. He described “acute widespread hunger.”393 So while Jewish leaders were accusing Germany of atrocities, their Soviet cronies were starving millions of exiled Volga Germans.

  The Empire Marketing Board, perhaps formed as a control agent in anticipation of the Soviets’ devious intentions, predictably failed to publish the results of Cairns’s agricultural study, Agricultural Production in Soviet Russia: A Preliminary Report as at May 1st, 1933.394 The British Foreign Office thought it wise to send Cairns back to the area, but his report was of such a “controversial nature” that the board withheld its publication for fear that Cairns would not get a return visa. In September 1933, before Cairns had the opportunity to return to Russia, the organization unexpectedly went into liquidation.395 Apparently, it had accomplished its aims.

  Years later, when people asked Cairns why he had not self-published the report, he said that he had received numerous threats from “powerful political figures” in Britain and feared for his life. One of those who threatened him was Beatrice Webb, who, with her husband Sidney, glorified Stalin’s accomplishments in a two-volume work, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. They blamed the peasants for the failures of collectivism. Schiller, Cairns’s associate, returned to the Soviet Union and thereafter published a report in Germany. Pravda immediately accused him of libel and of being “a tool of fascist masters.”396

  In mid-November, Duranty visited William Strang at the British Embassy in Moscow, who referred to him as a “shady character.” Duranty told Strang that the USSR’s livestock population had decreased by 40 percent from 1929 to 1930 because the peasants slaughtered the animals, but he failed to tell him why. Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Stalin’s favorite reporter, deliberately concealed the obvious evidence of the famine of 1932-33. Duranty spent a lot of time at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel where he was the “reigning social host.” William C. Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and George F. Kennan, who traveled to Russia with Bullitt, frequently socialized with Duranty. Kennan talked about the journalists and their “uproariously informal parties” attended by Russians and Americans.397

  Romanian-born attorney Henry Shapiro grew up in New York, attended Harvard and, because he was fluent in Russian, went to the Soviet Union at the end of 1933 to study comparative law. He soon entered the newspaper business. Starting as a cub reporter with the New York Herald Tribune, the Morning Post of London, and Reuters of London, he worked his way up to Moscow bureau chief for the United Press, position he held for the next forty years. He reported on Stalin’s purge trials398 and had a special relationship with the Kremlin. Shapiro understood the role of the press in the Soviet Union where officials considered it a branch of government. Unless reporters cooperated with the Soviets, they received no news stories and were not invited to functions. Furthermore, officials subjected foreign correspondents to the country’s strict press laws, which prohibited the publication of anything until after the government published it.399 Shapiro was one of the few American reporters who remained in Moscow during the Cold War400 and covered the USSR’s space program.401

  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election almost assured the official sanction of the Soviet Union. In November 1933, Duranty, with permission from the New York Times, accompanied Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to Washington to negotiate the conditions of this recognition. Since 1921, Duranty, with his positive coverage of Russia, had “cemented in the public’s mind” the idea that the Soviet style of governance was acceptable, even progressive, and deserved American recognition. Following Lenin’s death, Duranty described the “meteoric rise” of Stalin and the “growing strength” of the Communist Party. Bullitt, a millionaire diplomat and now the US ambassador to Russia, accompanied Duranty back to the Soviet Union.402

  A month after Duranty returned to the Soviet Union, Stalin granted him a private, one-hour interview during which the dictator expressed his views on diplomatic recognition by the United States. Time published Duranty’s full-page interview, complete with his photo. The interview took place on December 25, 1933. It would be the last time that Duranty saw Stalin, who told him, “You have done a good job in your reporting the U.S.S.R., though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.”403

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, said of the Soviet Union, “This was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine causing six million persons to die in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. They died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it. The world didn’t even notice it. Six million persons!”404 Leon Trotsky’s second wife, Natalya Sedovaya-Trotskaya, unperturbed by the millions who died, was the daughter of a Zionist banker, Ivan Zhivolovsky (Avram Zhivatovzo). Her father helped finance the Bolsheviks’ seizure of Russia. He had close ties to the Warburgs and the Schiffs.405

  Economic Assault against Germa
ny, 1933

  By 1910, Alfred Milner and his London Round Table cohorts focused on initiating a war against Germany. Alfred E. Zimmern, a political scientist, specialized in international relations.406 After moving to Britain, his parents, German Jews, brought their son up as a Christian. In December 1915, Zimmern, a Zionist, was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin and met Louis D. Brandeis, who told him about Chaim Weizmann, the head of British Zionism.407

  In 1918, Zimmern wrote The Economic Weapon against Germany in which he said, “The Central Powers are being besieged by practically the entire world and they have no means at their disposal for bringing the siege to an end.”408 In that book, he said that systematic, large-scale economic warfare was yet untried and that Germany would not anticipate its effectiveness. He and his cohorts would devise postwar plans at the Paris Peace Conference. While the blockade would ultimately end, they would make certain that Germany lacked access to raw materials, making industrial employment impossible. Without manufacturing, the returning soldiers would not find employment. The Allies, by confiscating and managing “essential supplies,” would incapacitate Germany and make recovery impossible, cutting the nation off from the seas, the markets, and the world’s supply centers.409

  This would cause food shortages and famine, affecting all of civilized Europe, if not the whole world for as long as three years. Zimmern wrote, “Who more naturally than Germany? It is not as if the boycott had to be organized. It will come about almost of itself unless special provision is made in the peace.”410 Fifteen years later, when Jewish perpetrators were planning another boycott, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise said, “Every form of economic discrimination is a form of violence.”411