Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

   64. Chamberlin, ‘Soviet Taboos’, 433.

   65. Carynnyk et al., eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine, 209.

   66. Chamberlin, ‘Soviet Taboos’, 432–3.

   67. Carynnyk et al., eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine, 202–9.

   68. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 574.

   69. Biographical details from Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to History (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2013).

   70. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 575.

   71. Jones’s diary was preserved by his sister at her home in Wales, rediscovered by his grand-nephew, Nigel Colley, and published as Gareth Jones, Tell Them We Are Starving: The 1933 Diaries of Gareth Jones, ed. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk (Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 2015).

   72. Gareth Jones, ‘Soviet Confiscate Part of Workers’ Wages’, Daily Express (5 April 1933), 8.

   73. Luciuk, Tell Them We Are Starving, 131.

   74. Ibid., 184–6.

   75. Gareth Jones, ‘Fate of Thrifty in USSR: Gareth Jones Tells How Communists Seized All Land and Let Peasants Starve’, Los Angeles Examiner (14 January 1935).

   76. Luciuk, ed., Tell Them We Are Starving, 190.

   77. Ibid., 204.

   78. Gareth Jones, ‘Famine Grips Russia, Millions Dying. Idle on Rise, Says Briton’, Chicago Daily News and Evening Post Foreign Service (29 March 1933), 1; Edgar Ansel Mowrer, ‘Russian Famine Now as Great as Starvation of 1921, Says Secretary of Lloyd George’, Chicago Daily News Foreign Service (29 March 1933), 2; Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to History, 183.

   79. Gareth Jones, ‘Press Release quoted in “Famine Grips Russia Millions Dying. Idle on Rise, Says Briton” ’, Evening Post Foreign Service (29 March 1933).

   80. Nigel Linsan Colley, ‘ “1933 Newspaper Articles”. Gareth Jones – Hero of Ukraine’, accessed 2017, http://www.garethjones.org/overview/articles1933.htm.

   81. Teresa Cherfas, ‘Reporting Stalin’s Famine: Jones and Muggeridge: A Case Study in Forgetting and Rediscovery’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, no. 4 (August 2013), 775–804.

   82. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 572, 575–6.

   83. Walter Duranty, ‘Russians Hungry But Not Starving’, The New York Times (31 March 1933).

   84. Margaret Siriol Colley, Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident (Newark, NJ: N. L. Colley, 2001).

   85. Thevenin, ‘France, Germany and Austria’, 9.

   86. Carynnyk et al., eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine, 329, 397.

   87. Snyder, Bloodlands, 50.

   88. Sally J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xx.

   89. Aleck Woollcott quoted in Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 191.

  15. THE HOLODOMOR IN HISTORY AND MEMORY

    1. http://taras-shevchenko.infolike.net/poem-calamity-again-taras-shevchenko-english-translation-by-john-weir.html. Originally published in Taras Shevchenko, Zibrannia tvoriv, vol. 2 (Kyiv, 2003), 303, trans. John Wier.

    2. Olexa Woropay, The Ninth Circle: In Commemoration of the Victims of the Famine of 1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Studies Fund, 1983), 16.

    3. Testimony of Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Chepur, in Veselova and Nikiliev, Pam’iat’ narodu, vol. 2, 758.

    4. Mytsyk et al., eds., Ukraïns’kyi holokost, vol. 4, 374.

    5. Testimony of Havrylo Prokopenko, in Kovalenko and Maniak, eds., 33-i Holod, 196–7.

    6. Testimony of Volodymyr Samoiliuk, in ibid., 95–6.

    7. Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 20.

    8. O. O. Zakharchenko, ‘Natsysts’ka propahanda pro zlochyny Stalinshchyny naperedodni i na pochatku Druhoï Svitovoï Viiny’, Naukovyi visnyk Mykolaïvs’koho Derzhavnoho Universytetu, Istorychni nauky 21 (2008), available online at http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/old_jrn/Soc_Gum/Nvmdu.

    9. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 117.

   10. Snyder, Bloodlands, 179–80.

   11. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 253.

   12. Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 35–7; Snyder, Bloodlands, 160–3.

   13. Alex J. Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and their Implementation’, in Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon, eds., Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 171.

   14. Snyder, Bloodlands, 164.

   15. Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and their Implementation’, 176.

   16. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 165.

   17. Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and their Implementation’, 106; Snyder, Bloodlands, 174.

   18. Woropay, The Ninth Circle, 16.

   19. Joseph Goebbels, ‘Communism with the Mask Off’, trans. the Nazi Party, Nazi and East German Propaganda Online Archive, last modified 13 September 1935, http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goebmain.htm; A. I. Kudriachenko, ed., Holodomor v Ukraïni 1932–1933 rokiv za dokumentamy politychnoho arkhivu Ministerstva Zakordonnykh Sprav Federatyvnoï Respubliky Nimechchyna (Kyiv: Natsional’nyi Instytut Stratehichnykh Doslidzhen’, 2008).

   20. O. O. Maievs’kyi, ‘Politychni plakat i karykatura, iak zasoby ideolohichnoï borot’by v Ukraïni 1939–1945 rr.’, PhD dissertation, Instytut Istoriï Ukraïny Natsional’na Akademiia Nauk Ukraïny (2016), 277–8.

   21. V. Kotorenko, ‘Rik pratsi v sil’s’komu hospodarstvi bez zhydo-bol’shevykiv’, Ukraïnskyi Khliborob 7 (July 1942), 2, cited in O. O. Zakharchenko, ‘Agrarna polityka Natsystiv na okupovanyii terytoriï Ukraïny’, Istoricheskaia Pamiat’ (Odessa) 2 (2000), 45–6.

   22. Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Ukraïna v ohni: Kinopovist’, shchodennyk (Kyiv: Rad. Pys’mennyk, 1990), 200.

   23. Berkhoff, ‘The Great Famine in Light of the German Invasion and Occupation’, 168.

   24. Ibid., 166.

   25. Ibid., 167.

   26. Bohdan Klid, ‘Daily Life under Soviet Rule and the Holodomor in Memoirs and Testimonies of the Late 1940s: Some Preliminary Assessments’, presented at the Canadian Association of Slavists 2015 Annual Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, 26 May 2015, citing S. Sosnovyi’s Nova Ukraïna (8 November 1942).

   27. Oleksa Veretenchenko, ‘Somewhere in the Distant Wild North’, from the series of poems 1933, published in Nova Ukraïna between 1942 and 1943, translated by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch, and available at http://faminegenocide.com/commemoration/poetry/2003-1933.htm.

   28. Berkhoff, ‘The Great Famine in Light of the German Invasion and Occupation’, 169.

   29. Ibid., 171.

   30. Svetlana Aleksievich, U Voiny ne zhenskoe litso (Moscow: Vremia, 2013), 11.

   31. Berkhoff, ‘The Great Famine in Light of the German Invasion and Occupation’, 169.

   32. Volodymyr Viatrovych, ‘Oleksandra Radchenko: Persecuted for her Memory’, Stichting Totalitaire Regimes en hun Slachtoffers, project of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, http://www.sgtrs.nl/data/files/Radchenko%20Oekraine.pdf.

   33. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 40–50; Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1946–47, the Weather and Human Agency in Historical Perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies 64, no. 6 (August 2012), 987–1,005.

   34. Woropay, The Ninth Circle, 16–17.

   35. Ibid., xviii.

   36. ‘Zum 15 Jahrestag Der Furchtbaren, Durch Das blutdürstige Kommunistische Moskau Organisikhten Hungersnot in der Ukraine’, Oseredok Project, Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. Flyers in Ukrainian, English, and German, distributed by Ukrainian participants at an 11 April 1948 demonstration in
Hanover, Germany, on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Famine of 1932–3 in Ukraine. Original, typed, http://holodomor.ca/oseredok-project.

   37. S. Sosnovyi, ‘Pravda pro velykyi holod na Ukraïni v 1932–1933 rokakh’, Ukraïns’ki visti (7 February 1948), 4.

   38. Klid, ‘Daily Life under Soviet Rule’.

   39. Ibid.

   40. Pidhainy, ed., The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 222–6.

   41. Ibid., vol. 1, 243–4.

   42. Ibid., vol. 1, 239.

   43. Bohdan Klid, ‘The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: Sixty Years Later’, Genocide Studies International 8 (2014), 224–35.

   44. Frank Sysyn, ‘The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33: The Role of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Research and Public Discussion’, in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocide (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 182–216.

   45. Klid, ‘The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: Sixty Years Later’, 229.

   46. Now the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre: www.ucrdc.org/History.html.

   47. Frank Sysyn, ‘Thirty Years of Research on the Holodomor: A Balance Sheet’, in Frank Sysyn and Andrij Makuch, eds., Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2015), 4.

   48. Pierre Rigoulot, Les Paupières Lourdes: Les Français face au Goulag: Aveuglements et Indignations (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1991), 1–10.

   49. Vladimir Tendriakov, ‘Konchina’, Moskva 3 (1968), 37.

   50. Michael Browne, ed., Ferment in the Ukraine: Documents by V. Chornovil, I. Kandyba, L. Lukyanenko, V. Moroz and Others (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 46.

   51. Ibid., 9.

   52. Iurii Shapoval, ‘Petro Shelest: 100th Anniversary of the Birth of One of Ukraine’s Most Spectacular Political Figures’, Den [The Day] (4 March 2008), originally published in Russian as ‘Stoletnii Shelest: 14 fevralia ispolniaetsia 100 let odnomu iz samykh koloritnykh rukovoditelei USSR’, Den (8 February 2008).

   53. Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the U.S.S.R.: An Underground Journal from Soviet Ukraine, compiled by Maksym Sahaydak, trans. Olena Saciuk and Bohdan Yasen (Baltimore, MD: Smoloskyp Publishers, 1976).

   54. John Corry, ‘TV Reviews: “Firing Line” Discussion on “Harvest of Depression” ’, The New York Times (24 September 1986).

   55. Sysyn, ‘Thirty Years of Research on the Holodomor’, 4.

   56. Ibid., 7.

   57. Ibid., 4.

   58. Douglas Tottle, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (Toronto: Progress Books, 1987), 57, 76–7, 123, 133.

   59. Lyudmyla Hrynevych, ‘Vid zaperechuvannia do vymushenoho vyznannia: pro mekhanizmy vkhodzhennia temy holodu 1932–1933 rr. v ofitsiinyi publichnyi prostir u SRSR ta URSR naprykintsi 1980-kh rr.’, Problemy istorii Ukraïny: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky: Mizhvidomchyi zbirnyk naukovykh prats’ 18 (spetsial’nyi: Holod 1932–3 rokiv-henotsyd ukrains’koho narodu) (2008), 232–44; Tottle, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism.

   60. Jeff Coplon, ‘In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right’, Village Voice (12 January 1988).

   61. Sysyn, ‘Thirty Years of Research on the Holodomor’, 9–10.

   62. U.S. Congress and Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–1933: Report to Congress, v.

   63. Ibid., vi–viii.

   64. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 310.

   65. ‘What Chernobyl Did: Not Just a Nuclear Explosion’, Economist (27 April 1991), pp. 21–3 (the anonymous author was Anne Applebaum).

   66. Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 309–10.

   67. Ivan Drach, ‘Vystup na IX Z’ïzdi Pys’mennykiv Ukraïny’, in Oleksandr Lytvyn, ed., Polityka: Statti, Dopovidi, Vystupy, Interv’iu (Kyiv: Tovarystvo ‘Ukraïna’, 1997), 310.

   68. Bohdan Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 62–3; see also ‘Conversation with Ivan Drach’, interview by Boriak Hennadii, 7 November 2016.

   69. David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random House, 1993), 50.

   70. Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence, 89–91.

   71. Ibid., 137.

   72. Georgiy Kasianov, ‘Revisiting the Great Famine of 1932–1933: Politics of Memory and Public Consciousness (Ukraine after 1991)’, in Michal Kopecek, ed., Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 197–220.

   73. Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence, 249.

   74. Marta Kolomayets, ‘Ukraine’s People Recall National Tragedy of Famine-Holocaust’, Ukrainian Weekly 61, no. 38 (19 September 1993), 1.

   75. Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 154–7.

   76. Ibid.

  EPILOGUE: THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION RECONSIDERED

    1. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’, unpublished talk, 1953, Raphael Lemkin Papers, The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Raphael Lemkin ZL-273. Reel 3. Available at https://www.uccla.ca/SOVIET_GENOCIDE_IN_THE_UKRAINE.pdf.

    2. Two excellent books have recently expanded popular knowledge of Lemkin. See Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell (New York: Basic Books, 2002), and Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ (New York: Knopf, 2016).

    3. Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 19–21.

    4. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79–95.

    5. Now published in Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, ed. Steven Leonard Jacobs (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012).

    6. Lemkin, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’.

    7. This is Naimark’s argument in Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

    8. Ibid., 24.

    9. Lemkin, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’.

   10. Georgiy Kasianov, ‘Holodomor and the Politics of Memory in Ukraine after Independence’, in Vincent Comeford, Lindsay Jansen and Christian Noack, eds., Holodomor and Gorta Mor: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland (London: Anthem Press, 2014), 167–88.

   11. ‘Ruling in the criminal proceedings over genocide in Ukraine in 1932–1933’, Human Rights in Ukraine, http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1265217823.

   12. ‘Ukraine Commemorates Holodomor’, Moscow Times (24 November 2008).

   13. Zenon Zawada, ‘Eastern Ukrainians Fight to Preserve the Holodomor’s Memory’, Ukrainian Weekly 67/7 (15 February 2009), 3.

   14. Cathy Young, ‘Remember the Holodomor’, Weekly Standard (8 December 2008).

   15. U.S. Diplomatic Cable, ‘Candid Discussion with Prince Andrew on the Kyrgyz Economy and the “Great Game” (29 October 2008)’, WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BISHKEK1095_a.html.

   16. Ella Maksimova, ‘Istorik Viktor Kondrashin: “Ne Rossiia ubivala Ukrainu, Vozhd’ – svoi narod” ’, Izvestiia (22 October 2008).

   17. Wolowyna et al., ‘Regional Variations of 1932–34 Famine Losses in Ukraine’, 175–202.

   18. Infamously, Lenin was so angered by the peasants of Penza in 1918 that he called for them to be ‘pitilessly suppressed’. He wrote a famous telegram about the Penza rebellion, which finished with a list of instructions:

  ‘Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloods
uckers.

  Publish their names.

  Seize all their grain …’

  Robert W. Service, Lenin: A Biography (London: Papermac, 2001), 365.

   19. V. V. Kondrashin and S. V. Kul’chyts’kyi, ‘O Samom Glavnom: professor Stanislav Kul’chitskii i ego rossiiskii kollega Viktor Kondrashin: chem byl Golodomor 1932–1933 godov?’, Den’ (Kyiv, 3 June 2008).

   20. Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Yanukovych and Stalin’s Genocide’, Ukraine’s Orange Blues in World Affairs Journal Online (29 November 2012) http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/yanukovych-and-stalin%E2%80%99s-genocide.

   21. ‘Ukrainian Sues Yanukovych over Famine Statement,’ Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, last modified 15 June 2010, http://www.rferl.org/amp/Ukrainian_Sues_Yanukovych_Over_Famine_Statement/2072294.html.

   22. Halya Coynash, ‘Kremlin’s Proxies Purge Memory of Victims of Holodomor and Political Repression’, Human Rights in Ukraine: Information Website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (18 August 2015), http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1439816093.

   23. Ekaterina Blinova, ‘Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime that Never Took Place’, Sputnik News (9 August 2015), https://sputniknews.com/politics/201508091025560345; see also Cathy Young, ‘Russia Denies Stalin’s Killer Famine’, Daily Beast (31 October 2015), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/russia-denies-stalin-s-killer-famine.html.

   24. In a peculiar sign of the times, newcoldwar.org, a website devoted to undermining ‘the great injustices … committed by the government installed in Kiev in February [2014] against the whole Ukrainian people’ created a link to the writings of Mark Tauger, an American academic. Tauger argues that the Ukrainian famine of 1932–3 was caused by poor weather and plant diseases (for which there is no archival evidence) and thus, by definition, was not a ‘genocide’. ‘Archive of Writings of Professor Mark Tauger on the Famine Scourges of the Early Years of the Soviet Union’, The New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond (23 June 2015). https://www.newcoldwar.org/archive-of-writings-of-professor-mark-tauger-on-the-famine-scourges-of-the-early-years-of-the-soviet-union.