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Denial of theHolodomor is the claim that a 1932–33 man-madefamine that killed millions inSoviet Ukraine,[1] did not occur[2][3][4] or was exaggerated.
Thegovernment of the Soviet Union officially denied the occurrence of the famine and suppressed information about it from its very beginning until the 1980s. This Soviet denial was also circulated by some Western journalists and intellectuals.[2][5][6] Most prominently,The New York Times'Walter Duranty echoed Soviet denials in his reporting during the height of the famine.
According to Jurij Dobczansky, Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and "generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades," often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence, Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.[7]: 160
Rebekah Moore argues that Western recognition of the Holodomor reflects the broader politics of genocide and victimhood, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for acknowledgment, particularly among the Ukrainian diaspora.[8]
Soviet head-of-stateMikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling off "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."[4][9]
On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the United States, published a letter on 3 January 1934, in response to a pamphlet about the famine.[10] In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" was "wholly grotesque." He claimed that the Ukrainian population had been increasing at an annual rate of 2 percent during the preceding five years and asserted that the death rate in Ukraine "was the lowest of that of any of the constituent republics composing the Soviet Union", concluding that it "was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate oftsarist days."[11]
Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in theGulaglabor camps. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death.[4]William Henry Chamberlin was a Moscow correspondent ofThe Christian Science Monitor for 10 years; in 1934 he was reassigned to the Far East. After he left the Soviet Union he wrote his account of the situation in Ukraine and North Caucasus (Poltava,Bila Tserkva, and Kropotkin). Chamberlin later published a couple of books:Russia's Iron Age andThe Ukraine: A Submerged Nation.[12][13] He wrote in theChristian Science Monitor in 1934 that "the evidence of a large-scale famine was so overwhelming, was so unanimously confirmed by the peasants that the most 'hard-boiled' local officials could say nothing in denial."[14]
The true number of dead was concealed. At the Kyiv Medical Inspectorate, for example, the actual number of corpses, 9,472, was recorded as only 3,997.[15] The GPU was directly involved in the destruction of actual birth and death records, as well as the fabrication of false information to cover up information regarding the causes and scale of death in Ukraine.[16]
The January 1937 census, the first in 11 years, was intended to reflect the achievements of Stalin's rule. Those collecting the data, senior statisticians with decades of experience, were arrested and executed, including three successive heads of theSoviet Central Statistical Administration. The census data itself was locked away for half a century in the Russian State Archive of the Economy.[17]
The Soviet Union denied the existence of the famine until its 50th anniversary, in 1983, when the worldwide Ukrainian community coordinated famine remembrance.[citation needed] TheUkrainian diaspora exerted significant pressure on the media and various governments, including the United States and Canada, to raise the issue of the famine with the government of the Soviet Union.
In February 1983,Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, in a secret analysis "Some thoughts regarding the advertising of the Ukrainian SSR Pavilion held at the International Exposition"Man and the world" held in Canada" put forward a prognosis for a campaign being prepared to bring international attention to the Ukrainian Holodomor which was spearheaded by the Ukrainian nationalist community. Yakovlev proposed a list of concrete proposals to "neutralise the enemy ideological actions of the Ukrainian bourgeoise nationalists".[18]
By April 1983, the bureau of the Soviet Novosti Press Agency had prepared and sent out a special press release denying the occurrence of the 1933 famine in Ukraine. This press release was sent to every major newspaper, radio and television station as well as University in Canada. It was also sent out to all members of the Canadian parliament.[19]
On 5 July 1983, the Soviet Embassy issued an official note of protest regarding the planned opening of a monument in memory of the victims of the Holodomor inEdmonton[20] attempting to smear the opening of the monument.
In October 1983, the World Congress of Ukrainians led by V-Yu Danyliv attempted to launch an international tribunal to judge the facts regarding the Holodomor. At the 4th World Congress of Ukrainians held in December 1983, a resolution was passed to form such an international tribunal.[20]
Former Ukrainian presidentLeonid Kravchuk recalled that he was responsible for countering the Ukrainian Diaspora's public education campaign of the 1980s, marking 50 years of the Soviet terror famine in 1983: "In the early 1980s many publications began appearing in the Western press on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most horrific tragedies in the history of our people. A counter-propaganda machine was put into motion, and I was one of its wheels." The first book on the famine was published in Ukraine only in 1989, after a major shake-up that occurred in the Communist Party of Ukraine whenVolodymyr Ivashko replacedVolodymyr Shcherbytsky and the Political Bureau decided that such book could be published. However, even in this book, "the most terrifying photographs were not approved for print, and their number was reduced from 1,500 to around 350."[21]
This recognition of the Holodomor as genocide has played an instrumental role in shaping modern Ukrainian identity. as Lina Klymenko asserts, that Ukraine’s efforts to solidify its historical narrative of resilience and resistance against oppression are integral to its nation-building process.[22] The institutionalization of Holodomor remembrance has further distinguished Ukraine from Russia, reinforcing national unity and historical memory. As ultimately, former President of Ukraine (1991-94), Leonid Kravchuk, exposed the official cover-up attempts and came out in support of recognizing the famine, named the "Holodomor", as a genocide, noting "this was a planned action and that this was a genocide committed against the people. But we can’t stop there. Yes, it was against the people, but it was directed from a different centre."[23]
According toPatrick Wright,[24]Robert C. Tucker,[25] andEugene Lyons,[26] one of the first Western Holodomor deniers wasWalter Duranty, who won the 1932Pulitzer Prize in journalism, in the category of correspondence, for his dispatches on Soviet Union and the working out of theFive Year Plan.[27] In 1932, he wrote in the pages ofThe New York Times that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".[28] He said that while there was a bad harvest, and consequent food shortages, it did not rise to the level of a famine and that "there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."[26][29] Some have disputed the validity of his distinction between death from starvation and death from disease that is exacerbated by malnutrition.[26]
In his reports, Duranty downplayed the impact of food shortages in Ukraine. As Duranty wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March 1933, "These conditions are bad, but there is no famine" and "But—to put it brutally—you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."[30][29]
Duranty also wrote denunciations of those who wrote about the famine, accusing them of being reactionaries andanti-Bolshevikpropagandists. In August 1933, CardinalTheodor Innitzer ofVienna called for relief efforts, stating that the famine in Ukraine was claiming lives "likely... numbered... by the millions" and driving those still alive toinfanticide andcannibalism.The New York Times, 20 August 1933, reported Innitzer's charge and published an official Soviet denial: "in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals norcardinals". The next day, theTimes added Duranty's own denial.[citation needed]
British journalistMalcolm Muggeridge, who went to live in the Soviet Union in 1932 as a reporter for theManchester Guardian and became a fierce anti-communist, said of Duranty that he "always enjoyed his company; there was something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous, about his unscrupulousness which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing."[31] Muggeridge characterised Duranty as "the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."[32]
However, by the end of 1933, the new Roosevelt administration were actively looking to dismiss any bad news that came out from the Soviet Union, as tensions rose in Germany with Hitler's rise and the Japanese threat to expansion.[33] Duranty, played a role in the "cover-up" of the famine in Ukraine, as President Roosevelt “read Duranty’s reporting carefully – encouraged him to believe that there might be a lucrative commercial relationship too.”[33] With this Litvinov arrived in New York to sign and make this newfound partnership official with the accompany of Duranty. With no doubt Duranty's impact of denying the famine in his writing and his allegiance to the USSR further suppressed the idea of a famine even exisiitng in Ukraine, despite his writitng holding contradictory notions with his conversations with William Strang, as he reckoned "'it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food’, though that number never appeared in any of his reporting."[33]
An international campaign for the retraction of Duranty's Pulitzer Prize was launched in 2003 by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its supporters. The newspaper, however, declined to relinquish it, arguing that Duranty received the prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931. In 1990, theTimes published an editorial calling his work "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."[34]
Prominent writers from Ireland and Britain who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such asGeorge Bernard Shaw andH. G. Wells, are also on record as denying the existence of the famine in Ukraine.[3][35]
Another famine denier was Sir John Maynard.[36] In 1934 the British Foreign Office in the House of Lords stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government regarding the famine in Ukraine, based on the testimony of Maynard, who had visited Ukraine in the summer of 1933 and rejected "tales of famine-genocide propagated by the Ukrainian Nationalists".[citation needed]
During a visit to Ukraine carried out between 26 August – 9 September 1933, formerFrench Prime MinisterÉdouard Herriot, said that Soviet Ukraine was "like a garden in full bloom".[37] Herriot declared to the press that there was no famine in Ukraine, that he did not see any trace of it, and that this showed adversaries of the Soviet Union were spreading the rumour. "When one believes that Ukraine is devastated by famine, allow me to shrug my shoulders", he declared. The 13 September 1933 issue ofPravda was able to write that Herriot "categorically contradicted the lies of the bourgeoisie press in connection with a famine in the USSR."[38] It was alleged by anti-communist activistHarry Lang, who claimed to have visited Ukraine at the same time, that Herriot was shown a carefully stage-managed version of Ukraine that hid effects of famine and poverty.[39][38]
In the 1980s, the union organizer and journalistDouglas Tottle wrote a book with the help of Soviet authorities[33] arguing that the famine in Ukraine was not genocide,[40] under the title "Fraud, Famine and Ukrainian Fascism", to be published in Soviet Ukraine. However, before final publication, reviewers of the book in Kyiv insisted that the name of the book be changed, claiming "Ukrainian fascism never existed".[41][42] Tottle refused this name change, and as a result the book publication was delayed by several years.[citation needed]
In 1987, Tottle published the book in Toronto, Canada asFraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard[43] throughProgress Publishers. In a review of Tottle's book in theUkrainian Canadian Magazine, published by theAssociation of United Ukrainian Canadians, Wilfred Szczesny wrote: "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".[44] HistorianRoman Serbyn responded that "in the era of glasnost, Szczesny could have rendered his readers no greater disservice". Serbyn likened Tottle's book toThe Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a work ofHolocaust denial byArthur Butz.[40] Some of Tottle's material appeared in a 1988 article in theVillage Voice, "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right".[45]
In 1988, the nonprofitWorld Congress of Free Ukrainians held anInternational Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine to establish whether the famine existed and its cause. Tottle's book was examined during the Brussels sitting of the commission,[46] held between 23 and 27 May 1988, with testimony from various expert witnesses. The commission president Professor Jacob Sundberg claimed that Tottle received assistance from the Soviet government, based on information in the book that he argued would not have been available to the general public.[47]
The issue of the Holodomor has been a point of contention between Russia and Ukraine, as well as within Ukrainian politics. According to opinion polls, Russia has experienced an increase in pro-Stalin sentiments since the year 2000,[48] with over half viewing Stalin favourably in 2015.[49] Since independence, Ukrainian governments have passed a number of laws dealing with the Holodomor and the Soviet past.
By 2009, Holodomor denial was a matter of Russian government policy and the subject of its disinformation operations.[7]: 162 The Russian government does not recognize the famine as an act of genocide against Ukrainians, viewing it rather as a "tragedy" that affected the Soviet Union as a whole.[50] A 2008 letter from Russian presidentDmitry Medvedev to Ukrainian presidentViktor Yushchenko asserted that "the tragic events of the 1930s are being used in Ukraine in order to achieve instantaneous and conformist political goals."[51]
Although from writers such as Alexander Motyl, his research indicated that Soviet and Russian denialism has paradoxically strengthened efforts to preserve the memory of the Holodomor both in Ukraine and among Ukrainian diasporas.[52] The attempt to erase historical memory has motivated Ukrainian activists, scholars, and policymakers to institutionalize Holodomor remembrance as a central pillar of national identity. As former Ukrainian presidentLeonid Kuchma had established a nationalHolodomor Memorial Day in November of 1988, which was renamed to theDay of Memory for Victims of the Holodomors and Political Repressions in 2004.
English-language publications are catalogued according toLibrary of Congress Subject Headings distinguishingHolodomor denial ("works that discuss the diminution of the scale and significance of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 or the assertion that it did not occur."),[53] andHolodomor denial literature ("Works that make such assertions").[54]
In 2006, the All-Ukrainian Public Association Intelligentsia of Ukraine for Socialism published a pamphlet titledMif o golodomore (The Myth of the Holodomor) by G. S. Tkachenko. The pamphlet claimed that Ukrainian nationalists and the US government were responsible for creating the "myth". Russian publicistYuri Mukhin has published a book titledKlikushi Golodomora (Hysterical Women of the Holodomor), dismissing Holodomor as "Russophobia" and "a trump card of the Ukrainian Nazis." Sigizmund Mironin's"Golodomor" na Rusi (The "Holodomor" in Rus') argued that the cause of the famine was not Stalin's policies, but rather the chaos engendered by theNew Economic Policy.[7]
Sputnik News, a Russian state media outlet, ran an article denying the severity and causes of the famine in Ukraine.[55]
In hisUcraina. La vera storia ("Ukraine: The True Story"), Italian-Moldovan authorNicolai Lilin downplayed the Ukrainian specificity of the Holodomor by conflating it with theSoviet famine of 1930–1933.[56]
A chapter ofBloodlands by Timothy Snyder covering the early 1930s famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union goes into considerable detail, but the term "Holodomor" is avoided entirely, and Snyder does not explain why.
Holodomor denial is a form ofhistorical negationism – falsification or distortion of the historical record about crimes against humanity – and as such it is subject to legal punishment in some countries.[57] Ukraine's 2006Law On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine [uk] makes it illegal to publicly deny the Holodomor, recognizing it as an insult to the memory of victims and humiliation of the dignity of the Ukrainian people.[58]
In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide,[59] at the same time as it amended a law to criminalize the approval, denial, and "gross trivialization" of war crimes and instances of genocide in a new paragraph 5 of the German Criminal Code, theStrafgesetzbuch, section 130.[60][61]
The Soviet Union dismissed all references to the famine as anti-Soviet propaganda. Denial of the famine declined after the Communist Party lost power and the Soviet empire disintegrated.
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