Chapter 5

Denial

Denial lasts throughout and always follows genocide. If genocide goes unacknowledged, “[it] is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres,” warned Gregory H. Stanton of George Mason University. According to Stanton, denial includes the following actions typically taken by perpetrators:

They dig up the mass graves, . . . try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity . . . unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.¹

The position of Soviet authorities regarding the man-made nature of the Ukrainian famine and the Kazakh famine, as well as the ultimate destruction of “small” ethnic groups, such as Crimean Tatars or Chechens in the Soviet Union, are examples of denial of genocides against national minorities. Like their Soviet predecessors, Russian officials deny that the Holodomor constitutes a genocide. In 2017, two days before the Holodomor Remembrance Day, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova informed the international community that the Ukrainian government’s position that the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine was a genocide “contradict[ed] historical facts” and that claims about the uniqueness of the famine in Soviet Ukraine had been “politically charged.”² Moreover, Stalin, the key perpetrator of Soviet genocides³ including the Holodomor, is enjoying renewed popularity in Russia, and systematic denials of Stalin’s genocides have become the norm in the Russian Federation. Paula Chertok, a linguist, lawyer, writer, and daughter of Holocaust survivors from Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, believes that “these denials have taken on a distinctly nasty character” since Ukrainian–Russian relations rapidly deteriorated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. She argues that Russian “state-run media have been attempting to use Holodomor denial to boost their campaign against Ukraine and the West,” claiming that the calamity had been invented by Ukrainians and “perpetrated by neo-Nazis, who conveniently are also running the coup government in Kyiv.”⁴

Ukraine’s struggle for the affirmation of the Holodomor as genocide faces the challenge of Russia’s denial which protects its self-image.⁵ The denial has comprised an array of tactics: challenging the legal definition of the Holodomor as genocide, reinterpreting the genocide against the Ukrainian people as an “all-Union” famine, covering up the true extent of population losses, banning books on the topic, and silencing the truth.

LEGAL CHALLENGE

In its hybrid war⁶ against Ukraine, Russia has employed an arsenal of diplomatic and legal instruments.⁷ On November 28, 2006, Ukraine adopted the law “On the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine,” which recognized the cataclysmic historical event that occurred between the two world wars in legal terms as genocide against the Ukrainian national group and criminalized Holodomor denial.⁸ In 2007, Ukraine launched a campaign to achieve worldwide recognition of the Holodomor as genocide in the United Nations and other international organizations. In response, in April 2008, when the NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania, was discussing Ukraine’s membership, the Russian State Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly) adopted a resolution, stating that “there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds.”⁹ Earlier in March 2008, Valerii Loshchinin, Russia’s envoy to the United Nations office in Geneva, told the seventh session of the U.N. Human Rights Council: “We urge against political speculation on subjects related to the general, sometimes tragic, historical past, and against using this for a voluntary interpretation of the rules of international law.”¹⁰ The diplomat also argued that Ukraine’s Holodomor should not be recognized as genocide under the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide.

Deniers assert that Cold War politics shaped the drafting of the U.N. Convention on Genocide, “gutting” many of Raphael Lemkin’s original ideas and rendering it “stillborn.”¹¹ They further claim that because the term was coined a decade after the famine, the U.N. Convention of 1948 should not be applied retroactively. This argument has been refuted by legal scholars. The prohibition of genocide is a jus cogens norm,¹² to which the general rule of nonretroactivity does not apply. Besides, under the 1968 U.N. Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, no statutory limitations shall apply to crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide as defined in the U.N. Convention on Genocide, regardless of the dates of their commission, “even if such acts do not constitute a violation of the domestic law of the country in which they were committed.”¹³ The Convention on Statutory Limitations eliminated any potential domestic barriers to prosecution of persons for acts of genocide as a crime against humanity.

Significantly, the U.N. Convention on Genocide reflects the génocidaire ¹⁴ Stalin’s influence on the process. Both Stalin and his Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov read through and commented on a draft of the future Genocide Convention. In bold red pencil, Stalin crossed out the word “political” as a motivation for committing genocide, and Molotov crossed out the entire last paragraph on cultural genocide. They also eliminated the “shortcomings” in the draft theses that they found unacceptable from the Soviet standpoint, crossing out phrases like “forced labor” and “confiscation of property.”¹⁵ Clearly, Stalin could not incriminate himself.

Regrettably, Lemkin’s conceptualization of Soviet genocide against the Ukrainian nation remained obscured until 2008, when the international community commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the U.N. Convention on Genocide and his typewritten notes were published. Historian Roman Serbyn first encountered the source cited by French scholar Jean-Louis Panné.¹⁶ A proponent of Lemkin’s conceptualization ever since its “discovery” in the New York Public Library, Serbyn concluded that the Holodomor met the criteria set by Article II of the U.N. Convention on Genocide, arguing that the two categories “national” and “ethnic(al)” do apply to the Ukrainian case.¹⁷ The intent was “to destroy in part” the nationally conscious elites and a large portion of the most dynamic element of Ukrainian society, the farmers, so as to reduce Ukrainians to obedient Russified “cogs of the great state mechanism,” Stalin’s favorite imagery for Soviet citizens. Serbyn has deepened the conceptualization by highlighting two parallel elements in Stalin’s strategy to create a single state with a single Soviet people with a uniform consciousness:

In this way Ukrainians would be destroyed as a national and an ethnic group. To achieve this goal, Stalin used lethal means, starvation imposed on the Ukrainian farming population—the most costly in terms of human lives, but also executions and deportations to Siberia of any Ukrainians opposed or accused of opposition to the regime and its policies. The non-lethal method was “reeducation” of the society into loyal citizens of the [G]reat Russian state that Stalin was building.¹⁸

Putin’s hybrid war resembles Stalin’s strategy to subjugate Ukrainians, using both lethal and nonlethal means.

Ukraine’s response to the legal challenge was to investigate human rights violations by the Soviet government. On May 22, 2009, the Security Service of Ukraine brought a criminal case for the crime of genocide in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 and initiated court proceedings on the basis of Article 442 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.¹⁹ After examining the evidence, on January 13, 2010, the Kyїv Court of Appeals in Ukraine ruled that Joseph Stalin and his accomplices were guilty of perpetrating “the genocide of part of a Ukrainian national group by creating conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction.”²⁰ The legal experts found sufficient precedent to hold the perpetrators accountable, albeit posthumously.

THE “ALL-UNION” FAMINE

The Russian rhetoric behind the façade of the “all-Union” famine as a “tragedy of all the Soviet countryside”²¹ points to its economic causes and deflects attention from the national (in Soviet Ukraine) and ethnic (Ukrainian minority in the Russian SFSR) group that was targeted in the genocide. In an attempt to control the narrative, spurred by the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide in Ukraine, Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin of Penza State Pedagogical University, on behalf of the head of the Federal Archival Agency (Rosarkhiv) Vladimir Kozlov, issued instructions to Russian scholars and researchers regarding the proper presentation of the famine of 1929–1934 in the USSR. This conceptual framework for discussing the famine, as spelled out in Decree No. 47 of the Federal Archival Agency,²² issued on October 17, 2007, was conveniently cast in generic terms as “all-Union,” a tragedy caused by enforced collectivization and industrialization. Academics were ordered to use a preapproved collection of documents to conform their writing about the famine to the conceptual framework, with the purpose of suppressing anything that would demonstrate the unique situation in Soviet Ukraine.²³

This collection of archival materials became an instrument in information warfare with the aim to impose Russian political interpretation of the famine on academia and export it to Ukraine. First, on January 17, 2007, the Russian Federal Archival Agency sent a letter to the then head of the State Committee on Archives in Ukraine Olga Ginzburg with Kondrashin’s instructions (the only difference being the date range of 1932–1933 in the title), deliberately singling out the “Ukrainian factor” that had to be eliminated from the historical narrative.²⁴ The following year, the Russian Federal Archival Agency together with the “Historical Memory” Foundation²⁵ organized an international conference “The Famine in the USSR in the 1930s: Historical and Political Interpretations” in Kharkiv, held on the eve of the Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 21, 2008. Observers noted that it was similar to the Moscow conference of November 17, with the same participants; the only difference was that it was initially planned for Kyїv.²⁶ The participants included Viktor Kondrashin and Nikolai Ivnitskii, the authorities on famine research in the USSR, as well as Mark Tauger, professor of Russian and Soviet history at West Virginia University,²⁷ and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who used Russian archives to write his book, The Years of Hunger.²⁸ Experts from Belarus and Kazakhstan were also among the speakers.²⁹ However, the political agenda of the Ukrainian–Russian relations took precedence over historical research. Speakers at the plenary session included the Russian ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin and the director of the “Historical Memory” Foundation Aleksandr Diukov among others. The conference hosts were the vice mayor of Kharkiv and the head of the Kharkiv branch of the pro-Russia Party of Regions.³⁰ The conclusion on the causes, character, and number of victims of the 1929–1934 famine in the USSR had been prepared in advance and distributed on a CD with documents from Russian archives.³¹ The Russian position on the famine was repeated in an open letter to the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The letter accused then President Viktor Yushchenko of using the tragedy of the 1930s for legitimizing his political course aimed at “excluding Ukraine from the common cultural, historical and economic space of the unique East-Slavic civilization.”³² The conference was seen as a provocation and insult to Ukrainian national feelings; the opponents were not allowed to participate or present their arguments in any format because the conference was accessible by invitation only in a remote hotel far away from the city center. The conference had little resonance in the academic community in Ukraine. It served one purpose: to further intensify political polarization in society over the Holodomor.

When Raphael Lemkin’s speech, “Soviet Genocide in [the] Ukraine” became public, and the National Holodomor-Genocide Museum opened its exhibitions in Kyїv in 2008, Russia’s State Duma went on the offensive, promoting a counternarrative. “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were millions of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country,” the Russian State Duma resolution stated.³³ This purported ideological motivation is not supported by the facts. The scope and consequences of the “all-Union” famine differed drastically, so much so that based on the 1926 and 1939 population censuses, taken before and after the famine years, the number of Russians in the Soviet Union increased by 28 percent, while the number of Ukrainians decreased by 9.9 percent.³⁴

The “all-Union” famine argument is promoted in order to deflect attention from the responsibility of the Communist Party and its sentinel the GPU for the genocide committed in Soviet Ukraine, and to deny that it was perpetrated against nationally conscious Ukrainians. For scholars brought up in the service of the Communist Party, like the Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, respected by his Russian colleagues, the “all-Union” famine argument became their historiographical credo. Recently, Kul′chyts′kyi has revised his views and proposed the concept of a “famine within the famine,” the Holodomor as a unique phenomenon distinct from the “all-Union” famine.³⁵ To quote Marochko: “If there was the ‘all-Union’ famine, where was its epicenter?”³⁶

Scholars who focus on the economic causes of the famine ignore the fact that “total collectivization” of farms in Soviet Ukraine had been completed by the autumn of 1931 or the spring of 1932 at the latest, much earlier than in Soviet Russia. They dismiss arguments of James Mace, executive director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, who pointed out that the famine ravaged the republic after the harvest was collected in the autumn of 1932 through the winter and spring of 1933. The fact that the 1934 crop, substantially smaller than that of 1932, did not lead to famine (because quotas were lowered and grain was released from state stockpiles), means that in 1932, famine could also have been averted, had the central authorities in Moscow wished to do so.³⁷ Soviet sources on the grain harvests and state procurements show that the crop was larger in 1932 than in 1931, so crop failure was not the cause of the famine; rather, the reason was excessive state procurements that increased from 1929 on.³⁸ The climate took its toll in 1931 to a greater extent, and Soviet historiographers had seen 1931 as a worse year than 1932.³⁹ In the summer of 1932 Molotov, sent to the then Soviet Ukrainian capital of Kharkiv as Stalin’s personal emissary, “specifically cited the 1931 drought in the Volga basin, the Southern Urals, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan as one reason why Ukraine had to meet its obligations to procure grain for the central authorities.”⁴⁰

Ukraine’s “gold”—grain—was the major commodity for Soviet export, and its deliveries on the world market in millions of tons increased from 2.6 in 1929 to 48.4 in 1930 to 51.8 in 1932 but dropped significantly to 17.6 in 1933 down to 8.4 in 1934.⁴¹ On the global grain market, the Soviet Union faced a difficult situation with a foreign currency exchange due to the Great Depression of 1929–1933. The Soviet Union wanted to beat Canada as a world grain producer, but dumping the grain further depressed market prices. Little effort was made to import industrial equipment and technology on credit mainly because the formal recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States depended on paying off the old debt owed by previous Russian governments in the form of a percentage above the normal rate of interest on a loan granted by the government of the United States.⁴²

In the last months of 1932, collective farms, entire villages, and entire regions in Ukraine and the North Caucasus were blacklisted as grain-quota debtors. Blacklisting meant the requisitioning of all produce grown by the farmers on their private plots and stored for the six months to come until the new harvest. Grain was the first item subject to confiscation. This was a draconian measure as there was practically no grain left in the winter months of 1932–1933. Yet, quoting Soviet statistics, Mark Tauger claims that the 1932 harvest was smaller than anticipated or admitted.⁴³

The harvest was not bad, as many survivors recalled and scholars, such as Robert Conquest, James Mace, and Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, concluded.⁴⁴ It would have fed the population in Ukraine. James Mace in his report to U.S. Congress cited “post-Stalinist” statistics to show that this harvest was larger than those of 1931 or 1934 and referred to later Soviet historiography, describing 1931 as a worse year than 1932 because of drought. Mace argued that the 1932 harvest would not have produced mass starvation and

was not even news when it happened, because at the summer 1932 Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference the Communists in Ukraine were making it as clear as they possibly could that the quotas being imposed on them by Moscow could not possibly be met.⁴⁵

By the third year of requisitioning, the farmers had become convinced that, as in previous two years, the state would confiscate the entire harvest. Although the state tried to promote material interest in collective farming by transitioning in January 1933 from unlimited requisitions to tax obligations (bound by certain limitations) of the collective farms to the state, the farmers saw little incentive to work on collective farm fields and collectively sell produced crops on the market after fulfilling the predetermined obligations. They preferred to work their private garden plots to survive. This was deemed “sabotage.” Kul′chyts′kyi has argued that Stalin himself understood this situation perfectly and retreated from unlimited requisitioning, but nonetheless he told the party that he was delivering a “crushing blow” to the farmers.⁴⁶

The “crushing blow” was camouflaged as a winter grain procurement campaign. It is an established fact that it was a planned GPU operation that started in the fall of 1932 and continued in the spring of 1933. The GPU was tasked with suppressing an “armed uprising aimed at overthrowing the Soviet rule and establishing a capitalist order under the so-called Independent Ukrainian Republic.”⁴⁷ Concurrently, on February 16, 1933, the Communist Party issued directives to ban registration of cases of deaths due to starvation by civilian registries and transferred the registration to the GPU. Village councils were ordered not to list the cause of death. The GPU was also in charge of controlling the population movement and blockaded villages, thus preventing the starving escapees from procuring food elsewhere.

Some Western scholars, along with Tauger, continue to argue that famine was unavoidable and Stalin had no alternative but starve the villages to feed the cities and sell as much grain as possible abroad to pay for his grandiose plans of industrialization. Did Stalin have to take so much food from the countryside after the harvest of 1932 to starve millions of people to death? Did Stalin have to blame the failure to find nonexistent grain on the local Communist Party cells being infiltrated by “Petliurists” and various so-called enemies? Did Stalin have no alternative to building a superior socialist mode of production to compete with exploitative capitalist one by destroying the most prosperous segment of the farming population in Ukraine?

English economist Alec Nove and his followers treat assertions of the genocidal character of the famine in Soviet Ukraine skeptically. An often quoted aphorism penned by Nove, who disagreed with Robert Conquest’s claim about Stalin’s “crashing blow” having been directed against Ukrainians, is thus, “[Stalin’s motive] was surely to strike a ‘devastating blow’ at peasants in grain-surplus areas, many of whom were Ukrainians, rather than at Ukrainians, many of whom were peasants.”⁴⁸ Aphorisms like this, which focus narrowly on the agricultural policy, create an impression that Ukraine had no intelligentsia and all Ukrainians were “peasants.” In the 1930s, the world was largely rural, with 22 percent of urbanization level.⁴⁹ To put it into a global perspective, in the 1930s, in the United States, the percentage of urban was 56 in total population (corresponding to a nationally defined concept), whereas in the Soviet Union the percentage of urban was 19, approximating the world average. No other country in the world, except the Soviet Union, suffered such a drastic loss of population in the 1930s as recorded in the United Nations publication, but the loss was reported in aggregate without providing the percentage of population loss in Soviet Ukraine. Kazakhstan at the time was an autonomous republic within the Russian SFSR, and the mortality from the Kazakh famine in the 1930s skewed statistical trends in the Russian SFSR.⁵⁰ The epicenter of the 1932–1933 famine was in Soviet Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus and other grain-producing regions in the Russian SFSR, including Kazakhstan, where Ukrainian farmers settled, voluntarily or involuntarily.

Ukraine became the epicenter of the genocidal famine because it was one of the largest national republics with a strong tradition of national liberation struggle led by its patriotic intelligentsia, strongly rooted in the agricultural population. The Bolshevik slogan of the time was the struggle against “bourgeois nationalism” as the greatest threat.⁵¹ The previous achievements of Ukrainization in the districts of the North Caucasus that aspired to be reunited with Ukraine, as well as in the adjacent districts in the Central Black Earth with the majority Ukrainian population, were curtailed first. The emerging new Ukrainian identity was nipped in the bud, when the Ukrainization campaign was abruptly stopped outside Soviet Ukraine on December 14, 1932, and all leaders of Ukrainian educational and cultural institutions outside the republic in ethnically Ukrainian settlements were arrested, executed, or exiled to concentration camps in the Russian Far North and Siberia.

The crux of the matter is that Stalin employed both nonlethal and lethal means to achieve his goal. The nonlethal means included silencing the truth about the famine, propaganda in the press, and political literacy campaigns designed to ideologically subvert Ukraine’s population. The lethal means included special operations of the GPU to eliminate nationally conscious intellectuals⁵² and to suppress uprisings in the countryside that threatened to topple the Soviet regime.⁵³ The elimination of the nationally conscious intelligentsia through GPU special operations in the 1920s and the 1930s, the “brain” of the nation in Lemkin’s terms, resulted in thousands of deaths and enormous cultural disruption in Ukraine. In 1929, the GPU arrested 30,000 intellectuals, writers, scientists, and teachers for their alleged participation in the fictitious organization Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (known by its Ukrainian abbreviation as SVU), fabricated by the GPU to intimidate the rest of the population into submission. In the spring of 1930, forty-five of them were put on trial in the Kharkiv Opera House.⁵⁴

Among the arrested were leading Ukrainian historians. Serhii Iefremov, vice president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ governing council and secretary of its historical-philological division, was accused of being the leader of the SVU and was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. Like Iefremov, Iosyp Hermaize (of Jewish ancestry), the secretary of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ historical division, was vilified in the press ahead of the show trial, and, as soon as the trial ended, was exiled to a labor camp on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in Soviet Russia. Professor Hrushevs′kyi was exiled to Moscow in 1931. In 1934, his body was returned to Soviet Ukraine in a coffin (a lethal outcome of a minor surgery).⁵⁵

While the crème de la crème of the old Ukrainian intelligentsia, the living symbols of Ukraine’s struggle for independence, were prosecuted at the SVU trial, preparations were made to crack down on the opponents of the regime in the countryside. A secret resolution of January 30, 1930 “On Measures to Liquidate Kulak Households in Districts with Total Collectivization” spelled out methods of destruction in three stages. The first category was comprised of leading opponents of the regime, subject to immediate liquidation by execution or imprisonment in concentration camps. Those assigned to the second category were to be deported from Ukraine to far-off areas in the Russian Far North and Siberia with a stipulation to never return to their homeland. Clarence A. Manning, professor of Slavic Languages at Columbia University, wrote that by the end of 1932, as many as 2.4 million persons were forcibly removed from Soviet Ukraine to remote places.⁵⁶ People who fell into the third category were to be resettled on the worst land outside the collectivized villages.⁵⁷ Those who joined uprisings automatically lost their land ownership and citizenship rights.

Additional methods that led to lethal outcomes included special resolutions with instructions, drafted by Stalin, for executive committees on specific measures to put collective farms and independent farmers on blacklists (these included a series of measures, such as the suspension of trade and credit and the removal of all produce from stores).⁵⁸ Within a month, the targets for blacklisting became not only collective farms as units of socialist economy or village soviets as administrative units, but entire villages. “This, beyond doubt, underscores that the goal of the Bolshevik policy was not the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan (it was an excuse), but the creation for all the village residents of conditions incompatible with life,” noted Heorhii Papakin.⁵⁹ Eventually, as of January 1933, the Ukrainian SSR as a whole was secretly blacklisted.⁶⁰ As the authorities brutally confiscated all grain and everything edible, they simultaneously sealed the borders of Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban′ in the North Caucasus, banning travel to Russian regions (Central Black Earth, the Lower Volga, and Moscow), as well as to Belarus, to procure food.⁶¹ Population movement was controlled by special military detachments and GPU patrols.⁶²

By 1934, the last remnants of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) were suppressed. Four successive Metropolitans of the UAOC were arrested and executed during the Great Terror. In addition, thirteen archbishops and bishops were reported dead in Soviet prisons, while in all 1,150 priests and some 20,000 members of parish and district church councils perished in concentration camps.⁶³ At the end of 1932, over a thousand churches were closed in Soviet Ukraine. Between 1934 and 1936, about 80 percent of the remaining churches in Soviet Ukraine were destroyed.⁶⁴

The assault on Ukrainian intellectuals from the 1920s to 1930s, as well as on Ukrainian clergy and farmers, constituted what Raphael Lemkin later would identify as genocide.⁶⁵ The demographic composition of Ukrainian villages was changed when Russian veterans and loyalists with their families were settled in the areas depopulated by the famine.⁶⁶ The memories of horrid experiences of starvation, deaths, and displacement haunted those who survived the Holodomor for generations. With the rehabilitation of Stalinism in Putin’s Russia, an old mix of lethal and nonlethal means is being redeployed to inspire supporters and fool critics of what analysts dub as a “new generation” warfare.⁶⁷

COVERING UP THE LOSSES

The most effective denial tactic in the Russian disinformation war is diminishing the scale of the population losses. As early as May 31, 1933, Italian Royal Consul in Kharkiv Sergio Gradenigo reported a devastating loss of 10–15 million, commenting that “in my opinion this number will be surpassed and may have already been reached.”⁶⁸ A month later, in his June 22, 1933, dispatch, Gradenigo reported 9 million deaths in Ukraine alone according to government representatives, adding that “[i]n university circles, however, there is talk of 40–50 percent of the entire Ukrainian population, a figure which I consider to be more accurate (15–16 million).”⁶⁹

Three years after the atrocity, in 1936, American psychologist William Horsley Gantt of Johns Hopkins University published an epidemiological study with results of the First Five-Year Plan in the British Medical Journal, quoting 15 million deaths based on estimates of Soviet public health officials.⁷⁰ Dr. Gantt served as chief of Medical Division of the American Relief Administration during the famine of 1921–1922, and visited the Soviet Union numerous times, including in the summer of 1933. In a letter to agricultural economist at U.S. Department of Agriculture Dana Dalrymple, dated March 6, 1964, Dr. Gantt confirmed that he “got the maximal figure of fifteen million” dead in the 1932–1933 famine privately from Soviet public health officials and doctors, emphasizing that starvation was complicated by epidemics.⁷¹

How did we get from the 1930s to the 1990s, from 15 million to just over 3 million deaths in the genocidal famine? In March 1988, the Institute of History of Ukraine received a draft of the Executive Summary of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Soviet historian Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi was commissioned to write a brochure, 1933: trahediia holodu, aimed at propagandists and general public, in which he challenged the “irrational idea that the man-made famine was genocide perpetrated against Ukrainians as a national group.”⁷² Using Cold War rhetoric, Kul′chyts′kyi dismissed the U.S. Commission findings by stating that Congressmen’s task was “to help the American people better understand the role of Soviets in organizing the famine” and to create in the minds of the American people an image of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.”⁷³ A historian by training, Kul′chyts′kyi offered his estimate of demographic losses after the 1937 census was declassified in 1987. His formula was simple: 1.7 million (difference between 1933 and 1937) plus 1.8 million (hypothetical natural population increase between 1933 and 1937) equals to 3.5 million.⁷⁴

Thirty years later, in 2018, in a newspaper article, Kul′chyts′kyi argued that “demography, unlike history, where everyone has his own opinion, is a precise science.”⁷⁵ Kul′chyts′kyi admitted that he was second after Stephen Wheatcroft of Melbourne University to be granted a privileged access to secret files in the Russian archive in Moscow during his visit in 1990. Kul′chyts′kyi also revealed that using the same census data, Russian dissident demographer Aleksandr Bab′onyshev of Harvard University, who wrote under pseudonym Sergei Maksudov, estimated Ukraine’s losses in a range from 4 to 4.8 million.⁷⁶

Russian scholars estimate Holodomor losses in Soviet Ukraine as follows: Elena Osokina⁷⁷—2.7 million, Viktor Danilov and Il′ia Zelenin⁷⁸—3.5 million, Viktor Kondrashin⁷⁹—3.5 million, and Sergei Maksudov⁸⁰—4.5 million. These scholars use the 1926 Soviet census and the repressed 1937 census⁸¹ figures, but ignore the fact that Ukrainians became victims beyond the borders of the republic, in grain-growing regions of the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth, the Lower Volga, and even Kazakhstan.⁸² Based on the 1926 Soviet census, there were 5.8 million Ukrainians in the European part of the Russian SFSR. Of these, 3.1 million lived in the North Caucasus, where they constituted 37 percent of the population. The percentages varied from less than 1 percent in the southern regions to 62 percent in the Kuban′ district (Krasnodar region) in the northwest. More than 1 million Ukrainians lived in the Voronezh region (33 percent of the population),⁸³ the territory which Skrypnyk planned to add to Ukraine through negotiations with Moscow in the 1920s.⁸⁴ Although demographers have examined regional differences in demographic losses in Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia,⁸⁵ so far there is no systematic study providing a breakdown of the population that died from the famine in the Russian SFSR that would allow us to know what number of victims were ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, and other nationalities.

Demographers ignore sources that were compiled during the 1930s in Soviet Ukraine, among them statistical reports from commissariats of health, education, and security police reports, as well as studies conducted by Ukrainian demographers Arsenii Khomenko⁸⁶ and Mykhailo Ptukha⁸⁷ in the 1930s. For over eighty years, interrogation files of chief demographer Oleksandr Asatkin have been stored in vaults of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, coming to light decades too late.⁸⁸ As early as 1935, Asatkin expressed his concern over the peak of mortality observed in 1933.⁸⁹ In his note addressed to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, he presented figures on changes in the population of Soviet Ukraine between 1926 and 1934. On September 2, 1937, he was executed for allegedly “falsifying” the census because his staff failed to reach the projected 35 million, reporting instead 27.9 million, a population loss of 7.1 million in Soviet Ukraine.⁹⁰ Besides, in November 1942, Ukrainian economist and statistician Stepan Sosnovyi published his article under the evocative title, “Truth about the Famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933,” in which he estimated total population losses in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1938 at 7.5 million, including 4.8 million deaths from 1932 (1.3 million) to 1933 (3.5 million) as a result of enforced starvation.⁹¹ His article was reprinted in Ukraїns′ki visti in Germany on February 5, 1950; that is how the Ukrainian diaspora learned about the death toll in Soviet Ukraine. The map in Figure 5.1 shows that in the northern, non-grain-producing regions, the mortality in 1933 exceeded 12–14 times that of 1927, which points to the deliberate nature of the famine used as a tool of genocide.

Figure 5.1 Mortality from the Great Famine in 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR. Source: Created by the DNVP “Kartohrafiia,” 2019.

A few weeks before the unveiling of the U.S. National Holodomor Memorial on November 7, 2015 in Washington, D.C., five leaders of Ukrainian academic institutions and associations in North America appealed to the chairman of the U.S. Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide Awareness, Michael Sawkiw, Jr., with a request not to use the figure over 7 million victims as has been known in the Ukrainian diaspora but instead use 3.9 million as a “consensus” figure. Otherwise, they warned, “it will cause protests in certain anti-Ukrainian circles, and will be immediately used by the Kremlin propagandists to discredit Ukrainian science for incompetence.”⁹² This “consensus” figure includes neither birth deficits, fertility decline, nor ethnic Ukrainian population losses of the Russian SFSR. The population of Soviet Ukraine was inflated and further diluted by resettlement of Russian and Belorussian families of Red Army veterans and loyalists in the areas depopulated by the famine (329 train transports or nearly 117,149 Russian settlers⁹³ as shown in Figure 5.1). These figures do not include workers recruited from outside the Ukrainian SSR to replace the losses in labor force.⁹⁴

The signatories of the letter dismissed the over 7 million deaths as lacking “methodological foundations” because the number was quoted in “journalistic accounts from the 1930s.” They also suggested replacing the “three million children” with a more accurate “one million children under the age of ten.” In support of their argument they cited an attack launched by Russia against the Holodomor as genocide, without realizing that the hoax article was posted by Sputnik International, the preeminent Russian government-funded propaganda news outlet.⁹⁵ In their desire to appear unbiased and fair-minded, a group of Ukrainian demographers and their North American colleagues perpetuate the underestimated number of victims of this genocide. Already in the 1950s, many recognized scholars considered 4.8 million to be a conservative estimate, pointing to up to 8 million as the number of deaths in Ukraine under the Soviets.⁹⁶ Yet, twenty-first-century scholars insist that there is no alternative to “serious academic estimates” performed by “reputable demographers” in Ukraine and the West.⁹⁷ It seems prudent to offer this letter in its entirety:

Text of the Letter to Michael Sawkiw, Jr., Chairman

U.S. Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor Genocide Awareness

September 1, 2015

Dear Mr. Sawkiw,

We, the presidents or directors of the five major Ukrainian academic institutions and associations in North America, are writing to you and the members of the U.S. Holodomor Commission about a very important matter.

It has come to our attention that the website of the U.S. Holodomor Committee provides the number of Ukrainian deaths in the Holodomor as being 7–10 million. Please be apprised of the fact that this estimate traces back to journalist accounts from the 1930s. All serious academic estimates performed by reputable demographers in Ukraine and the West place the death toll in the 3–5 million range. These figures are accepted by the leading historians in the field, from Andrea Graziosi to Tim Snyder and Stanislav Kulchytsky. The figure of 3.9 million victims of the Holodomor served as the basis for the ruling of the Ukrainian court on the perpetrators of the Holodomor in January 2010, during the last weeks of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency.

Problematic are also figures provided by the website on the dynamics of the Holodomor in Ukraine and the number of children who died in the famine. The website states that “By the end of 1933, nearly 25% of the population of Ukraine, including three million children, had perished.” Taking into account the data provided by a group of Ukrainian and U.S. demographers, a much more accurate statement would read as follows. “By the end of 1933, about 17% of the population of Ukraine, including nearly one million children under the age of ten, had perished.”

We strongly urge you to change the estimate on the website accordingly. This is vitally important for several reasons:

1. The 4 million estimate, as well as the other two figures, are based on sound demographical and statistical analysis. Such scholarship should not be ignored or treated lightly, as it rests on far more persuasive methodological foundations than journalistic estimates.

2. The 7–10 million figure will elicit a storm of protest from negatively disposed non-Ukrainian sources, with the typical accusation being that it is meant to exceed the death toll in the Holocaust. Such criticism will only divert attention from the tragedy of the Holodomor.

3. The 7–10 million figure will play directly into the hands of Kremlin propagandists, who will claim that, just as the figure is unjustifiably high, so is the treatment of the Ukrainian tragedy as genocide. To provide the Kremlin with such propaganda ammunition at a time of the war in Ukraine strikes us as unwise. The first attack has been already launched:

http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150809/1025560345.html#ixzz3iXdnBIyY

We appreciate and salute your and your colleagues’ success in making the U.S. Holodomor Monument a reality, and hope that our arguments will convince you to provide more correct figures on the web site, as well as on the planned plaque for the monument.

Respectfully,

Vitaly Chernetsky, President

American Association for Ukrainian Studies

George Grabowicz, President

Shevchenko Scientific Society

Albert Kipa, President

Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.

Volodymyr Kravchenko, Director

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Serhii Plokhii, Director

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute⁹⁸

Victims on the “territory of the Holodomor” included not only those who starved to death in the fields and villages but also members of various professions who were persecuted, lost jobs and consequently were deprived of any means to survive, the cannibals who suffered extreme mental anguish and turned to beastly behavior to quiet hunger, the innocent prisoners of the GPU labor camps who died from overwork and starvation rations in Russian permafrost, the orphaned children who died from neglect and malnutrition without their names being recorded and the cause of death cynically listed as “Ukrainian.”⁹⁹ On the documents that were meant to record cause of death, the local offices of ZAGS (Registry of Vital Statistics) were instructed not to list starvation as a cause of death but to substitute any of a number of approved diseases.¹⁰⁰ Hennadii Boriak, then head of the State Committee on Archives in Ukraine, found documents with instructions and a death certificate that had originally listed starvation as cause of death, but later visibly “corrected” to “unknown.”¹⁰¹ Doctors, who were state employees, put down all sorts of diseases as the causes of death, including “sudden illness.”¹⁰²

A teacher in Kremenchuk, Antin Lak, who survived on 300 grams of bread a day, recalled how bodies of starved to death victims were picked up by trucks every morning and evening at a medical center. On a visit to the center, where his fellow teacher was hospitalized, he overheard how the doctor Oleksander Ol′shanets′kyi instructed the truck drivers: “There is no famine. People are dying not from starvation but from protein deficiency dropsy.” As a Communist Party member he touted the official line not to use the word “famine,” but hide the truth from the people and name the cause of death from starvation as death from BBO (bezbilkovi opukhy or protein deficiency dropsy).¹⁰³ Professors M. D. Strazhesko, M. M. Huberhrits, and V. M. Kohan-Iasnyi conducted clinical trials with patients suffering from protein deficiency dropsy during the genocidal famine.¹⁰⁴

The mortality rate among children was catastrophic. Historians have used statistics on school enrollments and archival documents to estimate losses among school-aged children. The death toll ranges from 1.7 million¹⁰⁵ to more than 3 million children of preschool and school age in 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine.¹⁰⁶ The discrepancy in the numbers might be due to different sets of statistical data used. Such practices became the butt of jokes about “two sets of statistics—one secret set for themselves [the Soviet leaders] and a false set for the public.” As one American diplomat who arrived in Moscow in 1934 to work in the newly opened U.S. Embassy recalled, the punch line was that “the Soviet system has two sets of statistics, and both are false.”¹⁰⁷

Scholars have noted that the names of many diseased children were registered just as nicknames, as they were foundlings. Fedir Turchenko and Inna Shuhal′ova, who studied the Zaporizhzhia death registry records, pointed out that often the orphans were given names of famous Ukrainian, Russian, or even foreign writers: Lesia Ukraïnka, Ihor Maiakovs′kyi, Arkadii London, Anna Akhmatova, Maxim Gorky, Karl Libknekht, or Bernard Shaw.¹⁰⁸ In the Mykolaїv State Archives, historian Volodymyr Serhiichuk was able to locate several death certificates issued in 1933 that included nicknames like “Unknown” (Nevidomyi) for children in care of the state-funded orphanage named after Hryhorii Petrovs′kyi.¹⁰⁹ Doctors in rural regions avoided the word “starvation” when writing the cause of children’s death because it was too risky; they could lose a job, even life. Many orphanages did not compile death records, or their records were incomplete.¹¹⁰ In some regions, death certificates were not issued for infants, who perished before reaching one year of age.¹¹¹

By the winter of 1932–1933, death certificates no longer appeared. Not only were causes of death altered and death certificates forged, but ZAGS records from the fatal years were sanitized in local offices. A significant part of the documents related to the registration of illnesses and deaths in hospitals and village councils was destroyed “while still hot.” A top secret instruction, dated April 13, 1934, from the Odesa Regional Executive Committee (with copies to all lower-level executive committees and inspectors of the National Economic Survey Administration, later the Central Statistical Board) is remarkable evidence of how the crimes against the Ukrainians were covered up by the perpetrators.¹¹² As a result, according to Boriak, the extant vital statistics registers for the years of 1932–1933 in the state archives contain 3 million deaths,¹¹³ which cover “a maximum of one-third of the territory afflicted by the [Great] Famine, and mortality records directly attributed to the [Great] Famine constitute no more than 1.5 percent of the total mortality records of civil registry offices.”¹¹⁴ Scholars believe that the archival records were purposefully and systematically destroyed by the regime for decades.¹¹⁵ Thus, erasing the record of memory was a crucial part of Stalin’s war against Ukraine then as it is now a crucial part of Putin’s disinformation war, in the same battlespace—the mind.

BANNING BOOKS

While targeting Ukraine’s information space, Russia is protecting its own by silencing the truth about the past, thus undermining justice. On December 1, 2011, the Meshchanskii district court in Moscow declared books written by Vasyl′ Marochko, a Ukrainian historian and president of the Advisory Board of the Association for Holodomor Studies, “extremist” and ordered them to be removed from the shelves of the Ukrainian Library in Moscow.¹¹⁶ In December 2014, the municipal court in Russian-occupied Feodosia in Crimea charged the director of the library for storing extremist literature (Article 20.20 of the Russian Criminal Code) and imposed a fine in the amount of 2,000 rubles for storing a dozen books in Ukrainian, including Marochko’s books on the Holodomor, in two municipal libraries. These books are scholarly publications that were written between 2007 and 2014, based on the analysis of new documentary evidence from the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and other state and former Communist Party archives. In the Russian legal system, books about the Holodomor, which is a crime against humanity, are criminalized and erased from history and memory.¹¹⁷

Upon hearing the news, Marochko drew parallels to the days of Stalinism in an open letter posted on the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences website, saying that “[i]n the 1930s books were banned by entire lists: books were simply repressed, occasionally burned. Looks like this practice is coming back.” In his article about the “Russian World” in Feodosiia, Marochko compared book burning to burning of “brother Slavs” on the battlefields of occupied Crimea and Donbas: “all of these are consequences of the rehabilitation of Stalinism, the Holodomor denial, and the revision of the past.”¹¹⁸

Russia has banned scholarly publications that examined the GPU’s role in the Holodomor, deflecting attention from the institution that has perpetrated the crime of genocide but has never been held accountable. Among works included in the list of “extremist” literature is an influential volume on the history of the Soviet security police, ChK-GPU-NKVD v Ukraïni. It has been authored by Iurii Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko, and Vadym Zolotar′ov and has been referenced by scholars of Stalinism and Stalin’s security apparatus since its publication in 1997. Together with Marochko’s books, the 2011 Moscow court verdict criminalized this scholarly publication in an attempt to control the official historical narrative promoted by Russia. Analyzing the interconnectedness of the preceding Soviet and modern Russian methods of control over history writing, Olga Bertelsen pointed out that central to these memory politics are an anti-Ukrainian discourse, ideological subversion, and the cult of chekists.¹¹⁹

The ban on books was accompanied by an assault on the rights of the Ukrainian minority in Russia. In 2011, the Russian authorities dissolved the Federal Cultural Association of Ukrainians, and in 2012 the Union of Ukrainians, two organizations that represented the interests of all Ukrainians in the Russian Federation. Then in 2018, the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow was closed. The following year, in July 2019, the Office of the Prosecutor General and the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation declared the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) an “undesirable” organization and banned its activities in Russia.¹²⁰ More recently, in 2020, the regional structure “Siryi Klyn” of Ukrainians in the Omsk region was dissolved in a quasi-judicial proceeding.¹²¹ The anti-Ukrainian stance of Russian memory politics has emerged as a central feature of the “Russian World”¹²² that Putin is promoting.

Current Kremlin’s course is anti-Ukrainian and rather aggressive, as it was in the 1930s, when the “crushing blow” to Ukrainian nationalism was piloted in the North Caucasus in November 1932 before it hit the core of the “national spirit” in Soviet Ukraine, synchronized with the grain procurement campaign.¹²³ On December 15, 1932, Stalin and Molotov signed a resolution to “immediately discontinue Ukrainization” in the Far East Region, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the Central Black Earth, and other areas and “prepare the introduction of Russian language school instruction” in all ethnically Ukrainian areas throughout the Soviet Union.¹²⁴ At the same time the Soviet leaders imposed domestic and international information blockades on the famine in Soviet Ukraine.¹²⁵

The “blockade decree” of January 22, 1933,¹²⁶ created a “Stalinist ghetto,”¹²⁷ from which starving Ukrainians, young or old, could not escape. Blame for this criminal act was placed on the victims. In November 1933, “local Ukrainian nationalism” was declared to be the preeminent danger to Soviet power in the region.¹²⁸ In January 1934, at the Seventeenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Pavel Postyshev gloated, “The past year [1933] was the year of defeat of the nationalist counterrevolution.”¹²⁹ Not incidentally, Postyshev’s speech regarding the breakthrough on the grain procurement front that devolved into scapegoating of Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists,” as well as Kosior’s speech on the national question, were published in a separate brochure by the International Publishers in New York in English translation with the aim of convincing not only Western observers but even Ukrainians abroad that Bolshevik policies were victorious. Thus, the Soviet disinformation campaign killed two birds with one stone, domestically and internationally. Today, the Russian disinformation war follows the same logic, targeting domestic trust in the governmental institutions and international perceptions of Ukraine and its history.

SILENCING THE TRUTH

“Silence is the think tank of the soul. All religions share and revere silence.”¹³⁰ Silence can also make the truth unheard of when used as a tool of coercion by the powerful to oppress the powerless.¹³¹ Out of fear of losing a job, school teachers touted the Communist Party line that there was no famine. To suggest that there was a famine was made illegal.¹³² A survivor from Stavyshche, a town with about 10,000 people in the Kyїv region, recalled,

In our schools whenever any of the children mentioned the [Great] Famine, they were corrected by the teachers. They were told that there was no famine, simply a ‘year of difficulties.’ They confiscated all that we had and designated the year as one of difficulties.¹³³

The witness, who was ten at the time of the genocidal famine, further told the U.S. Commission interviewer that they had a very beautiful park in their village, with a stream flowing by. And in all the parks, there were loudspeakers placed as part of the radio network, which was itself linked to the post office. He recited a song that one could always hear in these parks, songs being sung in Russian:

Swiftly as birds, one after another,

Fly over our Soviet homeland

The joyous refrains of town and country:

Our burdens have lightened—

Our lives have gladdened!

They broadcast this song while people were dying in the [Great] Famine. “Our lives have gladdened.” I can recall this song from my school years, when they were teaching the children to sing The Patrolling Pioneer. What kind of country is this in which children patrol over the fields to keep kernels of grain from the starving peasants for the sake of a “better life”? They themselves sang, “The joyous refrains of town and country.” And this song would play every day, ten times a day, and as you were listening to the song, everywhere all around you people are screaming, and dying, while the song was playing on: “Our burdens have lightened.”¹³⁴

When the interviewer asked the witness what he was thinking during that time, the narrator’s answer highlighted the deliberate nature of the famine as a tool of coercion.

What could I think?! All I could think of was where could I get some food. I didn’t think about anything else. They let the Ukrainians have it because they had wanted to separate from Russia. That’s what I think. The Ukrainian nation is still paying for that even up to this very day.¹³⁵

School teachers indoctrinated their students about Pavlik Morozov, a young Pioneer hero, who “unmasked” his own father for hiding grain.¹³⁶ Students were forbidden to use the word “famine” though food was insufficient even in towns, and in the neighboring village no one was left at all, recalled a lecturer at an agricultural school in Molochans′k, an agricultural Mennonite settlement near Melitopol′.¹³⁷ In his novel, Tema dlia medytatsiї (Theme for Meditation), Leonid Kononovych symbolically condemned teachers, who chose to participate in Soviet propaganda and grain-requisition campaigns, depicting them as bureaucrats in the realm of education. His protagonist recalls how a teacher instilled “love for the Soviet rule” by beating her student and calling him a “Petliurite puppy” (petliurivs′ke tsutsenia).¹³⁸

Teachers, like other Soviet officials, who could see death all around were not permitted—did not permit themselves—to see “starvation.” Once a school principal, Kaveev, a Russian, according to a survivor’s account, told his colleague, a third-grade teacher Kononenko, to forget it and keep silent. Whether children come [to school] or not, it was the teacher’s duty to teach. “Don’t involve yourself deeper or be closer. Just do your duty and teach. That’s all.”¹³⁹

Worst of all, the people were forced to forget. “In 1934, no one talked about the famine as if it had never happened,” recalled Vasyl′ Nechyporenko. In his village of Bilozir’ia, Cherkasy district, arrests of the enemies of the people continued.

They continued to remove portraits of the “leaders”: Skrypnyk (for some reason in the middle of the lesson), then Kosior, and even ‘the friend of children’ Postyshev. Quietly, Taras Shevchenko’s portrait was taken down but later placed back on the wall.¹⁴⁰

The survivor further noted,

When someone mentioned the famine around Komsomol or [Communist] Party members, they pretended they did not hear it. But those who carelessly used their tongue could end up in big trouble. After a while people stopped talking about the famine even among themselves.¹⁴¹

The Soviet leaders did not allow even the faintest reference to reality. The refusal to face the truth was applied inside the country and on a world scale. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-born British writer and author of the anti-totalitarian book, The Yogi and the Commissar, described two “belts of silence” surrounding the famine:

I spent the winter of 1932–33 mainly in Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine. . . . Traveling through the countryside was like running the gauntlet: the stations were lined with begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, sticklike limbs, swollen, pointed bellies. You could swap a loaf of bread for Ukrainian embroidered kerchiefs, national costumes and bedcovers; foreigners could sleep with practically any girl except party members for a pair of shoes or stockings. Under my hotel room window in Kharkov funeral processions marched past all day. The electricity supply in Kharkov had broken down; there was no light in the town, and the trams functioned only for an hour or so a day to take workers to the factories and back. There was also no fuel or petrol in the town and the winter was hard even for Ukraine, with temperatures of 30⁰ below zero. Life seemed to come to a standstill, the whole machinery on the verge of collapse.

. . . at the time not the slightest allusion to real conditions was allowed to appear in the Soviet press, including the newspapers of Ukraine itself. Each morning when I read the Kharkov Kommunist I learned about plan-figures reached and over-reached, about competitions between factory shock brigades, awards of the Red Banner . . . and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands . . . Not one word about the local famine, epidemics, the dying out of whole villages; even the fact that there was no electricity in Kharkov was not once mentioned in the Kharkov newspaper. It gave one a feeling of dreamlike unreality; the paper seemed to talk about some quite different country which had no point of contact with the daily life we led; and the same applies to the radio.

The consequence of all this was that the vast majority of people in Moscow had no idea of what went on in Kharkov. . . . The enormous land was covered by a blanket of silence and nobody outside the small circle of initiates could form a comprehensive picture of the situation.

A second belt of silence isolated the country from contacts with the outside world. Foreign missions and newspaper correspondents were concentrated in Moscow. . . . To smuggle out news vetoed by the censor meant expulsion; a risk which both journalists and their employers will take only reluctantly, and only when vital issues are at stake. But “vital issues” is an elastic term, and the practical result of continuous pressure was that even conscientious newspapermen evolved a routine of compromise; they cabled no lies, but nolens volens confined themselves to “official dope” . . . The cumulative effect of all this was a picture distorted by half-truths and systematic omissions. This was the foundation on which direct Soviet propaganda could build.”¹⁴²

The information blockade was imposed after the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference in July 1932, when Stalin and Molotov made any mention of the famine punishable as a counterrevolutionary crime.¹⁴³ Yet, historians, like Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, continued to argue in 1988 on the pages of the Ukrainian Historical Journal that the famine was “neither organized, nor man-made, but was an unforeseen outcome of Stalin’s economic planning,” and that the Communist Party did all it could to alleviate the suffering of the starving population.¹⁴⁴

Rather than alleviating the suffering of the starving population, the Communist Party was constantly on a look out for “enemies of the people”; purges were conducted periodically. In fact, the Postyshev purge of 1933 followed five previous purges of the Communist Party in 1920, 1921, 1924, 1925, and 1929–1930, in which, as scholars noted, the non-Russian party organizations were hit harder than those in the Russian regions.¹⁴⁵

In January 1933, Stalin declared that enemies had become increasingly invisible. In eerily familiar language (see the lists of suspected “counterrevolutionaries” in Soviet Ukraine in the 1924 secret OGPU circular in Chapter 3), Stalin declared that

the last remnants of moribund classes—private manufacturers and their servitors, private traders and their henchmen, former nobles and priests, kulaks and kulak agents, former White Guard officers and police officials, policemen and gendarmes, all sorts of bourgeois intellectuals of a chauvinist type, and all other anti-Soviet elements—have been tossed out.

But tossed out and scattered over the whole face of the USSR, these “have-beens” have wormed their way into our plants and factories, into our government offices and trading organizations, into our railway and water transport enterprises, and, particularly, into the collective farms and state farms. They have crept into these places and taken cover there, donning the mask of “workers” and “peasants,” and some have managed to worm their way into the party.

What did they carry with them into these places? They carried with them hatred for the Soviet regime, of course, burning enmity toward new forms of economy, life, and culture.¹⁴⁶

Like his predecessor Lenin, Stalin called for “revolutionary vigilance.” As historian Hiroaki Kuromiya of Indiana University Bloomington noted, “It would appear to be absurd not to fear the ghosts of those who had died en masse during the collectivization, industrialization, dekulakization, and famine.”¹⁴⁷ Stalin’s answer to the unpopular economic and cultural transformation of life was more terror, while keeping it disguised under political vigilance. Attacks on the Ukrainian Communists, intelligentsia, and farmers took place at the apex of the famine in 1933.

The goal of the 1933 purge was to establish an “iron proletarian discipline” within the Communist Party ranks by expelling “foreign” elements. Who conducted the purges and who was purged? Purge commissions made decisions. Their members were “politically literate” cadres who were ideological allies, never worked in the opposition, and had been Communist Party members for over a decade. These criteria excluded most Ukrainians.¹⁴⁸ More Ukrainians were also purged. Of the 104,458 new members and candidate members of the Communist Party since 1931, the KP(b)U purged 37 percent.¹⁴⁹ Between June 1932 and October 1933, approximately three-fourths of the officials of the local soviets and the local party committees were dismissed and replaced by newcomers dispatched from Moscow.

Findings by an investigator in the Chernihiv regional Communist Party organization revealed instances of paying bonuses to the district party bosses, wasting funds on drinking and entertainment, unlawful redirecting of food rations designated for the needy to supply party bureaucrats. “Friends of the Children” Association was left bankrupt, and its regional branch head Pokotilova pocketed 1,669 rubles. District police patronized local gangs, and sold guns and bullets to the gangsters. Instead of guarding the rule of law, local police engaged in sadistic people had nowhere to turn for protection. What was the outcome of the purge? Out of 60 names on the list of the regional Communist Party headquarters that counted 179 members and candidate members in its ranks, 16 were purged. The procedure was a public spectacle. The purged party members lost jobs, apartments, food rations, but were released from prisons due to overcrowding. Out of 17,000 regional Communist Party rank-and-file, 4,536 lost their membership (27 percent) and 35 percent more were demoted from members to candidates and from candidates to supporters.¹⁵⁰

By 1934, before the Great Terror, the Communist Party purged its own ranks to get rid of those who did or did not carry out its programs vigorously enough during the collectivization in 1928–1929 and the grain requisitions in 1932–1933. In many instances, the same activists participated in both campaigns. As archival documents from just one regional Communist Party organization in Chernihiv revealed, the perpetrators purged over 60 percent of their own rank-and-file, including the “inquisitor” Roizenman himself, to cover their tracks.

Silence was imposed on foreign correspondents as early as 1928, when the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow issued Circular No. 984, which explicitly ordered the Ukrainian authorities to deny any information or assistance to foreign guests and journalists in traveling to the villages. That same year, the OGPU issued the Statute about Secrecy, which narrowed the circle of individuals who could potentially have access to top secret documents. Examining the essence of strategic silence (polityka zamovchuvannia in Ukrainian), Olga Bertelsen noted that it was a tool for isolation of the Ukrainian victims and a way to conceal preparations for escalating violence in 1932–1933.¹⁵¹

The West kept silent, pretending not to notice. American and British journalists, Louis Fischer of the Nation, Eugene Lyons of the United Press International, William Henry Chamberlain of the Manchester Guardian, and Margaret Bourke-White of Fortune, wrote news articles for major dailies and magazines about modernization projects in the Soviet workers and peasants’ paradise, obscuring the story about the devastating famine several miles away from the industrial construction sites that they were invited to cover.¹⁵² The irony of the situation is that a 1932 photograph by James Abbe that shows a panoramic opening ceremony of the Dnipro HES (hydroelectric dam) in the background, foregrounded serendipitously a long bread line at the store in its vicinity. Nick Kupensky explained the “blindness” of Western journalists through the prism of “postmodern sublime”¹⁵³ as a way to distance themselves, historically or geographically, from the gruesome reality on the ground that did not fit into their modernist narrative about industrialization as progress.

Well-known Western intellectuals participated in the disinformation campaign, among them British playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw, French prime minister Édouard Herriot, French novelist Romain Rollan, and American novelist Theodore Dreiser.¹⁵⁴ They traveled to the Soviet Union, but they noticed what they were shown on carefully selected and staged routes. After touring these “Potemkin village” settings, they returned home to report that there was no famine in Ukraine. Despite evidence to the contrary, Herriot remained adamant in what he was determined to discover that the Soviet plan of the collectivization of agriculture was successful.¹⁵⁵ The nature of the genocidal famine with its millions of victims did not affect his opinion.

When in 1933, at the peak of the Holodomor, George Bernard Shaw read news about deaths from starvation and cannibalism, he wrote in the preface to his play “On the Rocks” (premiered in November 1933) that he “had not seen people who starved and children were surprisingly chubby.”¹⁵⁶ Shaw’s fellow Fabian Socialists Lord and Lady (Baroness) Passfield, commonly known as Beatrice and Sydney Webb, traveled to the Soviet Union from late May to late July 1932 and wrote a highly influential 1,000-page account entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1935). George Orwell commented about the British intellectuals: “Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English [R]ussophiles.”¹⁵⁷ But as Robert Conquest noted, it was not only а matter of Russophiles “but also of а large and influential body of Western thought.”¹⁵⁸ In Conquest’s view, “the scandal was not that they justified Soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence.”¹⁵⁹

Among Western journalists who enabled the concealment of truth about the genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine was Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty. Of British origin, Duranty became the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, or rather Moscow’s man at the New York Times, characterized as “the one-legged Anglo-American granddaddy of fake news.”¹⁶⁰ He won personal attention from Stalin and reported the Communist Party line in his articles. On September 14, 1933, he wrote, “But, as far as this writer could learn, there was nothing like famine conditions.”¹⁶¹ Duranty, who downplayed the famine in his dispatches, informed British Embassy staff that he thought it entirely possible that as many as 10 million had perished due to the famine.¹⁶²

Under what conditions Duranty was allowed to work in Moscow is hidden in secret Stalin’s archives. On October 27, 1925, a meeting of the TsK RKP(b) discussed the possible deportation of the journalist out of the Soviet Union. Two days later, this issue was discussed again, and the decision was rescinded.¹⁶³ In 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Soviet Russia the previous year.¹⁶⁴ In one of his dispatches from Moscow on March 31, 1933, he quoted a grotesque cliché, often attributed to genocidal murderer Stalin: “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He shrugged off the Bolshevik leaders’ indifference to the casualties of their drive to socialize agriculture as “proper soldierly spirit” because the masterminds were “animated by fanatical conviction.”¹⁶⁵

The most acute observer of the famine was Sergio Gradenigo, Royal Consul of Italy in Kharkiv. On May 31, 1933, in his report to the Italian Embassy in Moscow, he linked the famine and the Ukrainian question, highlighting the role of the international press in perpetuating the world’s indifference to the atrocity:

The famine continues to wreak havoc among the people, and one simply cannot fathom how the world can remain so indifferent to such a catastrophe and how the international press, which is so quick to bring international condemnation upon Germany for its so-called “atrocious persecution of the Jews,” can stand quietly by in the presence of this massacre organized by the Soviet government, in which the Jews play such a major role, albeit not the leading one.

For there is no doubt: 1) that this famine is primarily caused by a contrived scarcity designed “to teach the peasant a lesson,” and 2) that there is not one Jew among the famine victims; on the contrary, they are fat and well fed under the fraternal wing of the GPU.

The “ethnographic material” must be changed, cynically stated one Jew who is a high ranking official in the local GPU. One can already foresee the final fate of this “ethnographic material,” which is destined for replacement.¹⁶⁶

Although Gradenigo’s views might be reflective of the growing anti-Semitic attitudes in fascist Italy and throughout Europe during the 1930s, it should be also pointed out that the persecution of Jews as active in the Bolshevik repressive apparatus was not a fantasy. There had been a substantial number of Jewish activists within the ChK-GPU-NKVD in Soviet Ukraine from the organization’s early years.¹⁶⁷ Mendel Osherowitch, a correspondent of Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward), who visited his family in Soviet Ukraine in 1932, dedicated a chapter in his memoir, titled “The Fear of the GPU Across the Country,” where he noted that the first Yiddish word he heard upon arriving was from the GPU official. His brother served in the GPU, charged with enforcing policies of grain requisitions in the countryside.¹⁶⁸ Such facts are often neglected by contemporary Jewish scholars who write about the Holodomor.¹⁶⁹ The inability to “Ukrainianize” the Cheka appears to have been a long-standing “problem” for the Communist Party in the 1920s.¹⁷⁰ By the late 1930s, anti-Semitism became official state policy, when repressions against Jewish cadres swept through the Communist Party and GPU ranks.¹⁷¹

For the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who used his connection to David Lloyd George to acquire a diplomatic visa from the Soviet Embassy in Great Britain, the famine was real. Jones crossed the border into the Soviet Union in March 1933 and spent his first week in Moscow interviewing Communist Party officials, Western correspondents, foreign consuls, Soviet literary figures, and ordinary citizens waiting in long bread lines. His handwritten diaries served as the basis for twenty-one articles published between March 31 and April 20, 1933, in the Evening Standard, Daily Express, Western Mail, and Financial News.¹⁷² Although in his newspaper titles Jones used “Russia” as the generic term to describe areas affected by the famine, he made specific references in the diaries to Ukraine and specific districts in Soviet Ukraine.

As a guest of the German Consulate, Jones secured permission to visit a tractor factory in Kharkiv. On March 10, 1933, he bought a ticket for the overnight train from Moscow. He carried a backpack filled with loaves of bread, butter, cheese, and chocolate bought with foreign currency from Torgsin stores, with an intention to make an unescorted trip into the Ukrainian countryside. Jones got off at a station before reaching Kharkiv and walked 70 kilometers through more than twenty Ukrainian villages. He spent one night of his wanderings with the head of the village soviet and one night with another local family to see for himself the conditions of the countryside. When Jones recorded a starving Ukrainian saying “We have no bread” in his diary, that meant they had no food to eat. Upon leaving the Soviet Union, Jones gave interviews on March 29, 1933, in Berlin, and news of the famine spread quickly, prompting anger from the Soviet officials. Maxim Litvinov blamed consulate staff for issuing visa to Jones and the press department for failing to bring to his attention unfavorable articles. In April 1933, further restrictions on the freedom of movement by foreign correspondents to the areas affected by the famine in Soviet Ukraine were imposed. The Soviet diaries of Jones offer direct eyewitness account of the impact of Stalin’s policies on Ukraine’s cities and villages.¹⁷³ For telling the truth, in 1935, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Gareth Jones was assassinated by “bandits,” but most probably by Soviet agents, in Inner Mongolia.¹⁷⁴

Jones was preceded in 1932 by a Canadian journalist of Jewish origin, Rhea Clyman, who traveled thousands of miles through eastern regions of Soviet Ukraine and the North Caucasus, where the OGPU arrested her and deported for a handful of stories that the Kremlin regarded as having slandered the Soviet regime. Given two days to pack her belongings in Moscow, she was briefly visited in her flat by the newly arriving British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife Katie, and reluctantly left the country under duress on September 24, 1932.¹⁷⁵ Headlines about the Moscow-based correspondent of the Toronto Evening Telegram driven from Soviet Union were carried in all major newspapers in Canada and around the Western world. The Politburo of the TsK RKP(b) even issued a formal decree about her expulsion on September 17, 1932.¹⁷⁶

Clyman was the first to investigate and document stories of forced labor denied by Molotov about the army of prisoners digging the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal. Her reports from Kem′ (“The Town of the Living Dead” in Clyman’s words), a way station to the Solovetsky camps, inaccessible to foreign visitors, angered the Soviet officials so that they had to publish a rebuttal titled “New Campaign of Lies Against the Land of Socialist Construction” in the English edition of the International Press Correspondence in Berlin to discredit the author.¹⁷⁷ Her honest accounts of how villages in Soviet Ukraine and the North Caucasus were being ravaged by hunger were overlooked by specialists in Soviet and Russian history.¹⁷⁸

Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the winter and spring of 1932–1933, was one of the few journalists who were unafraid to tell the truth. In his interview with Marco Carynnyk, a Canadian writer, he recalled how L. B. Golden, the general secretary of the Save the Children Fund, which had been very active during the famine of 1921–1922 in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, approached the British Foreign Office in August 1933 for advice.¹⁷⁹ He had received disturbing information from the press and from private letters about famine in Soviet Ukraine and the North Caucasus. But the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy had assured him that the harvest was a “bumper one,” and Golden asked the Foreign Office whether a public appeal should be put out. The Foreign Office told him not to do anything. Muggeridge summed up the attitude of the British government: “The Soviet authorities were not admitting to a famine, and therefore it was agreed that nothing should be said.”¹⁸⁰ The silence lasted for so long because it was “the calculated campaign of misinformation that the Soviet authorities mounted to conceal their doings.”¹⁸¹ And the British and the U.S. leaders at the time turned a “blind eye to murder”¹⁸² and “appeased” the Soviet dictator.¹⁸³

To seek international support, the Ukrainian Women’s Union in Galicia, then under Polish rule, selected one of its capable and prominent members, Milena Rudnyts′ka, to bring the situation in Soviet Ukraine to the attention of the League of Nations. During 1932–1933, as vice chair of the Public Rescue Committee, she met with politicians, scientists, and educators to raise awareness about the famine. On September 29, 1933, fourteen countries met at the headquarters in the Palais Wilson in Geneva, Switzerland, and Rudnyts′ka along with other members of the Ukrainian delegation presented their findings about mass deaths in Soviet Ukraine and need for international assistance. After several hours of deliberations, the League decided that the famine was an internal problem of the Soviet Union, which was not a member of the League. Then, the delegation turned toward the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with a plea for help. ICRC officials contacted Soviet officials to gain approval for the Red Cross to organize international aid for Ukraine, but the head of the Soviet Red Crescent Society Avel Enukidze denied that there was any famine in Soviet Ukraine. Rudnyts′ka spoke at another international conference in Vienna in December 1933, urging the international community to pressure the Stalinist regime to admit there was a crisis and allow aid. Denial continued and information about the nature and scope of the famine was suppressed.¹⁸⁴

In the United States, the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA) was one of the most active organizations in the Ukrainian-American community that tried to raise awareness about the famine in Soviet Ukraine. In November 1933, leaders of the UNWLA approached Eleanor Roosevelt with a request to exert some influence to pressure the Soviet government to allow duty-free admission of relief packages through Torgsin.¹⁸⁵ Mrs. Roosevelt replied that although she realized “that the need was very great, she deeply regretted” that she could do nothing to help.¹⁸⁶ This summary of Mrs. Roosevelt’s response comes from a letter preserved in UNWLA archives in New York. The organization’s president, Iwanna Rozankowsky, provided this document to Dr. James Mace, Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine.

Eleanor Roosevelt, reflecting on her past life on her seventy-fifth birthday, advised in her Autobiography:

I think that one of the reasons it is so difficult for us, as a people, to understand other areas of the world is that we cannot put ourselves imaginatively in their place. We have no famine. But if we were actually to see people dying of starvation we would care quite a bit.¹⁸⁷

Yet, the reality of mass starvation in Ukraine, perpetrated by the Soviet government, seemed to require a double standard of blindness from American politicians toward the universality of human suffering. Eleanor Roosevelt took part in the genocide definition discussions at the United Nations, speaking vis-à-vis the Soviet representative Andrei Vyshinsky. The Soviets managed to force a dilution of Lemkin’s original and intended broader-scoped definition of genocide. This political tactic worked, because other nations were afraid of not getting any definition at all, if they failed to appease the Soviets on this point.

The UNWLA also published a pamphlet and sent it for comment to the Soviet Embassy on January 3, 1934. A month later it received a letter from Boris Skvirsky, Embassy Counselor, who replied that the idea that the Soviet government was “deliberately killing off the population of the Ukraine” was “wholly grotesque.” Claiming that “the Ukrainian population increased at an annual rate of 2% during the past five years,” Skvirsky dismissed UNWLA evidence as spurious. The death rate in Ukraine “was the lowest of that of any of the constituent Republics composing the Soviet Union,” he stated “and was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate of Tsarist days.”¹⁸⁸ The Soviet government denied the famine. The Roosevelt administration sought closer ties with the Soviet government and saw the famine as an internal Soviet affair.

In the context of its time, the sources of hard currency—grain, timber, and gold—kept the Soviet Union as a player in world politics. The Communist International and the Communist Party of the United States of America continued to abide by directives from Stalin and assist in the construction of Soviet workers’ paradise.¹⁸⁹

Eugene Lyons, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Jewish League Against Communism, in his article “American Jews and the Kremlin Purges” in The New Leader, March 1953, explained the reasons behind the lack of awareness among American intellectuals of the fact that millions had perished from the man-made famine in the 1930s:

In the last thirty years, a number of Jews, especially among the educated and the well-to-do, came to defend the Soviet Union and its works. Influenced by Communist propaganda about racial equality and the proscription of anti-Semitism, they found it possible to gloss over assorted Soviet obscenities. In a glow of liberal righteousness, they tended to accept Sovietism “despite everything.”¹⁹⁰

Still another reason was set forth by James Burnham in his review of Peter Viereck’s book Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, in March 1953,

this was the glory of the intellectuals: that in spirit and body they stood firm against Nazi assault. It is the shame of the intellectuals that they stood not firm but servile, deceived and seduced before the equally vicious approach of Nazism’s twin, communism. They refused to recognize concentration camps, aggression and terror when, instead of the swastika, there flew the flag of “the revolution” and spoke in the name of “radical slogans.”¹⁹¹

Soviet disinformation succeeded in silencing the truth about the genocidal famine for over half a century. Domestically, a code of silence was imposed and enforced in preparation for the liquidation of the Ukrainian intellectual elites, who could organize opposition to the regime, as well as their real or alleged supporters, economically self-sufficient farmers, who could potentially wrestle the reins of power from representatives of the colonial Bolshevik regime. Internationally, silencing the truth took the form of controlling access of foreign correspondents to the “crime scene” and staging tours of foreign dignitaries and fellow travelers of the Communist International to showcase industrial construction achievements in Soviet Ukraine, deflecting attention from the famine-ravaged countryside. With the rehabilitation of Stalinism in Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, the denial took the form of the information war, undermining domestic trust in the governmental institutions and distorting international perceptions of Ukraine and its history.

Stalin singlehandedly edited the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, deleting any incriminating reference to Soviet crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, the remaining text of the U.N. Convention on Genocide has served as the foundation for the legal recognition of the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainians. Russia has used its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to block Ukraine’s demand for the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide by this international organization. When denial could no longer be tenable after the publication of the U.S. governmental report on Communist takeover and occupation of Ukraine, published in the 1950s, which linked “collectivization” with genocide, and a special commission’s report on the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, published in the late 1980s, Soviet and now Russian scholars have tried to promote a notion of an “all-Union” famine to obscure anti-Ukrainian character of the genocide. The Holodomor death toll ranges from 2 to 15 million.¹⁹² Although the number of victims is not a defining feature of genocide, attempts to cover up the truth and destroy evidence have been well-documented. Ultimately, the topic of the Holodomor has been criminalized in neo-Stalinist Russia.

NOTES

1. Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” https://www.genocidewatch.com/ten-stages-of-genocide.

2. Ben Johnson, “Russia Still Denies the Holodomor Was ‘Genocide,’” Acton Institute, November 27, 2017, https://www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2017/11/27/russia-still-denies-holodomor-was-genocide.

3. Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

4. Paula Chertok, “History, Identity and Holodomor Denial: Russia’s Continued Assault on Ukraine,” Euromaidan Press, November 7, 2015, http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/11/07/history-identity-and-holodomor-denial-russia-s-continued-assault-on-ukraine/.

5. Jurij Dobczansky, “Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress,” Holodomor Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 153–62. On July 1, 2009, the Library of Congress introduced two new subject headings: Holodomor denial literature and Holodomor denial.

6. Hans Petter Midttun, “Hybrid War in Ukraine—Predictions for 2019 and Beyond,” Euromaidan Press, April 18, 2019, http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/04/18/hybrid-war-in-ukraine-predictions-for-2019-and-beyond/.

7. The war in the information space is part of a concerted strategy of total war that encompasses the use of economic, political, diplomatic, religious, legal, security, cyber, and military instruments. See Janis Berzins, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy” (report from the National Defense Academy of Latvia and the Center for Security and Strategic Research), Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners Blog, April 30, 2014, http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2014/04/russias-new-generation-warfare-in.html.

8. “Zakon Ukraїny ‘Pro Holodomor 1932–1933 v Ukraїni’ No. 376-V,” 226–28.

9. “Duma ne priznala Golodomor 1932–33 godov,” Delo.ua, April 2, 2008, https://delo.ua/econonomyandpoliticsinukraine/gosduma-ne-priznala-1932-33-go-75225/.

10. “Predstavitel′ Rossii nazval politicheskimi spekuliatsiiami popytki kvalifitsirovat′ golod 30-kh godov kak genotsid,” Novosti OON, March 7, 2008, https://news.un.org/ru/story/2008/03/1121751.

11. Weiss-Wendt, The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the U.N. Genocide Convention, 280.

12. Bohdan A. Futey, “International Legal Responsibility for Genocide: Justice in the Courts,” paper presented at a Conference on Famine-Holodomor, Kyїv, Ukraine, September 25–26, 2008, Holodomor Education, 2009, http://www.holodomoreducation.org/index.php/id/178/lang/en. See also idem, “Legal Recognition of the Holodomor as Genocide: International Covenants, Agreements, and Court Decisions (Implementing Lemkin’s Legacy),” paper presented at the International Forum “Ukraine Remembers, the World Acknowledges!” on the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor 1932–1933—Genocide of the Ukrainian People, Kyїv, Ukraine, November 22, 2018.

13. Kateryna Bondar, “Legal Definition of Genocide: Examining the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine under the Genocide Convention,” in The Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine as a Crime of Genocide under International Law, eds. V. Vasylenko and M. Antonovych (Kyїv: Kyїv-Mohyla Academy, 2016), 99.

14. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, 133.

15. Weiss-Wendt, The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the U.N. Genocide Convention, 64–66, 70.

16. Panné, “Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir,” 7–66.

17. Serbyn, “Holodomor,” 30.

18. See “Holodomor in the Context of Genocide: A Narrow vs Broad Definition of Genocide,” 1–2; a summary of survey findings was distributed by Lana Babij via email to a group of the Holodomor scholars on October 19, 2019.

19. “SBU vozbudila ugolovnoe delo po faktu soversheniia Genotsida,” UNIAN, May 25, 2009, https://www.unian.net/politics/225116-sbu-vozbudila-ugolovnoe-delo-po-faktu-soversheniya-genotsida-dopolnennaya.html.

20. “Ruling of the Kyiv Court of Appeal Concerning the Commission of the Crime of Genocide Perpetrated by J. V. Stalin (Dzhugashvili), V. M. Molotov (Skriabin), L. N. Kaganovich, P. P. Postyshev, S. V. Kossior, V. Ia. Chubar, and M. M. Khatayevich, 13 January 2010,” in The Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine as a Crime of Genocide under International Law, eds. Vasylenko and Antonovych, 356.

21. Viktor Kondrashin, “Hunger in 1932–1933—A Tragedy of the Peoples of the USSR,” Holodomor Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 21.

22. A summary of the contents of Decree No. 47 of the Federal Archival Agency, issued on October 17, 2007, with specific instructions on how to use a collection of documents “Famine in the USSR, 1929–1934” is available at Rosarkhiv (the Federal Archival Agency), 2008, https://web-archiv.ru/archive/507.

23. In 2007, Viktor Kondrashin was appointed as the editor of a three-volume collection of documents from the Russian central and regional archives that presented the famine in the USSR as a common tragedy of all the people. In his presentation at the first seminar on July 19, 2010, “Russia-Ukraine: Problems of Interpretation and Assessment of the Holodomor of 1932–33,” Kondrashin admitted that his Ukrainian colleagues refused to participate in the joint project. See transcript of Kondrashin’s presentation: Viktor Kondrashin, “Golod 1932–33 gg. v nauchnykh issledovaniiakh i istoricheskoi publitsistike,” Uroki istorii: XX vek, October 4, 2010, https://urokiistorii.ru/article/1185.

24. For a complete text of the letter and seven pages of Kondrashin’s “prospectus” for the proposed three-volume collection of documents from the Russian archives with recommendations on how to discuss the famine of 1930–1934 in the USSR, see “Podobrat′ ikh [dokumenty] sleduet takim obrazom, chtoby byla vidna tragediia vsego sovetskogo krest′ianstva, bez aktsenta na Ukrainu” [Kondrashin V. Plan-prospekt z rekomendatsiiamy shchodo vidboru dokumentiv dlia zbirnyka ‘Golod v SSSR, 1932–1933’. Dodatok do lysta kerivnyka Federal′noho arkhivnoho ahenstva Rosiis′koï Federatsiï V. Kozlova do Holovy Derzhkomarkhivu Ukraïny O. Ginzburg z propozytsiamy pro spivpratsiu. 17 sichnia 2007], from a personal archive of Hennadii Boriak, available on the website of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine since December 5, 2017, at http://resource.history.org.ua/item/0013470. It was first made public by Pavlo Solod′ko in “Iak pysaty pro Holodomor. Instruksiia rosiis′kym istorykam,” Istorychna Pravda, on November 26, 2012, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/artefacts/2012/11/26/101572/.

25. The “Historical Memory” Foundation (Fond Istoricheskaiia Pamiat′) was established in 2008. One of its main goals is to counteract “anti-Russian” interpretation of history in the neighboring countries, as stated on its website http://historyfoundation.ru.

26. Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “‘Capital of Despair’: Holodomor Memory and Political Conflicts in Kharkiv after the Orange Revolution,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 631.

27. Mark Tauger’s research interest is agrarian history. His publications include Agriculture in World History (Routledge Press, 2010) and Golod, Golodomor, Genotsid? (Kyїv: Dovira Press, 2008).

28. Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger.

29. For personal reflections on the Kharkiv conference, its program, and a list of participants, see a blog post by Iurii Shevtsov, “International scientific-practical conference ‘Famine in the USSR in the 1930s: historical and political assessments,’ Kharkov, 21 November 2008,” http://yury-shevtsov.blogspot.com/2008/11/30-21112008.html. Shevtsov, the only invited speaker from Belarus, is the director of the independent Center for European Integration in Minsk, where he teaches International Relations at Belarusian State University. He is the author of New Ideology: Holodomor (Moscow: Europe, 2009).

30. The Party of Regions (Partiia rehioniv) was a pro-Russia political party of Ukraine created in late 1997. It grew to be the biggest party of Ukraine between 2006 and 2014. As of 2020, the party has disintegrated.

31. Zhurzhenko, “Capital of Despair,” 632. A CD with a hundred selected documents from the Russian archives was distributed at the Kharkiv Conference in 2008. In 2009, an English translation appeared. The two versions differ in the deliberate selection of the documents to fit different audiences. The text of the CD in English includes a preface written by Kondrashin that explains the need to prepare a set of documents to counter a “massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign by the current leaders of Ukraine that had been unleashed both on Ukrainian soil, and abroad, especially in the countries of the European Union, the United States, and Canada, and built around the alleged ‘genocide by holodomor’ of Ukrainians in 1932–1933” (slide 12). See “Famine in the USSR, 1929–1934: New Documentary Evidence,” with Historical Essay by Viktor Kondrashyn; English translation of the documents by Nikita B. Katz; English translation of the Note from the Compilers by Alexandra Dolgova (Moscow: Federal Archival Service, 2009), Compact Disc, http://resource.history.org.ua/item/0008508. The content of the CD has been posted on the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences website since March 19, 2013, http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/FamineInUSSR_2009/FamineInUSSR_2009.pdf. No one has paid serious attention or tried to debunk it in academic literature, which further illustrates Russia’s success in strategically invading and capturing broader audiences to subvert their opponents.

32. The local newspaper Kharkovskie izvestiia devoted a whole page to a report about the conference. See Valerii Tyrnov, “O tragedii bez spekuliatsii: Byl li genotsydom golod 30-kh godov?” Kharkovskie izvestiia, November 25, 2008; quoted in Zhurzhenko, 633.

33. For a summary of the announcement, see “Gosduma ne priznala Golodomor 1932–33 godov: Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii otritsaet priznaki genotsyda vo vremia goloda 1932–1933 godov na territorii SSSR,” Delo, April 2, 2008, https://delo.ua/econonomyandpoliticsinukraine/gosduma-ne-priznala-1932-33-go-75225/; see also Steve Gutterman, “Russia: 1930s Famine Was Not Genocide,” Fox News, April 2, 2008, https://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_wires/2008Apr02/0,4675,RussiaUkraineFamine,00.html.

34. International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, 2.

35. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 140.

36. Vasyl′ Marochko, “Prystrasti dovkola Holodomoru: real′ni mify,” Dzerkalo tyzhnia, March 24, 2018, https://dt.ua/HISTORY/pristrasti-dovkola-golodomoru-realni-mifi-272997_.html.

37. James Mace, “Research on Documents” (typewritten notes), Ukraine Famine Hearing, April 30, 1987, Box 16921, Gary Bauer Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

38. Mace, “Research on Documents,” 1.

39. Ibid., 2.

40. James Mace, “Soviet Press Sources on the Famine,” in Report to Congress, 70.

41. “International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, 10 March 1990,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 305.

42. Hugh D. Phillips, “Rapprochement and Estrangement: The United States in Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1930s,” in Soviet–U.S. Relations, 1933–1942 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 11–12.

43. Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” 70–89.

44. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 142.

45. Letter to the Editor of Ukraine Report 2003, E. Morgan Williams, Ukraine Market Reform Group, Washington, D.C. by Prof. James Mace, Kyiv, Ukraine, June 2, 2003, Concerning the discussion on H-Russia List about Cheryl Madden’s “The Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–1933 and Aspects of Stalinism: A Detailed Annotated Bibliography-in-Progress in the English Language.” Originally it was published online at http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/mace16.htm. A copy of the text of the letter, saved on November 15, 2016, can be obtained from Cheryl Madden.

46. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 142.

47. Shapoval, “Holodomor i ioho zv’iazok iz rerpesiiamy v Ukraïni,” 155–57.

48. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 180.

49. U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Growth of the World’s Urban and Rural Population, 1920–2000, Population Studies No. 44 (New York: United Nations, 1969), 49.

50. Valentina Zhiromskaia, Osnovnye tendentsii demograficheskogo razvitiia Rossii v XX veke (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2012), 109, available at https://www.labirint.ru/books/387399/.

51. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 148.

52. For a discussion about the Soviet repressions against Ukraine’s intellectuals in the 1930s and their eventual extermination, see Bertelsen and Shkandrij, “The Secret Police and the Campaign against Galicians in Soviet Ukraine,” 37–62; Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine,” 417–47. For earlier studies of repressions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, see N. M. Lytvyn, “Politychni represiï proty naukovoï intelihentsiï v radians′kii Ukraïni v 1920–1930-kh rokah (ideolohichni aspekty problemy)” (doctoral diss., Kyїv, 2006); O. S. Rubl′ov, Zakhidnoukraïns′ka intelihentsiia u zahalnonatsional′nykh politychnykh ta kul′turnykh protsesakh (1914–1939) (Kyїv: Instytut Istoriї Ukraїny NAN Ukraїny, 2004); and O. S. Rubl′ov and Iu. A. Cherchenko, Stalinshchyna i dolia zakhidnoukraïns′koï intelihentsiï (Kyїv: Naukova dumka, 1994).

53. In 1930, the GPU recorded 4,098 uprisings in the Ukrainian SSR. There were significantly more disturbances in Ukraine than in three other grain-growing regions of the Central Black Earth (1,373), the North Caucasus (1,061), and the Lower Volga (1,003). See The War Against the Peasantry, ed. Viola et al., 320.

54. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraïny,” 44, 413.

55. Professor Iefremov died in a Russian prison in 1939, three months before the end of his prison term. After his release in 1934, Hermaize was rearrested in 1937 and died in a labor camp after his sentence was extended for an additional ten years. See Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 351, 356.

56. Clarence A. Manning, Ukraine Under the Soviets (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953), 95; quoted in The Soviet Empire: Prison House of Nations and Races; A Study in Genocide, Discrimination, and Abuse of Power, prepared by Joseph G. Whelan, analyst in Eastern European affairs, at the request of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 85th Cong., 2nd Sess., Document No. 122 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958), 15, 19, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008514963.

57. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 32.

58. Resolution of the CC CP(B)U Politburo “On Measures to Strengthen Grain Procurement,” November 18, 1932, in Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine, ed. Pyrih, 55–60.

59. Papakin, “‘Chorna doshka’ Holodomoru,” 160.

60. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 149.

61. Roman Serbyn, “The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 as Genocide in Light of the U.N. Convention of 1948,” The Ukrainian Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2006): 187.

62. Papakin, “‘Chorna doshka’ Holodomoru,” 162.

63. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 211–12.

64. Ibid., 212.

65. Lemkin, Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine.

66. For the discussion of archival evidence of resettlement of Russian loyalists and their families to villages in southeastern Ukraine depopulated by the 1932–1933 famine, see “Dopryselennia u vymerli ukraïns′ki sela,” in Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv iak henotsyd ukraïnstva (Vyshgorod: PP Serhiichuk M. I., 2018), 186–206. These settlers received food provisions and farming equipment. Russian language teachers were recruited, which intensified assimilation in schools. On the resettlement of 500,000 Red Army veterans from central Russia to Kuban in the North Caucasus, see P. Polian, Ne po svoei vole . . . Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel′nykh migratsyi v SSSR (Moscow: O. G. I. – Memorial, 2001), 78.

67. Nicholas Fedyk, “Russian ‘New Generation’ Warfare—Theory, Practice, and Lessons for U.S. Strategists,” Small Wars Journal, August 25, 2016, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/russian-“new-generation”-warfare-theory-practice-and-lessons-for-us-strategists.

68. Mace, Report to Congress, 424.

69. Ibid., 434.

70. Gantt, “A Medical Review,” 19–22.

71. See appendix to Jaroslaw Sawka, “American Psychiatrist: Fifteen Million Dies in Thirties’ Famine,” Ukrainian Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 65.

72. S. V. Kul′chyts′kyi, 1933: trahediia holodu, Seriia 1 “Teoriia i praktyka KPRS. Istoriia,” No. 6 (Kyїv: T-vo “Znannia” URSR, 1989), 3.

73. Kul′chyts′kyi, 1933, 3.

74. Ibid., 47.

75. Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, “Mil′ony zahyblykh: skil′ky same?” Den′, April 13, 2018, https://day.kyiv.ua/uk/article/istoriya-i-ya/milyony-zagyblyh-skilky-same.

76. Kul′chyts′kyi, “Mil′ony zahyblykh.”

77. E. A. Osokina, “Zhertvy goloda 1933 g.: skol′ko ikh? (Analiz demograficheskoi statistiki TsGANKh SSSR),” Istoriia SSSR, no. 5 (1991): 18–26; available in Web Archive, September 29, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070929204317/http://www.auditorium.ru/books/4522/ch2.pdf.

78. V. P. Danilov and I. Ie. Zelenin, “Organizovannyi golod. K 70-letiiu obshchekrest′ianskoi tragedii,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (2004): 97–111.

79. V. V. Kondrashin, “Golod 1932–1933 gg. – obshchaia tragediia narodov SSSR: natsional′no-regional′nyi aspect,” in Sovetskiie natsii i natsional′naia politika v 1920–1950-e gody: Materialy VI mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Kiev, 10–12 oktiabria 2013 g., ed. N. Volynchik (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), 195.

80. Sergei Maksudov (Aleksandr Bab′onyshev), “Byl li golod 1932–33 godov na Ukraine genotsydom?,” Blog Sergeia Maksudova, September 16, 2016, http://www.maksudovsergei.com/.

81. The 1937 Soviet census was the first census conducted after the famine. It showed the total population of Soviet Ukraine to be lower than it was in 1926. The government declared the census “defective” and executed demographers who conducted it. Some of the documents were destroyed and the remaining results discredited. The 1937 census was declassified in 1987. See F. D. Livshits, “Perepis′ naseleniia 1937 goda,” in Demograficheskie protsessy v SSSR, ed. A. G. Volkov (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 174–207, and A. G. Volkov, “Perepis′ naseleniia 1937 goda: vymysly i pravda,” in Perepis′ naseleniia SSSR 1937 goda: istoriia i materialy, vyp. 3–5 (II) (Moscow: Informtsentr Goskomstata SSSR, 1990), 6–63.

82. For a study of the North Caucasus Ukrainian population as the target of the genocidal famine of 1932–1933, see Oleksii Kurinnyi, “Ukrains′ka spil′nota Pivnichnoho Kavkazu iak ob’iekt Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni iak zlochyn henotsydu zhidno z mizhnarodnym pravom, eds. Volodymyr Vasylenko and Myroslava Antonovych (Kyїv: Vydavnychyi dim “Kyievo-Mohylians′ka akademiia,” 2016), 161–72. For a study of linguistic genocide of Ukrainians in the Kuban area in the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth, the Lower Volga, and Kazakhstan, see Serhiichuk, Holodomor1932–1933 rokiv iak henotsyd ukraïnstva, 214–61.

83. Tymish Olesevych, Statystychni tablytsi ukraïns′′koho naselennia SSRR za perepysom 17 hrudnia 1926 roku (Warsaw: Ukraïns′kyi naukovyi instytut, 1930); quoted in Bohdan S. Kordan, “A Note on the Political Geography of the Great Famine of 1932–1933,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 29.

84. On May 21, 1927, the KP(b)U adopted a resolution proposed by Mykola Skrypnyk to add territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians in neighboring regions to Ukraine based on the principle of self-determination. See Politychna systema dlia Ukraïny: istorychnyi dosvid i vyklyky suchasnosti, ed. V. M. Lytvyn (Kyїv: Nika-Tsentr, 2008), 525.

85. Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna, Omelian Rudnytskyi, Alla Kovbasiuk, and Natalia Kulyk, “Regional 1932–1933 Famine Losses: A Comparative Analysis of Ukraine and Russia,” Nationalities Papers (2020): 1–21, doi:10.1017/nps.2019.55.

86. Arsenii Khomenko, “Liudnist′ USRR u perspektyvnomu obchyslenni,” Profilaktychna medytsyna, no. 11–12 (1932): 47; quoted in Marochko, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru,” 129.

87. Marochko, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru,” 130.

88. HDA SBU, f. 6, spr. 43187-FP, vol. 1, ark. 19, 91–92.

89. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 6762, ark. 56; quoted in Marochko, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru,” 129.

90. Marochko, “О. М. Asatkin – vyhadanyi ‘fal′syfikator’ perepysu naselennia 1937 r.,” 147, 149.

91. Oleksandr Saltan, “Stepan Sosnovyi – pershyi ukraїns′kyi doslidnyk Holodomoru,” lecture at the Kharkiv Historical-Philological Association webinar, November 19, 2020, HistorySumy, Inc. (Sums′kyi istorychnyi portal), January 15, 2021, video, 2:32–37:40, http://history.sumy.ua/sources/media-documents/9304-pershyi-doslidnyk-holodomoru.html.

92. See email dated September 1, 2015 re: “Holodomor Memorial” to Michael Sawkiw, Jr., Chairman of the U.S. Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor Genocide Awareness of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, signed by Vitaly Chernetsky, American Association for Ukrainian Studies; George Grabowicz, Shevchenko Scientific Society; Albert Kipa, Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States; Volodymyr Kravchenko, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; Serhii Plokhii, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; quoted in Serhiychuk, “How Millions of Deaths Were Not Included in the Statistics,” Genocide-Holodomor of Ukrainians, 112.

93. Polian, Ne po svoei vole, 78; quoted in Kurinnyi, “Ukraïns′ka spil′nota Pivnichnoho Kavkazu,” 165.

94. Serhiychuk, “To Honor All Innocent Victims of the Holodomor,” 130–33.

95. Victoria A. Malko, “Russian (Dis)Information Warfare vis-à-vis the Holodomor-Genocide,” in Russian Active Measures: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, ed. Olga Bertelsen (Stuttgart and New York: ibidem-Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2021), 215–62.

96. Communist Takeover and Occupation of Ukraine, 20; see also Manning, Ukraine Under the Soviets, 101.

97. Omelian Rudnytskyi, Nataliia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna, Pavlo Shevchuk, and Alla Kovbasiuk, “Demography of a Man-made Human Catastrophe: The Case of Massive Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933,” Canadian Studies in Population 42, no. 1–2 (2015): 53–80.

98. The September 1, 2015 collective email to Michael Sawkiw, Jr.; reprinted in Malko, “Russian (Dis)Information,” 236–38.

99. Vasyl′ Marochko, Terytoriia Holodomoru 1932–1933 rr. (Kyїv: PP Natalia Brekhunenko, 2014); idem, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru,” 112–32; Volodymyr Serhiichuk, “Istoryko-pravovi aspekty pidrakhunku vtrat vid Holodomoru-henotsydu 1932–1933 rokiv,” Chetverta khvylia, July 2, 2020, http://4hvylia.com/novyny-usim/7737.html; Solovey, “Skil′ky znyshcheno na Ukraїni liudei,” in Golgota Ukraїny, 201–16.

100. Hennadii Boriak, Sources for the Study of the Great Famine in Ukraine (Cambridge: Harvard University Ukrainian Studies Fund, 2009), 3.

101. DAKO, f. 5634, op. 1, spr. 969, ark. 86; quoted in Boriak, Sources, 22.

102. Vadym Kohan and Raїsa Nahorna-Persyds′ka, “Medychni aspekty holodu 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni: prychyny i naslidky. Mizhnarodna naukova konferentsiia, Kyїv, 9–10 veresnia 1993 r. Materialy, ed. S. Kul′chyts′kyi (Kyїv: Instytut istoriї Ukraїny NAN Ukraїny, 1995), 111.

103. “Case History SW3: Antin Lak, b. 1910 in the Poltava region,” in Oral History Project, 730–31.

104. DAKhO, f. 1962, op. 1, spr. 270, ark. 3, 5–6, 9, 15; quoted in Kohan and Nahorna-Persyds′ka, “Medychni aspekty holodu 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni,” 111–13.

105. Marochko, “Shkoly bez ditei ta vchyteliv,” 53.

106. Serhiichuk, “Shkil′na statystyka,” 5; idem, “Holodni, bosi i rozditi,” 92.

107. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), 35.

108. Fedir Turchenko and Inna Shuhal′ova, “Dytiacha smertnist′ u roky Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv u Zaporizhzhi,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv: vtraty ukraïns′koï natsiï. Materialy Mizhnarodnoï naukovo-praktychnoï konferentsiï, Kyїv, 4 zhovtnia 2016, ed. Olesia Stasiuk et al. (Kyїv: Vyd. O. Filiuk, 2017), 113.

109. Death certificate of eight-year-old Vania, whose last name is recorded as Nevidomyi (Unknown), dated June 13, 1933, with the cause of death listed as diarrhea, in DAMO, od. obl. P1010030; courtesy of Volodymyr Serhiichuk.

110. Inna Shuhal′ova, “Stratehiia vyzhyvannia ditei-ditbudynkivtsiv u roky Holodomoru 1932–1933 v Radians′kii Ukraïni,” in Materialy mizhnarodnoï konferentsiï “Shtuchni holody v Ukraïni XX stolittia,” 16 travnia 2018 r. (Kyїv: Vyd-vo “Kolo,” 2018), 360.

111. Volodymyr Serhiychuk, Genocide-Holodomor of Ukrainians, 1932–1933 (Vyshgorod: PP Serhiychuk M. I., 2020), 175.

112. The top secret circular with instructions regarding withdrawal of death record books for the years of 1932–1933 from the local civil registry (ZAGS) archives of the Odesa oblast′ into classified storage at the district executive committees, dated April 1934, was located in DAOO, f. R-2009, op. 1, spr. 4, ark. 91–92; quoted in Boriak, Sources, 28–35.

113. Hennadii Boriak, “Population Losses in the Holodomor and the Destruction of Related Archives: New Archival Evidence,” in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine, eds. Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda, and Halyna Hryn (Cambridge: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 2013), 204; originally published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies 30, nos. 1–4 (2008): 199–215, http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/BoriakPopulationLosses_2008/BoriakPopulationLosses_2008.pdf.

114. Boriak, Sources, 21.

115. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt argues that there were three waves of purges of Soviet archival documents: in 1929–1930, 1937–1938, and during the summer of 1941 on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. See Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The “Special” World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, trans. Sally Laird and John Kendal (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), 1: 88–93. Boriak argues that after the reevacuation of archives in 1945, inventories conducted in 1949, 1955, 1957, 1962, 1965, and 1968 led to thousands of records for the period of 1928–1935 being deliberately destroyed. According to Boriak, “Stalin’s regime left just half of the aggregate archives on the Holodomor created at all levels of government.” See Boriak, “Population Losses in the Holodomor,” 207–12.

116. Vasyl′ Marochko, “‘Russkii Mir’ u Feodosiї: zaborona slova pro Holodomor,” Istorychna Pravda, January 28, 2015, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/columns/2015/01/28/146975/. On the burning of Ukrainian language books in backyards of municipal libraries in the Kuban′ region of the North Caucasus in the spring and summer of 1933, see Jaroslaw Sawka, “Rosiishchennia Kubani – pivdenno-skhidn′oho bastionu Ukraïny,” Rosiishchennia Ukraïny: Naukovo-populiarnyi zbirnyk, ed. Leonid Poltava (New York: Vydannia ukraïns′koho kongresovoho komitetu Ameryky, 1984), 218, https://shron2.chtyvo.org.ua/Zbirka/Rosiischennia_Ukrainy_naukovo-populiarnyi_zbirnyk.pdf.

117. A list of materials deemed extremist is published on the website of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. It has expanded from 14 titles in 2007 to 1,271 titles in 2012. See “V Rosiї knyhy pro Holodomor pryrivniuiut′sia do ekstremizmu,” Istorychna Pravda, June 27, 2012, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2012/06/27/89363/.

118. Marochko, “‘Russkii Mir’ u Feodosii.”

119. Olga Bertelsen, “A Trial in Absentia: Purifying National Historical Narratives in Russia,” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, no. 3 (2016): 57–87.

120. UWC, “UWC Defends Itself against Ban in Russian Federation,” Ukrainian Weekly, April 26, 2020, 1, 5.

121. Askold S. Lozynskyj, “A New Proposal for the Government of Ukraine,” Ukrainian Weekly, January 31, 2021, 6.

122. According to Taras Kuzio, Putin’s mix of Tsarist and Soviet Russian nationalism gave rise to a “Russian World” doctrine. The visible sign of it is the Russian World Foundation, established in 2007. See Taras Kuzio, “Putin Forever: Ukraine Faces the Prospect of Endless Imperial Aggression,” Atlantic Council, February 13, 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putin-forever-ukraine-faces-the-prospect-of-endless-imperial-aggression/.

123. Kurinnyi, “Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. na Pivnichnomu Kavkazi,” 73–85.

124. See the December 15, 1932, resolution of the CC AUCP(B) and SNK USSR “On Ukrainization in DVK, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, TsChO and Other Areas of the USSR”; quoted in Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine, ed. Pyrih, 68–69.

125. Arthur Koestler, “Soviet Myth and Reality,” in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 137–39.

126. Credit must be given to Nikolai Ivnitskii from the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was the first to bring up a detailed analysis of this document from the Russian archives at the 1993 international conference on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the famine. See Ivnitskii, “Golod 1932–1933 gg.,” 43.

127. Marochko, Terytoriia Holodomoru, 11.

128. P. P. Postyshev, “The Results of the Agricultural Year 1933 and the Immediate Tasks of the Communist Party of the Ukraine” (Speech delivered at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, November 19, 1933), in Soviet Ukraine Today (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 95. The English text has been preserved in the National University Kyїv-Mohyla Academy’s James E. Mace Library and Museum Archives, od. zb. 819.

129. Pavel Postyshev, “Speech delivered at the Seventeenth Congress of the AUCP(B), 27 January 1934” (excerpts translated by Bohdan Klid), in The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, eds. Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2012), 268.

130. Pete McBride, “The Last Quiet Places: To the End of the Earth in Search of the Healing Power of Silence,” Smithsonian, October 2020, 51–61.

131. For a strategic use of silence as a tool to marginalize the opposition and cover up mass violence, see Olga Bertelsen, “Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence: 1928–1929,” Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 (2017): 38–67.

132. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 329.

133. “Case History SW34: Anonymous male narrator, b. 1922, Kiev region,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 923; English version in the Report to Congress, 387.

134. Ibid., 925; English version in the Report to Congress, 392.

135. Ibid.

136. The fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov denounced his father, previously head of the village Soviet in the village of Gerasimovka. After the trial and sentence of the father, Morozov was killed by a group of villagers, including his uncle, and is regarded as a martyr. There is now a museum in his village: “In this timbered house was held the court at which Pavlik unmasked his father who sheltered the kulaks.” In 1965, the village was additionally adorned with his statue. His name is entered in the Pioneer “Book of Honor.” See Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 295.

137. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 262; quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 259.

138. Leonid Kononovych, Tema dlia medytasiï (L′viv: Kal′variia, 2006).

139. “Statement by Mr. Kononenko before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Hearing and Meeting, April 30, 1987” (typewritten transcript), 43, Ukraine Famine [Hearing 04/30/1987], Box 16921, Gary Bauer Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

140. Vasyl′ Pavlovych Nechyporenko, b. 1923 in the village of Bilozir’ia, Cherkasky district, Kyїv region, in Ukraïns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 3, 169.

141. Anastasiia Ivanivna N., b. 1923 in the village of Rodnykivka, Kirovohrad district; in Ukraïns´kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 4, 141.

142. Koestler, “Soviet Myth and Reality,” 137–39.

143. From a letter written by James Mace to Volodymyr Maniak, editor of the book of memory, January 13, 1989; quoted in Ukraїns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 5, 294.

144. In his private correspondence with Volodymyr Maniak, James Mace pointed out that Kul′chyts′kyi’s disingenuous arguments were criticized even by the Ukrainian scholarly circles. See Mace’s letter dated January 13, 1989, in Ukraїns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 5, 293.

145. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 181; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 169.

146. I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow, 1951), 207, 212; quoted in Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184–85.

147. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, 185.

148. G. Aronshtam, “K chistke natsional′nykh partorganizatsii,” Revoliutsiia i natsional′nosti, no. 5–6 (1933): 18; quoted in Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 169.

149. “Dopovid′ tov. Sukhomlina,” KP(b)U, XII z’їzd, 230; quoted in Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 169.

150. Volodymyr Shkvarchuk, “Rik 1934: Pokhval′ne slovo tov. Roizenmanu, abo masova chystka Chernihivs′koï oblpartorhanizatsiï,” in Na kazarmennomu stanovyshchi (narysy z istoriï Chernihivshchyny dovoiennykh rokiv) (Chernihiv: Chernihivs′ki oberehy, 2002), 9–19.

151. Bertelsen, “Starvation and Violence,” 39.

152. Nick Kupensky, “Blindness, Hypnosis, Addiction, Fetish: The Language of Holodomor Denial” (paper presented at the Danyliw Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine, University of Ottawa, November 9, 2018).

153. Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror, and Human Difference (London: Routledge, 2007), 43.

154. Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

155. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 6204, ark. 111–12; quoted in Serhiychuk, Genocide-Holodomor, 92. See also Snyder, “The Soviet Famines,” in Bloodlands, 57–58.

156. B. Tsiupyn, “Zapliushchuiuchy ochi: Vydatni zakhidni intelektualy, iaki ne vytrymaly perevirky Holodom,” Tyzhden′, November 24, 2012, http://tyzhden.ua/History/65731.

157. George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 370.

158. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 321.

159. Ibid.

160. Kyle Smith, “Stalin, Famine, and the New York Times: Mr. Jones Tells the Truth about Moscow’s Man at the Paper of Record,” National Review, July 2, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/movie-review-mr-jones-tells-truth-about-new-york-times-communism/.

161. Walter Duranty, “Abundance Found in North Caucasus,” in New York Times, September 14, 1933, 14, in James William Crowl, “Angels in Stalin’s Paradise: Western Reporters in Soviet Russia, A Case Study of Louis Fischer and Walter Duranty” (doctoral diss., University of Virginia, 1978), 162–67.

162. Mace, “Research on Documents” (typewritten notes).

163. Serhiychuk, Genocide-Holodomor, 93.

164. For more on a campaign to revoke Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, see Not Worthy: Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize and the New York Times, ed. Lubomyr Luciuk (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2004).

165. For excerpts from Duranty’s articles, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” March 31, 1933; “Stalin’s Mark Is Party Discipline,” June 27, 1931; “Stalinism Dominates Russia of Today,” June 14, 1931; “Red Army Is Held No Menace to Peace,” June 25, 1931; “Stalinism Solving Minorities Problem,” June 26, 1931; “Stalin’s Russia Is an Echo of Iron Ivan’s,” December 20, 1931, see Jacques Steinberg, “Word for Word/Soft Touch; From Our Men in Moscow, In Praise of the Stalinist Future,” New York Times, October 26, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/weekinreview/word-for-word-soft-touch-our-man-moscow-praise-stalinist-future.html?searchResultPosition=2.

166. Report by the Kharkiv Consulate Royal Consul, Sergio Gradenigo, May 31, 1933, “Re: The Famine and the Ukrainian Question,” in Report to Congress, 424–25, 427; original text in Lettere da Kharkov, ed. Graziosi, 168–74; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 280.

167. Iurii Shapoval and Vadym Zolotar′ov have estimated that of the top sixty-eight officials in the Ukrainian security police in 1929–1931, twenty-six were Jews (38 percent), and by 1932–1933, of the top seventy-five chekists in the Ukrainian GPU, fifty were Jews (66.6 percent). According to the 1926 census, Jews constituted 6.5 percent of the population in Ukraine. Their dedicated work for the GPU did not shield them from Stalin’s Great Terror; most of them were eliminated in the late 1930s. See Iurii Shapoval and Vadym Zolotar′ov, “Ievreї v kerivnytstvi orhaniv DPU–NKVS USRR–URSR u 1920–1930-kh rr.,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, no. 34 (2010): 53–93, esp. 56, 58.

168. Mendel Osherowitch, How People Live in Soviet Russia: Impressions from a Journey, ed. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and trans. Sharon Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Chair of Ukrainian Studies and The Kashtan Press, 2020), 187–96.

169. Victoria Khiterer, “The Holodomor and Jews in Kyiv and Ukraine: An Introduction and Observations on a Neglected Topic,” Nationalities Papers 48, no. 3: Special Issue on the Soviet Famines of 1930–1933 (May 2020): 460–75.

170. Dzerzhinsky, founder and head of Cheka, complained to Lenin in 1920 that “an enormous hindrance in our work is the absence of chekists who are Ukrainians” (V. I. Lenin i VChK: Sbornik dokumentov, 1917–1922 gody, Moscow, 2001, 200); quoted in Myroslav Shkandrij, “Ukrainianization, Terror and Famine: Coverage in Lviv’s Dilo and the Nationalist Press of the 1930s,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 40, no. 3 (2012): 451.

171. Liudmyla Hrynevych, “Ievreis′ke natsional′no-kul′turne vidrodzhennia 1920-kh – 1930-kh rr. v USRR u ‘prokrustovomu lozhi’ bil′shovyts′koї ideolohiї,” Problemy istoriї Ukraїny: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky, no. 12 (2004): 232.

172. Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2013). For a complete list of Gareth Jones’ articles from 1930 to 1935, see garethjones.org.

173. Gareth Jones, “Tell Them We Are Starving”: The 1933 Diaries of Gareth Jones, with an introduction by Ray Gamache, ed. Lubomyr Luciuk (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2015), ii–xv. The diaries contain passages in Welsh, Ukrainian, Russian, and German. The pocket diaries have been preserved by Annie Gwen Jones, Gareth’s mother. The original diaries are archived at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. A complete set of scalable, color diary pages can be found online at www.garethjones.org/diaries.

174. See a book written by Gareth’s niece, Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley and his great nephew, Nigel Linsan Colley, Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident (Nottinghamshire: Nigel Linsan Colley, 2001).

175. Jars Balan, “Rhea Clyman: A Forgotten Canadian Eyewitness to the Hunger of 1932,” in Women and the Holodomor-Genocide: Victims, Survivors, Perpetrators, ed. Victoria A. Malko (Fresno: The Press at California State University, 2019), 113.

176. Balan, “Rhea Clyman,” 92.

177. L. Moskwin (Moscow), “New Campaign of Lies Against the Land of Socialist Construction,” International Press Correspondence, September 29, 1932, 907; thanks to Jars Balan of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies for bringing this source to my attention.

178. Balan, “Rhea Clyman,” 115.

179. “L. B. Golden, General Secretary of the Save the Children Fund, to Sir Robert Vansittart, 24 August 1933, and the Foreign Office to Edward Coote, 7 September, 1933,” in The Foreign Office and the Famine, eds. Carynnyk, Luciuk, and Kordan, 287–89.

180. Marco Carynnyk, “Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin’s Famine: ‘Deliberate’ and ‘Diabolical’ Starvation,” in The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust, eds. Roma Hadzewycz, George B. Zarycky, and Marta Kolomayets (Jersey City: Svoboda Press for Ukrainian National Association, 1983), 50. Originally published in New Perspectives (Toronto), February 19, 1983, 4–5.

181. Marco Carynnyk, “Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, the United States and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933,” in Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933, eds. Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 110; available at https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/16737/file.pdf.

182. Carynnyk, “Blind Eye to Murder,” in Famine in Ukraine, eds. Serbyn and Krawchenko, 109.

183. Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Democracies and the Holodomor,” Clio World, no. 1 (2020): 28–35.

184. Lesia Onyshko, “Milena Rudnyts′ka: shtrykhy do portretu,” Nashe slovo, December 23–30, 2012, 52. In 1958, Rudnyts′ka’s book, Borot′ba za pravdu pro Velykyi Holod (Fighting for Truth about the Great Famine) took the stance that the famine was a result of organized pressure by the Kremlin to fracture Ukrainian farmers, using collectivization to curb rebellious Ukrainians.

185. Vasyl′ Marochko, “‘Torgsin’: zolota tsina zhyttia ukrains′kykh selian u roky holodu (1932–1933),” Ukraïns′kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 3 (2003): 90–91, 100; idem, “Obmin pobutovoho zolota na khlib v Ukraïni v period Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv,” Ukraïns′kyi istoryk, nos. 3–4 (2008): 195–96; idem, “Torgsin,” in Entsyklopediia Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraїni, 431–32.

186. Dr. Lubow Margolena Hansen to Dr. Nellie Pelecovich, January 30, 1934, 2–3; Archives of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, New York, New York; quoted in Report to Congress, 167.

187. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Harper, 1961), 413.

188. Famine in Ukraine (New York: United Ukrainian Organizations, 1934), 6–7; in Report to Congress, 176–77.

189. Haynes and Klehr, In Denial.

190. Eugene Lyons, “American Jews and the Kremlin Purges,” The New Leader 36, no. 9 (March 2, 1953): 14–15; quoted in Dmytro Soloviy, “The Golgotha of Ukraine,” Svoboda – Ukrainian Weekly, June 2, 1953, 2.

191. See James Burnham’s review of Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals by Peter Viereck, The New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1953; quoted in Soloviy, “The Golgotha of Ukraine,” 2.

192. Gantt, “A Medical Review,” 20; see also Vasylenko, “Metodolohiia pravovoї otsinky Holodomoru,” in Holodomor, eds. Vasylenko and Antonovych, 54.