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Holodomor denial
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Holodomor denial
Denial of the Holodomor is the claim that a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or was exaggerated.
The government of the Soviet Union officially denied the occurrence of the famine and suppressed information about it from its very beginning until the 1980s. This Soviet denial was also circulated by some Western journalists and intellectuals. Most prominently, The New York Times' Walter Duranty echoed Soviet denials in his reporting during the height of the famine.
According to Jurij Dobczansky, Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and "generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades," often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence, Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.
Rebekah Moore argues that Western recognition of the Holodomor reflects the broader politics of genocide and victimhood, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for acknowledgment, particularly among the Ukrainian diaspora.
Soviet head-of-state Mikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling off "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."
On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the United States, published a letter on 3 January 1934, in response to a pamphlet about the famine. In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" was "wholly grotesque." He claimed that the Ukrainian population had been increasing at an annual rate of 2 percent during the preceding five years and asserted that the death rate in Ukraine "was the lowest of that of any of the constituent republics composing the Soviet Union", concluding that it "was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate of tsarist days."
Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in the Gulag labor camps. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death. William Henry Chamberlin was a Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor for 10 years; in 1934 he was reassigned to the Far East. After he left the Soviet Union he wrote his account of the situation in Ukraine and North Caucasus (Poltava, Bila Tserkva, and Kropotkin). Chamberlin later published a couple of books: Russia's Iron Age and The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation. He wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 1934 that "the evidence of a large-scale famine was so overwhelming, was so unanimously confirmed by the peasants that the most 'hard-boiled' local officials could say nothing in denial."
The true number of dead was concealed. At the Kyiv Medical Inspectorate, for example, the actual number of corpses, 9,472, was recorded as only 3,997. The GPU was directly involved in the destruction of actual birth and death records, as well as the fabrication of false information to cover up information regarding the causes and scale of death in Ukraine.
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Holodomor denial
Denial of the Holodomor is the claim that a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or was exaggerated.
The government of the Soviet Union officially denied the occurrence of the famine and suppressed information about it from its very beginning until the 1980s. This Soviet denial was also circulated by some Western journalists and intellectuals. Most prominently, The New York Times' Walter Duranty echoed Soviet denials in his reporting during the height of the famine.
According to Jurij Dobczansky, Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and "generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades," often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence, Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.
Rebekah Moore argues that Western recognition of the Holodomor reflects the broader politics of genocide and victimhood, emphasizing the ongoing struggle for acknowledgment, particularly among the Ukrainian diaspora.
Soviet head-of-state Mikhail Kalinin responded to Western offers of food by telling off "political cheats who offer to help the starving Ukraine," and commented, "Only the most decadent classes are capable of producing such cynical elements."
On instructions from Litvinov, Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor of the recently opened Soviet Embassy in the United States, published a letter on 3 January 1934, in response to a pamphlet about the famine. In his letter, Skvirsky stated that the idea that the Soviet government was "deliberately killing the population of Ukraine" was "wholly grotesque." He claimed that the Ukrainian population had been increasing at an annual rate of 2 percent during the preceding five years and asserted that the death rate in Ukraine "was the lowest of that of any of the constituent republics composing the Soviet Union", concluding that it "was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate of tsarist days."
Mention of the famine was criminalized, punishable with a five-year term in the Gulag labor camps. Blaming the authorities was punishable by death. William Henry Chamberlin was a Moscow correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor for 10 years; in 1934 he was reassigned to the Far East. After he left the Soviet Union he wrote his account of the situation in Ukraine and North Caucasus (Poltava, Bila Tserkva, and Kropotkin). Chamberlin later published a couple of books: Russia's Iron Age and The Ukraine: A Submerged Nation. He wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 1934 that "the evidence of a large-scale famine was so overwhelming, was so unanimously confirmed by the peasants that the most 'hard-boiled' local officials could say nothing in denial."
The true number of dead was concealed. At the Kyiv Medical Inspectorate, for example, the actual number of corpses, 9,472, was recorded as only 3,997. The GPU was directly involved in the destruction of actual birth and death records, as well as the fabrication of false information to cover up information regarding the causes and scale of death in Ukraine.
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