How Stalin Hid Ukraine's Famine From the World

[EYESORE 9001]

In 1932 and 1933, millions died across the Soviet Union—and the foreign press corps helped cover up the catastrophe.

By Anne Applebaum

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.

Neither the Ukrainian famine nor the broader Soviet famine were ever officially recognized by the USSR. Inside the country the famine was never mentioned. All discussion was actively repressed; statistics were altered to hide it. The terror was so overwhelming that the silence was complete. Outside the country, however, the cover-up required different, subtler tactics. These are beautifully illustrated by the parallel stories of Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones.

In the 1930s, all of the members of the Moscow press corps led a precarious existence. At the time, they needed the state’s permission to live in the USSR, and even to work. Without a signature and the official stamp of the press department, the central telegraph office would not send their dispatches abroad. To win that permission, journalists regularly bargained with foreign ministry censors over which words they could use, and they kept on good terms with Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet official responsible for the foreign press corps. William Henry Chamberlin, then the Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that the foreign reporter “works under a Sword of Damocles—the threat of expulsion from the country or of the refusal of permission to re-enter it, which of course amounts to the same thing.”

Extra rewards were available to those, like Walter Duranty, who played the game particularly well. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow from 1922 until 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. British by birth, Duranty had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and skeptical “realist,” trying to listen to both sides of the story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935—the kulaks being the so-called wealthy peasants whom Stalin accused of causing the famine. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”

More…

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/

Some background into reasons why many Ukrainians are resistant to becoming part of Greater Russia again. The famine may also help explain why some Ukrainians chose fighting with occupying nazis during WW II. Memories of mass starvation don’t fade quickly.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Both-sides-ism in 1935. . . . nt

[Sherman A1]

2. K&R

Thanks for posting.

[blue-wave]

3. The famine also helps explain

why eastern Ukraine has so many people who speak Russian. In 1932-33 Ukraine was divided between two occupying countries. The Soviet Union (Russia) and Poland. The Russians controlled eastern Ukraine and the Polish controlled western Ukraine. The famine was only in the Soviet (Russian) side. It was ordered by Stalin, who had no control over western Ukraine. After the famine, whole villages and large areas of eastern Ukraine were desolate of life. Many Russians then settled in eastern Ukraine.

[Tommy Carcetti]

4. A good movie to watch on the topic: "Mr. Jones"

About Gareth Jones, the reporter who went into Ukraine and exposed the famine.

The screenplay was written by Andrea Chalupa; her sister Alexandria helped to expose the illegal payments Paul Manafort was receiving from Ukraine’s former pro-Russian strongman Viktor Yanukovych.

[scarletlib]

5. Thanks. Looks like a good movie. I will watch it.

[onlyadream]

8. Found it on Hulu. Thanks! Nt

[VWolf]

6. My grandparents and great uncle/aunt were part of that,

having lived in Kiev at the time. They said it was absolutely brutal.

Years later, my great uncle wrote an essay on it for Peter Jenning's book "The Century"
If you have the book, it's a one-page inset, roughly 1/3 of the way in.

[Javaman]

7. I knew someone years ago from the Ukraine...

she would tell me stories about her families survival during the induced famine.

the one thing I will never forget was, she told me that her parents were so hungry they were eating grass.