Holodomor 1932-33: Genocide or unfortunate famine?

Who Organised the Famine in the USSR in 1932-1933?
By ORIENTAL REVIEW


Episode 10. Who Organised the Famine in the USSR in 1932-1933?

The theory of the Holodomor is reactivated in the media every time Ukraine is about to take a step back to Russia. Just to remind those who are not aware of the tragedy, in 1932-1933 there was a severe famine throughout the USSR that claimed an unprecedented number of lives (up to 7 million victims, according to some debatable estimates). Paradoxically the famine mostly affected fertile areas in the North Caucasus, the Volga basin, the South Urals, Western Siberia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Kazakhstan. During the last decade several Western historians were recruited to elaborate on the  theory that the famine tragedy was a deliberate act of genocide against Ukrainians carried out by Stalin’s government. Let’s consider the historical facts and try to get closer to the truth regarding the issue of the sources and circumstances of that horrible famine in the USSR.

First of all we have to recall something about the Gold, which surprisingly not always is a mean of payment…

In early 1920s the recently proclaimed Soviet Union was anxious about restoration of its industry totally destroyed after WWI and Civil War in Russia (1918-1921). The Soviets desperately needed modern machinery and industrial equipment. How could they pay it? Soviet government was able to offer to the international market three items: grain, minerals and gold.
Soviet Golden Chervonets, 1923

Soviet Golden Chervonets, 1923

On Genoa Conference in 1922 the new Gold Exchange Standard was introduced. Since the end of 1922 the Soviet Union was issuing the golden chervonets – a new Soviet currency fully covered by the golden reserves and convertible to gold. In 1923 the Soviet chervonets was one of the most stable and secured currencies of the world. It represented a clear and present danger for emerging financial epicentre – the United States of America The economic and financial weight of the United States boomed astonishingly as the result of global war. That country was one of few beneficiaries of the man-slaughtering house in Europe of 1910s. But an unexpected rival from the Bolshevik stated emerged vigorously…

In 1924 the Soviet chervonets was replaced by a softer rouble without golden equivalent. The menace to the US dollar and British pound was diminished. In return Soviet Union was recognized by the UK, France, Norway, Austria, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, China, Japan, Mexico and other countries. The United States possessed 46% of golden reserves of the capitalist world.

In 1925 the Soviet leadership decided to accelerate industrialization of the country. Quite surprisingly despite enormous economic gains promised by such policies, the Western countries refused to accept gold as payment when trading with Soviet Union! This amazing behaviour of is known in history as the “gold blockade”. The USSR could pay for machinery and equipment only by oil, timber and grains. (Interestingly, they still accepted pre-revolution Imperial Russian golden coins – the currency of a non-existent state was not dangerous!)

In 1929 the US bankers initiate the Great Depression. The short period of international currency exchange stability was over.

In 1931 Germany and Austria failed to repay the foreign debt and stop exchanging marks into gold, thus abolishing Gold Exchange Standard. By the autumn 1931 the UK suspends the gold exchange as well.

As you see, it would be a logical and natural move to lift the golden blockade of Soviet Union at that time, thus allowing Soviet gold to relieve the suffocating Western economies. But the decision they was taken at that circumstances was shocking in its absurdity. They not only left the gold blockade of the USSR in force, but also imposed a severe trade embargo on the major part of Soviet export! It was done despite acute economic crisis in the West where most producers were interested in any kind of demand, especially paid by gold, timber, oil and other raw material from the Soviet Union. E.g. in 1932 80% of British machinery export was being supplied to the USSR. Nevertheless, on April 17, 1933 the British government introduced embargo: Russian Goods (Import Prohibition) Act 1933! What was the logic? It was a politically motivated decision to pressure the tenacious Soviet government powered by the antagonistic ideology and economic structure.

Was the traded between the West and the USSR totally cut down? Absolutely not. Soviet demand for Western technologies and machinery was even higher than ever: the industrialization was full-pelt. But now the West was expecting only one mean of payment: the Soviet grains! (The curiosity of this claim is emphasized by the fact that by that time the currencies of the most agrarian countries were significantly devaluated and the demand for grains on world market was cut 50-70%!)

The Stalin’s government was faced with a choice: either to give up restoring industry, so capitulating to the West, or continue industrialising, leading to a dreadful internal crisis. If the Bolsheviks took grain away from the peasants, there was the very great probability of a famine which, in turn, might lead to internal unrest and removal from power. So no matter what Stalin chose, the West would remain victorious. Stalin and his entourage decided to force their way through and stop at nothing.

The government collected grain and sent it to the West, but not to starve part of a country’s population to death, but because there was no other way it could pay for the supply of equipment. All of Stalin’s hopes were on a new harvest. It turned out to be a small one, however, since the country was struck by a drought. The USSR was unable to buy food in exchange for gold (the gold blockade) or currency (as a result of the embargo there was none). Attempts were urgently made to get supplies of grain from Persia, where they had agreed to accept gold. The authorities did not have time, however, as a catastrophe was already underway.
Famine Victims, Kuban, 1932

Famine Victims, Kuban, 1932

Between 1932 and 1933, thousands and thousands of people died and it was only after this that the West was once again renewed to accept oil, timber and precious metals from the Soviets.

In October 2008, the European Parliament recognised the Holodomor in the Ukraine as a crime against humanity. The guilty was put on the ‘Stalinist USSR’. However, the report by the European Parliament did not provide answers to two questions:

• why did the capitalists behave so “strangely”, refusing to accept Stalin’s gold?

• why did they only want to receive grain from the USSR as payment?

There is neither truth nor logic in the European Parliament’s reports. The truth is that in 1934, grain exports from the USSR completely stopped. By order of the Soviet government…

The famine of 1932-33, which was carefully organized by the West, did not have the desired effect: the Bolsheviks remained in power. They continued industrializing. Economic measures had no effect – Stalin was restoring the country at any price. Only military measures remained. And exactly in 1933 Adolf Hitler, who had openly written about his expansionist aims in the vast Russian plains, came to power in Germany…

NationalRus wrote:everyone died in that famine not only ukranians  

it was more of a crime to allow further ukrainisation (a artificial langouge and name to ethnical russian people) in the whole soviet period, basicaly supporting heretics, now we reap what we allowed to be sow

Remarkably, the roots of the "Holodomor" ("deliberate starvation") myth lie in the longstanding Cold War standoff between Soviet Russia and the West. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, infamous Nazi collaborators — members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their paramilitary UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) units — fled into Western Europe and the United States, escaping punishment for their hideous crimes, including ruthless terror against peaceful Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians.

In 1949 the CIA and the US State Department sponsored the OUN-UPA leaders' immigration to the United States, planning to use them as subversion groups and intelligence agents in the Cold War against Soviet Russia.

One of them, Mykola Lebed was characterized as "a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans" by the CIA, according to Swedish-American historian Dr. Per Anders Rudling in his book "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths." However, this fact had not prevented the CIA from recruiting the former Nazi collaborator.

"Mykola Lebed [who was responsible for the murder of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia] lived in Queens, New York, until the 1990s, totally supported by the CIA or State Department," the US expert in Soviet history Professor Grover Carr Furr of Montclair State University, narrated in an interview with Sputnik in May, 2015.

While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.

By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.

One of these myths was "Holodomor" that claimed that the USSR and its leader Joseph Stalin deliberately starved to death from three to seven million Ukrainians.

"In 1987 the film "Harvest of Despair" was made. It was the beginning of the 'Holodomor' movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle, exposed the fact that the film took photographs from the 1921-22 'Volga famine' and used them to illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, 'Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,' about the phony 'Holodomor' issue," Professor Furr elaborated.

After the collapse of the USSR, the Ukrainian diaspora played a substantial role in shaping the ideology of the new Ukrainian state. "Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora," Dr. Rudling underscored.

However, it was under Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko (who gained his power after the Western-sponsored Maidan uprising of 2004, also known as the Orange Revolution) when the anti-Russian myth making caught its second wind in Ukraine. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of "memory management" and "myth making" were established in the country.

Both Russian and Western historians have questioned the "Holodomor" concept as well as evidently exaggerated number of victims of the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine.

American historian Professor Mark B. Tauger, West Virginia University, carried out thorough research on the famine of 1932-33 in the USSR, and came to the conclusion that the disaster was due to environmental circumstances and was evidently not related to the Soviet policy in the region.

"Popular media and most historians for decades have described the great famine that struck most of the USSR in the early 1930s as "man-made," very often a "genocide" that Stalin perpetrated intentionally against Ukrainians and sometimes other national groups to destroy them as nations… This perspective, however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster. A small but growing literature relying on new archival documents and a critical approach to other sources has shown the flaws in the "genocide" or "intentionalist" interpretation of the famine and has developed an alternative interpretation," Tauger wrote in his research work "Review of R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933."

Tauger stressed that climatic conditions played the main role in the famine of 1932-33.

Paradoxically, supporters of the "Holodomor" myth remain silent about the fact that Russia (including the territory of modern Ukraine) had suffered from periodic devastating famines since the end of 19th century, long before Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. They also ignore the fact that there were serious famines in 1920-21, 1924, 1927 and 1928.

Interestingly enough, official Soviet Ukrainian primary sources show that the 1928-29 famine, caused by natural disaster, mainly draught, was very serious, and Ukraine received more aid from the Soviet government, than it sent to other parts of the USSR. This obviously disproves the false theory of the Ukrainian nationalists' "malicious" conspiracy against Ukrainian peasants in the Soviet Union, noted Grover Furr in his book "Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands Is False."

In response to historians who suggest that the Ukrainian peasants starved and suffered especially because of Collectivization — Stalin's policy of the early 1930s aimed at consolidating individual lands into collective farms — Tauger emphasized:

"These studies minimize or ignore the actual harvest data, the environmental factors that caused low harvests, the repeated recovery from the famine and crop failures, the large harvests of the 1930s, the mechanization of Soviet farms in these years, Soviet population growth, and the long-term increases in food production and consumption over the Soviet period" ("Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-1939).

According to the scholar, although the Stalin regime implemented collectivization "coercively," the policy "brought substantial modernization to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s" ("Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization, 1930-1939").

Remarkably, the famine of 1932-33 was the last famine that struck the Soviet Union with the exception for the famine of 1946-47 the country suffered from after the Second World War.

Although the "Holodomor" myth was never based upon credible evidence and there are enough authentic sources to prove that it is a hoax, it is simply taken for granted. Unsurprisingly, Washington supports the myth as a part of its recent Cold War-style anti-Russian campaign. Alas, even repeated a thousand times a lie will never become the truth.

kvs wrote:Old thread, but relevant question:

Why were Ukrainians not subjected to famine genocide during the 1945-1953 period.   The same Stalin was in power and there was actually a Nazi insurgency in
western Ukraine.   There was no insurgency during the 1930s in Ukraine.     So we are supposed to believe that Stalin starved to death millions in central and
eastern Ukraine for some vague reason (hate for Ukrainians?), but did nothing similar in western Ukraine when he had full incentive to do it ("no man, no problem")?

Holodomor hoax pimps can't have their cake and eat it too.

Backman wrote:Dmitri Babich was just on Crosstalk and he really settled this issue.

The Western part of Ukraine is the one crying about this now. And it wasn't even a part of Ukraine in 1933 ! It was a part of Poland. The Eastern part of Ukraine took rev brunt of it. You know , the part who is currently fighting against kiev.

kvs wrote:Harassment taxation by the Polish occupation administration in "real Ukraine" is a fact.   Polish whitewashing is inane.

lancelot wrote:From what I understand the famine happened not only in Ukraine but across most of the Soviet farming belt including in Russia and Kazakhstan.

Part of the whole plan of industrialization of the Soviet Union in one generation relied on massive taxation of farming. In order to support industrialization there was a massive movement of workers into cities and food had to be supplied to industrial workers in the cities. Or construction workers all over the nation. The industrialization effort also relied a lot initially on foreign technical assistance and purchase of foreign machine tools. For example US machine tools and designers and technical assistants. The US insisted on being paid in grain and gold. All local authorities in the Soviet Union wanted to keep presenting ever larger growth figures to central government and hid the low production figures for a long period. So the grain got exported. And by the time the central government figured the situation out it was just too late to reverse the situation.