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NYT Propagandizes False Ukrainian History
The New York Times claims that the Ukraine Separatists Rewrite History of 1930s Famine. A headline nearer to the historic truth would be "NYT Propagandizes False Ukrainian History" or "Ukraine Separatists Correct Rewritten History of 1930s Famine".
An excerpt from the piece says:
Traditionally, Ukrainian historians have characterized the famine as a genocide, the direct result of Stalin’s forced collectivization and the Soviet government’s requisitioning of grain for export abroad, leaving Ukraine short — and its borders sealed shut. Since Ukraine gained independence, that is what its students have been taught.
But that is not what students in southeastern Ukraine are learning this year. Instead, under orders from the newly installed separatist governments, they are getting the sanitized Russian version, in which the famine was an unavoidable tragedy that befell the entire Soviet Union.
West-Ukrainians have claimed that the famine caused by the Soviet government under Stalin was a unique genocide targeted against ethnic Ukrainians. They often use this claim to demonize Russians. But that claim is ahistoric and false.
The famine happened in all agricultural areas of the Soviet Union. The Volga region of Russia was just as much effected as the Ukraine region But the most hurt area was Kazakhstan:
Kazakhs were most severely affected by the Soviet famine in terms of percentage of people who died (approximately 38%). Around 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan of whom 1.3 million where ethnic Kazakhs.
Even the Ukrainians who claim that the famine was a special anti-Ukrainian genocide concede that point. In a 2009 piece on the issue the NYT quoted a Ukrainian professor who propagandizes the genocide myth:
“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”
So being "killed by hunger" in Ukraine and "died from famine" in the Volga region and Kazakhstan is an "absolute difference"? The cause as well as the outcome seem to be the same to me. What else but some national genocide myth making could create an "absolute difference" in that.
The reasons for the famine are also multiple and not caused by a Stalin order or intent to "kill the Ukrainians":
[In 1927 Stalin warned] party congress delegates of an impending capitalist encirclement, he stressed that survival and development could only occur by pursuing the rapid development of heavy industry.
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Shifting from Lenin's New Economic Policy or NEP, the first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making, stressing rapid, heavy industrialization. It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth.
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In November 1928 the Central Committee decided to implement forced collectivization of the peasant farmers. This marked the end of the NEP, which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Grain requisitioning intensified and peasants were forced to give up their private plots of land and property, to work for collective farms, and to sell their produce to the state for a low price set by the state.
Given the goals of the first Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy industrialization.
The plan of rapid industrialization was largely successful. Iron and coal production exploded. New industries grew with newly imported modern machines. The agricultural development was more difficult. The forced collectivization of peasant farmers and the exceeding central demands to deliver their products to the cities and for export led to a sharp drop in agricultural productivity and output. The small land landowners boycotted the collectivization which was then brutally enforced. Only in the early 1940s did the agricultural production again reach the level of the early 1930s.
The separatist governments in east-Ukraine have this right. The famine was the heavy price paid for the fast industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The main agricultural regions were hit hardest while areas with coal and iron ore and the cities developed the most.
But only the successful industrialization in the 1930s enabled the Soviet Union to withstand the German onslaught in the following decade. Without Stalin's foresight and brutal industrialization the Soviet Union would not have been able to later out-produce the well industrialized Germany in weapons and ammunition. It would have lost the war against the Nazis. Even as it won the war it cost the Soviet Union about five times the casualties of the 1930s famine.
But the fact that the Soviet Union did not lose that war against Nazi-Germany may be the real reason why today's Ukrainian "nationalists" are sad about the issue.
If there’s a grand conspiracy theory, this is it. But while the US ignores its own historical crimes, it tries to make a natural disaster halfway across the globe out to be a “genocide”… all so it can do more of it’s own killing.
Just look at the Google nGram (which tracks the use of word or phrase in books and media over the last century) for “Holodomor” and “Ukraine Famine”. It’s quite clear that the idea of this as a “genocide” and not a horrible natural disaster has only arisen in the late 1980s – the Reagan/Thatcher years where Nazi propaganda made a major comeback.
The fact is that this distortion of history is a giant fib, designed to to rend the former Soviet states, and to further the myth that the Soviet Union is somehow the moral equal to Nazi Germany (a complete lie, which not only distorts the Soviet record, but is mean to polish that of the Nazis). It’s the world’s most immoral marketing trick, pure and simple. Even anointing it with the same “Holo” of the Holocaust – only one is a real man-made horror, and the other is an attempt to cover for the first! There’s even event’s to “promote” it – an event you really wouldn’t think needed “promoting” seeing how, if it is to be beleived as described it was one of the most horrific events of the 20th Century (after all, no one throws pot lucks to remind people of World War Two) but apparently this “genocide” does require it.
It is the reduction of History to a tactic in covert war, and it is a sure sign that the moral compass of those who guide us is not just off, but completely lost. No good can come of such lies – especially when they have as their goal only more death and murder.
This is one of the grossest distortions of the historical record ever attempted. If 1984 has any resonance today, it is in efforts such as these – an effort by the far-right to bestow the perpetrators of vast crimes against humanity during the Second World War the mantle of victims.
The people who are the most tied to this story, who promote it the most and who strive to put it into the history books are, in fact, the people of the Western Ukraine – people who were not even a part of the Soviet Union at the time, who were not affected by the famine at all. And it is one of the main “selling points” for the nazis at work in Ukraine today – those who are intent to shell apartment blocks in their own country. Pretending to be the historical victim.
There was, of course, a huge famine in the Soviet Union during those years. It was huge news in the west. Communists. This was not a first in Russia – in fact, it was a common occurrence in that poor, giant nation under the Czar. The years of 1891 1897, 1901, 1906, and 1911 were years of food shortage or famine before the revolution. In fact, because of the terrible losses of 20 million during the war, the Soviet Union experienced another – its last – massive food shortage in 1946.
As for the shoddy nature of the article, it is immediately apparent. They contradict themselves entirely in the space of one sentence:
Traditionally, Ukrainian historians have characterized the famine as a genocide, the direct result of Stalin’s forced collectivization and the Soviet government’s requisitioning of grain for export abroad, leaving Ukraine short — and its borders sealed shut.
A genocide is the direct result, it should be clear, of genocide. Genocides do not occur as the secondary result of poor government policy – though using that metric, might we be right to accuse the Bush Administration of mass murder during the Katrina episode? The fact is there is no evidence that the famine was intentional. There is not a single official document that indicates this was anything more than a massive tragedy. And yet it is paraded around and used to divide and conquer the states of the former USSR.
Posted by: guest77 | Apr 30 2015 1:40 utc | 13
All parties in a position to do so, use real or alleged civilian
mass killings/deaths for propaganda reasons.
The best example of that is the jews and their so called holocaust. Though not only the jews, but all major allied powers took/take advantage of the holo narrative for their own gain.
Ukraine now, meaning the neo installed junta, is in just such a position, backed as it is, by zusa. Russia, no strange to propaganda either, counters with some of its own.
The world war II narrative is a joke, it really is the victors narrative. It’s the zamerican, brit, soviet and french narrative. All these countries had a big hand in causing the war.
The article by b is biased and selective. The subject is hotly debated – unlike the holocau$t, which cannot be discussed – as the wiki article which reads, in part:
The causes of the Holodomor are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some historians theorize that the famine was an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization. Others claim that the Soviet policies that caused the famine were an engineered attack on Ukrainian nationalism, or more broadly, on all peasants, in order to prevent uprisings. Some suggest that the famine may fall under the legal definition of genocide.
My position after studying this for a while? I don’t really know.
There is certainly room for doubt about the genocide claim. There certainly were many causes for the famines, in the Ukraine and elsewhere.
But there is more than enough hard evidence for the culpability of the stalinist regime in the famines and the mass deaths. Certainly the evidence is much more compelling than the non existent evidence for nazi homicidal gas chambers and 6 million jews.
The soviet regime undertook brutal policies, they knew what was happening and kept on going.
The justification by b that through such policies, industrialization was achieved and saved the SU from nazis is quite bizarre. The famines took place before or just as Hitler rose to power.
To compare the victims of the famines with the people who perished in world war Ii is basically to accept wwII propaganda that the allies had nothing to do with it and it was all germanys and the axis fault.
Except that is a load of BS.
The stalinist regime had a lot of responsability for wwii and in the brief period of time between the SOVIeT UNIONs collapse and Putins rise, many russian historians pioneered work which since then has demonstrated that there is now ample evidence to substantiate the claim that the German led Axis invasion of the Soviet Union was a preventive attack to forestall Stalin’s attempted invasion of Europe which was codenamed Operation Thunderstorm. It was Russian historians who led the way with the release of this information and books on this subject.
Since the rise of Putin, the russian government has been recasting history to serve the country’s national interests, and the myth of ‘the great patriotic war’ is one that creates incentives for patriotism. Patriotism is very important to counter american infiltration in the country. Both Putin and Medvedev have stated such goals and have been against any revising of history.
Except that history without revision is dogma and propaganda and not science. Obviously that ZUSA, the Uk, etc all do the same thing. The western allied countries also had much responsability for the war.
I support the Russian position in the Ukraine.
But that does not mean one has to swallow soviet/russian propaganda uncritically.
For those who understand German, have a look at ‘Überfall auf Europa: Plante die Sowjetunion 1941 einen Angriffskrieg?’, written by 9 russian historians, published in 2009, it shows that the common feel good notion of a peace loving and neutral SU is nonsense.
For american responsability, take a look at ‘the new dealers war’ by Thomas Feming. There are many others;
For ZUKs: ‘Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War’ by Buchanan. In German, the excellent ‘Die Kriegstreiber’ by historian Max Klüver.
Posted by: Luca K | Apr 30 2015 4:17 utc | 24
Thanks Demian, that’s quite true which is why I mentioned Nazi propaganda making a comeback.
The myth of American Exceptionalism relies entirely on making the Soviet Union the equal of Nazi Germany and it is an utter historical fabrication. The far-right tries to extend the Stalin-era to be the entirety of Soviet history, which it most certainly wasn’t. It would be akin to trying to make Japanese Internment (a policy on par with Stalin’s relocations) out to being the entirety of US history. Yet you could hear, in the 1980s, people screaming not just that the Soviet Union was somehow like Nazi Germany, but even allowed the same foolish hyperbole for such vaguely-Soviet influenced countries like Nicaragua
The Soviet Union, like the American Revolution, was a work in progress. And it showed quite an astonishing ability to re-invent itself, from de-Stalinization to Perestroika, indeed to (one could argue) its peaceful dissolution. This is arguably a more credible display of change than the 100 years it took the United States to undo slavery (and the other hundred to undo Jim Crow) or America’s still unsolved issues regarding its native population. But just as the core ideals of the American Revolution have lead it to reform itself in many remarkable ways, so I think we must know that the core ideals of the Russian Revolution would have put it on the path to righting its basic injustices and achieving great things. As indeed is happening in many countries that still, to some degree or another follow its example in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. But unfortunately the US-led Cold War counter-revolution has succeeded in ways rarely seen in this world history.
Those who say, as “Luka K” (who, I’d suggest reading his past, far-right screeds here on MoA) does, that “The USSR is a different animal that todays’ Russia” needs to understand that Russia today, despite the Malthusian horrors of the 1990s reforms, is what it is because of the Soviet experience. Russia still maintains many aspects of Soviet life, from relatively generous pensions, to high-levels of home security, to universal healthcare, to a strong Communist Party.
It’s interesting to note as well that in many of the countries of Eastern Europe – aside from those outlawing – nazi-style – the Communist Parties (Ukraine being the latest) – these parties receive substantial support, often remaining in power after the transition to western-style campaigning or being among the top parties. Hardly a “repudiation” of “totalitarian evil empires”. Even in East Germany, where we are regaled with the “horrors” of the Stasi, the party that emerged from the East German ruling party receives upwards of 30% of the vote!
The fact is that much of the turn by these governments to security-heavy social regimes are because of the pressure by the United States and the Western countries. The fact that the United States immediately turned to former Nazis to staff the highest level of German intelligence – people responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens – should leave no doubt as to how the Soviets perceived the threats to their security. They were not about to let what happened twice in the 20th century happen again. And the vast majority of Soviet Citizens – certainly more understandable, if no less tragic, that US citizens who accept the scrapping of civil liberties because of “terra-ism” – we’re okay with that type of social contract.
Sadly, they did let what had happened twice in the 20th Century happen a third time by letting their guard down, such was the drastic “reforms” that lead to the deaths of millions which, if we go with the NYTimes construction of the Ukraine famine, we might as well call a genocide of the Russian people. Though I’m quite sure that, unlike the Ukraine Famine, there WERE people among top US policy maker who knew the deaths of millions through these Malthusian “reforms” was in the cards.
A twist on that is Belarus, a country that never allowed itself to descend into neo-liberal hell and has still managed economic performance on the level of both Russia and western-sponsored states such as those in the Baltics. So what happened in Russia didn’t have to happen. Sadly, it happened because of Yeltsin’s taking over, in 1993, as a virtual dictator and destroying western-style democracy in Russia in its infancy.
Posted by: guest77 | May 1 2015 3:17 utc | 65
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