(The Ukrainian Weekly, December 27, 1987, No. 52, Vol. LV)
The paper below was delivered by Dr. James Mace at a conference on “Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century” held in New York on November 13.
PART I
In 1932 and 1933 an artificially created famine made the Ukrainian SSR, the contiguous and largely Ukrainian North Caucasus Territory to its east, and the largely German and Tatar regions of the Volga Basin, in the words of Robert Conquest, “like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbors. At the same time (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”
In the Soviet case, the enemy was defined in terms of social class rather than-nationality, race or religion. However, the Communist Party held itself up as the embodiment of the class consciousness of the proletariat: anything it sanctioned was by definition proletarian, and anything it found convenient was by definition infected with hostile class content. Its ideology classified “nationalism,” as distinct from the party-sanctioned Russocentric “Soviet patriotism,” as “bourgeois nationalism,” that is, a form of bourgeois ideology. This allowed Stalinism to imbue class categories with national content. According to Stalin, the social basis of nationalism was the peasantry.
Soviet ideology also posited the division of the peasantry into bourgeois and proletarian strata, which were never precisely defined, and thus, at Stalin’s discretion, any segment of the peasantry could at and given moment be declared either proletarian and worthy of survival or bourgeois and worthy of “liquidation.” Those whose relative wealth did not qualify them as class enemies could easily be classified as “agents” of the class enemies.
The New Economic Policy, beginning in 1921 and ending somewhere between 1927 and the end of 1929, was basically a series of concessions to the peasant. From 1923, NEP was accompanied by a policy of concessions to non-Russians known as indigenization. Since in 1926 about three-eighths of the Soviet Union’s non-Russians were Ukrainians and the latter outnumbered the next largest non-Russian group by about 6.5 to 1, the nationality problem was to a great extent a Ukrainian problem. It is thus hardly surprising that the Ukrainian version of indigenization, Ukrainization, went much farther than its counterparts elsewhere in the USSR.
The forced collectivization of agriculture was actually a war in which the regime forced the peasantry, much against its will, into state-controlled estates from which the authorities could seize more produce more easily. By the end of 1931 in Ukraine, the state had won its war. Seven-tenths of the peasants had been forced to “sign up” for collective farms, comprising four-fifths of all arable farmland in the Ukrainian SSR. At the same time, grain seizures had wiped out reserves from previous years and led to localized outbreaks of famine. Moscow’s representatives were warned of the situation as early as July 1932.
The essence of collectivization was the replacement of individual farms by large collective farms in which the agricultural population planted and harvested as a group. The latter was particularly important: since the entire harvest of a given collective farm was brought to a single point and placed under state control, the state could dispose of it as it pleased. Obligations to the state, as the state determined them, and to the collective farm administration had to be completely fulfilled before any produce whatsoever was distributed to those who had produced it. If the harvest fell short or merely equalled the amount demanded for other obligations, the peasants received nothing, and thorough searches were made of members’ homes for anything which might make up for the shortfall. Even if a given collective met its quota, it was often assigned a supplementary quota to make up for others that had not.
Those remaining outside the collective farms also had “firm tasks” and household quotas, and they too were assigned “supplementary tasks.” Their houses and gardens were similarly searched. In the early 1930s the state thus took complete control of all crops grown and was in a position to seize any or all of them. Thus Stalin had the power to starve the actual producers of foodstuffs, and in 1932 he made use of it.
After the 1932 harvest, the Ukrainian party organization went over to a virtual war footing in “the struggle for bread.” Officials found wanting were replaced, including a quarter of Ukraine’s 494 raion government heads by October 1. Entire oblasts were censured for “temporizing” in the struggle. As the situation worsened, various appeals were made to Stalin, who dismissed them. Stalin responded in October 1932 by “strengthening” the Ukrainian party organization through the appointment of Mendel Khataevich and Ivan Akulov to the Ukrainian leadership. Khataevich, who had won a reputation for brutality in combatting “kulak sabotage” in the Middle Volga Territory, became second secretary of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine. Akulov, hitherto first deputy of the OGPU (secret police), became head of the Donbas obkom.
Any difficulty in seizing the grain was blamed on the ubiquitous class enemies in the countryside, the kulaks, and their “agents,” surviving supporters of Petliura and Makhno. At the same time, a new enemy was added, the “tightwads” (tverdozdavtsi). By December 13 more than one-fifth of Ukraine’s raions were “blacklisted,” that is, placed under complete economic blockade and thoroughly purged of “class enemies.” In December, arrests began of local officials found wanting in the struggle for bread, and in one raion the entire leadership was arrested.
The starving were left to their fate and all traffic between Ukraine and areas immediately to the north was closely controlled. They were not allowed to travel to Russia where food was available, though some managed to do so by stealth. Nor were these lucky ones allowed to return with any food they might have purchased; it was confiscated at the Russo-Ukrainian border.
Stalin took advantage of the famine created by his policies to withdraw the concessions earlier made to the Ukrainians. On December 14, 1932, he ordered a halt to the “mechanistic” implementation of Ukrainization and the initiation of a campaign “to disperse Petliurists and other bourgeois nationalist elements from the party and Soviet organizations” in Ukraine. On January 24, 1933, Stalin took direct control of the Ukrainian party organization by appointing Pavel Postyshev second secretary and head of the Kharkiv obkom. Khataevich who now became third secretary, was also given the Dnipropetrovske obkom, and Evgenii Veger, a Central Committee functionary from Moscow, was appointed to head the Odessa obkom.
With Akulov retaining the Donbas, Stalin controlled through his new appointees two of the three secretaries of the Ukrainian Central Committee and four of Ukraine’s six obkoms (not counting the small Moldavian ASSR). In addition, Postyshev brought with him thousands of clients which in succeeding months took over responsible posts throughout the Ukrainian SSR, including the top party and state posts in about half of all Ukraine’s raions.
Everything that happened subsequently could only have happened under Stalin’s direct mandate. In the late winter and spring of 1933 efforts to seize food from the starving were ordered intensified. In succeeding months the autonomist wing of the CP(b)U, led by Ukrainian Education Commissar Mykola Skrypnyk, was thoroughly purged.
With Skrypnyk himself committing suicide in July, Ukrainization became a dead letter, and virtually everything associated with the national revival of the preceding decade was banned. Ukrainian arts and letters were virtually banned for a generation. Ukrainization gave way to Russification. All this together could only mean an attempt to destroy any hint of Ukrainian cultural or political self-assertion as part of a deliberate policy calculated to neutralize the Ukrainians as a political factor and social entity, in other words, genocide.
The famine, accompanied by a broad campaign against every manifestation of Ukrainian self-assertion, dealt a body blow to the basic constituency of Ukrainian national identity, starving to death millions of Ukrainian peasants. As with the Holocaust and the Armenian massacres, the exact number of victims can only be estimated. But we know that the 1926 Soviet census counted 31.2 million Ukrainians and that the probably inflated census of 1939 counted only 28.1 million, an absolute decline of 3.1 million or 10 percent. Once probable population growth for the period is considered, the probable number of victims is in the range of 5 to 7 million, more probably closer to the higher end of this range than to the lower.
The U.S. government knew a great deal about the man-made famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and chose not to acknowledge what it knew or to respond in any meaningful way. Some members of the American press corps also knew a great deal which they chose not to report and, in some cases, actively denied in public what they confirmed in private. This constituted collaboration the perpetrator’s denial of genocide.
Even lacking a diplomatic presence in the USSR, the State Department monitored Soviet developments through both the official Soviet press and a variety of other sources. Especially closely followed were issues dealing with grain production because of direct competition between American and Soviet wheat exports on the world market. Less notice was taken of developments in nationality policy, but here too information was certainly available.
Robert F. Kelley, chief of the State Department’s Division of Eastern European Affairs from 1926 until its abolition in 1937, oversaw research and processed intelligence on the USSR. The single most important post for reliable and timely intelligence was the Russian affairs section at the U.S. Legation in Riga, Latvia, which had monitored the Soviet Union since its establishment in 1922.
As early as 1931, the excessive seizure of agricultural produce had led to localized outbreaks of famine in Ukraine. An early indication of the hardships wrought by the Soviet state, the number of refugees fleeing to Poland and Rumania, was duly reported to the State Department. Surprisingly, in 1931 two letters, addressed in English to the “Department at the City at Washington, the District of Columbia,” arrived in Washington from Zhashkiv, now a raion center in Cherkassy oblast, Ukrainian SSR. The letters were delivered to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and forwarded to State. Kelley described the first letter as “apparently written from Russia, with regard to alleged conditions in Russia.” To the second he responded similarly; it also concerned “alleged conditions,” but “in the Ukraine.”
Reports of conversations between U.S. diplomats and those who had traveled to the USSR also provided information about the rapid impoverishment of the populations of Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Through this type of information the State Department received clear warning signals. On October 27, 1932, Riga sent a memorandum of a conversation with Prof. Samuel Harper, who had just spent two months in the Soviet Union and returned with disturbing news: “The food situation has become very serious and may become catastrophic in a year from now if no improvement takes place. Worst of all is the situation in the Ukraine which last year has been milked dry by the excessive government grain procurements.”
Information on Soviet nationality policy usually came second hand. Poland, which fought a war with the Soviets in 1920 and had its own restive Ukrainian minority, always kept an especially close eye on developments to its east.
On November 14, 1932, the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw sent Washington a translation of an analysis of Soviet agriculture prepared by the Polish Consul in Kiev. Obtained by the Americans through a “strictly confidential source,” it indicated that during July, August and September, Ukraine had achieved only 28.6 percent of its annual grain procurements plan and that any expectation of there being sufficient grain to meet the demands set by Moscow were unrealistic. Local officials and press adopted a “tone of depression” at “the really bad state of affairs” in the Ukrainian countryside.
The next day, Skinner sent State its first report that the famine had begun:
“While the Moscow press is silent on the subject of food shortage in Russia, other sources of information indicate that the new harvest has failed to alleviate to any appreciable extent the acute insufficiency of supply which existed in 1931. The German specialist on Russian agriculture, Otto Auhagen, writing in the generally well-informed Berlin Osteuropa for August 1932, goes as far as to describe the situation in rural districts of the Ukraine…as ‘famine in the full sense of the word.'”
Reports continued to confirm the worsening situation. At the end of November, Kendall Foss of the Hearst Press confirmed to the Berlin consulate that the food situation was steadily worsening “and in some villages people are actually starving.” On January 26, 1933, Riga sent its report on Soviet economic conditions during the final quarter of 1932, which noted that “there is an acute lack of food in many districts, and the demands on agriculture are tremendous.”
Riga filed only a brief report on the decree of January 24, 1933: The appointment of Postyshev as Ukraine’s new ruler clearly “was not received with too much welcome,” and meant that Moscow held the CP(b)U “either incapable or unwilling to carry out the peasant policy with the required energy.”
On March 1, Frederic Sackett in Berlin sent a confidential memorandum written by economics Prof. Calvin Hoover of Duke University, who had formerly been highly optimistic about Soviet developments. Now he believed that “Russia is headed for chaos and ruin.” Kelley found the memorandum so valuable that a month later he referred it to the university, adding, “When the secretary has a few minutes to spare, I believe that he would be interested in glancing through” it, which the new secretary, Cordell Hull, evidently did.
Hoover noted the large numbers who had perished from starvation in Kazakhstan since 1930 and added that there was “a very bad shortage of food in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine,” with guerrilla warfare in the North Caucasus and, some months earlier, numerous village uprisings in Ukraine. Censorship of Western correspondents had become much more strict, and two American correspondents had recently been refused permission to go to Ukraine.
On March 27, Robert Skinner reported from Riga the execution of 35 Soviet agricultural officials and the imprisonment of 40 others for, according to the OGPU communiqué, “the organization of counterrevolutionary sabotage in the machinery and tractor stations and the state farms of a number of regions of Ukraine…and the disorganization of sowing, harvesting and threshing campaigns with the purpose of undermining the material conditions of the peasantry and of establishing a famine in the country.” Noting that his post had reported on the “unsatisfactory state of Soviet agriculture since 1931,” Skinner commented with diplomatic restraint:
“The study of these developments over a period of several years leaves the indelible impression that the present condition of Russian agriculture is not the result of any criminal acts of a group of persons but are the effects of the reaction of the peasantry as a whole (and in Russia that means the preponderant majority of the country’s population) to a government policy which has deprived it of individual ownership in respect of most of its property and which has robbed it of the incentive to work. Viewed in this light, the severe punishment which has been meted out to the 75 officials appears essentially as an act of terror undertaken with the double object of crushing criticism of Stalin’s policy among government executives and concealing the true reasons of its failure by shifting the responsibility to quarters where it does not properly belong.”
Rosja Sowiecka (Soviet Russia) was a Warsaw journal which so interested Kelley that he prevailed upon the U.S. Consulate in Warsaw to translate every issue verbatim. The journal pointed out the unprecedented fact that among the accused were party members and that the trial should be understood as part of “a systematic persecution of the rural administration and the extermination of employees of the Commissariats of Agriculture, and the Commissariats of State Domains” in order to “destroy or to put in second place all of the higher agricultural officers…and to turn over the rural administration of collectivized agriculture to Communist companies in the political sections of the machine-tractor stations.”
On April 7, Ernest Harris, consul general in Vienna, sent translations of letters received by a servant of an Austrian countess from her sister in Ukraine. One dated March 12 begged for a dollar to be sent through torgsin: “How one has to hunger here! Many have already died of starvation. We are not yet dying, however; since Christmas I have baked no bread…to die of hunger is very difficult…we have always had up to now a few potatoes and we will soon be at the end of those…If the beloved God does not have mercy, we must die.”
A May 5 Helsinki report of a conversation with an American resident of the Soviet Union also confirmed the existence of the Ukrainian famine, then at its height:
“In Ukraine, the formerly flourishing granary of Europe, utter starvation faces the population…conditions are growing worse, especially in the Ukraine. There in the open market one must pay 50 rubles for a loaf of bread. But the loaf is not really a loaf of bread. When one takes a knife and cuts a slice it is impossible to be sure whether it is made of grass, ashes or other materials. It has no resemblance to bread made of cereal.”
On June 8, the second secretary of the Latvian Legation in Moscow told the Americans in Riga that in Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Volga region, “the entire population is undernourished and actual famine is experienced. Conditions are worst in Odessa, Kiev and Kharkiv.”
On August 29, Le Matin in Paris printed the story of a Ukrainian American, Martha Stebalo, who had just returned from a month in Ukraine, and Robert Murphy, an American consul in Paris, summarized her statement that:
“…in the vicinity of Kiev, the population generally shows outward physical signs of starvation (swollen legs, ulcers, boils, apathy, etc.). She claims that in the villages near Kiev, many people are obliged to subsist on trees, wood pulp and grass. Sentries posted on platforms guard many fields and shoot poachers at sight. In Podolia, Mrs. Stebalo learned that her parents had died of starvation. In Pysarivka, a village of 800 inhabitants, 150 persons had died from that cause since last spring. The account affirms that in the region of Kiev, as well as that of Odessa, cannibalism is a common practice.”
In September Undersecretary William Phillips was given a radiogram from an American who had been in the USSR which had been sent to the latter’s son. Calling the situation “one of the world’s greatest famines,” it read:
“The present famine is so directly due to (the Communists’ policies) that they are trying in every possible way to deny and cover it up. This the people know… Seed grain is state property and any withholding it is stealing from the state and punishable with death. Children are given Soviet honors for revealing any concealment even by their parents.”
Further confirmation of the existence of the famine came on October 4 from a member of the Latvian Legation in Moscow. In reply to a direct question about whether there was a famine, the Latvian said that it was “an actual fact” and “that last winter and spring its existence was frankly admitted on several occasions by officials of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to members of the Moscow diplomatic corps. In the general opinion of the Moscow diplomats the present famine is even more severe than that of 1921-22, and the number of people who have died from starvation is estimated at 7 to 8 million. While shortage of bread and other food is prevalent throughout Russia, it is most acute in the southern wheat belt. i.e., in the North Caucasian Krai, the Ukraine, and the Lower Volga Krai, where practically all peasants have been assembled into collective farms.”
On October 10, the Warsaw Embassy dispatched translations from the Polish journal Soviet Russia and its International Organization. The July issue reported that “Conditions in the Ukraine, autocratically ruled by Postyshev, Stalin’s representative, are not satisfactory… Not long ago the Moscow press did not disguise its indignation against the local authorities of the Soviet Ukraine who showed, it was alleged, great leniency toward anti-state elements.”
Analyzing and quoting extensively Postyshev’s denunciation of Skrypnyk’s so-called national deviation at the June plenum of the CC CP(b)U, it observed that “the real object of Postyshev’s dictatorship” was the “pacification” of Ukrainian nationalism, an allusion to the Polish pacification of western Ukraine, which had been designed to knock out Ukrainian nationalism there.
The August issue pointed out that even before Postyshev’s “mission,” the Communists in Ukraine had “vigorously enforced the decrees of the central government” and “squeezed out of the peasants the largest possible quantities of grain.” It then considered the Soviet allegation that the Ukrainization policy, which Skrypnyk had overseen, and interpreted is as merely the continuation of Lenin’s policy. It observed that simultaneously “with the liquidation of the Skrypnyk mistakes, all of the pro-Russian servile elements begin to raise their heads.” The “anti-peasant policy” of excessive grain seizures, which had caused so much suffering, had been “the policy of the central authorities imposed upon Skrypnyk.”
Meanwhile, Rosja Sowiecka (Soviet Russia) indicated that the amount of grain procured from Ukraine in 1932 was over three times the amount seized at the height of War Communism in 1920, which had also contributed to famine, while the 1932 crop was no more than 40 percent greater than that of 1920. Simultaneously, the portion of the total Ukrainian crop requisitioned had risen from 8.9 percent in 1929 to an estimated 70 percent, while in the North Caucasus it was close to 100 percent. If one adds grain retained by the collective farms for reserves and expenses, “what is then left for the peasants?” Rosja Sowiecka asked.
Further confirmation of the existence of the famine came from the U.S. Legation in Athens, Greece, which reported on October 14:
“In view of the many published statements denying the seriousness of famine conditions in Russia, I have the honor to report that, in a conversation I had the other day with the Turkish minister here, the minister informed me that the Turkish envoy at Moscow reported that famine conditions…are at the present time very bad indeed, as bad, he said, as during the worst postwar years.”
PART II
Given that recognition of the Soviet government was a lively issue in the administration in 1933, it is difficult to believe that the president was not briefed orally on the famine and the Soviet government’s responsibility for it. Yet, even if he was not, there was another source of information reaching the White House. Letters about the situation had also been received at the White House since the first days of the Roosevelt administration. The first was dated March 13:
“Dear Master of our Country President Roosevelt:
“I have a Step Sister in Russia alon with 4 small Children and Starving if we cannot help her a little have heard that you gave Orders not to send money out of Country is it Possible that I Could get your Permission to send an Order for her to the American Store out there not far from her home town to get things to eat its not so Easie to know you have Sisters thats Starving and you Cant Rais a hand to help so Im asking you to help if possible so I Can do what little I Can and God will Reward you for your Kindness Im Sure.
“I will pray for your Protection of your enemies God alone Can Save you and no man on earth Can Stand Before Him.
“Closing with Gods Blessing to you and the Mrs. I thank you
“Truly yours
Anna Witkopp
1513 Taylor St.
South Bay City Michigan
“Wont you Please answer this Im waiting Pastionly though.”
This letter was the first of many referred by FDR’s secretary to the State Department, where it was then sent to Kelley’s division. Kelley politely informed her that she could legally send small sums abroad for specified purposes and enclosed a list of banks prepared to undertake transmission of funds to the Soviet Union.
Among the first American groups to raise the issue of the famine were Germans who had emigrated from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. German colonists, Mennonites and others, were first brought to the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great and have lived in Ukraine and the Volga Basin since the late 18th century. Many fled during the revolution, and they quickly responded to pleas from those they had left behind. The chairman of a privately organized relief committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, P.C. Hiebert, wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on March 27, making clear the urgency of the situation and announcing his intention to send a Mennonite delegation to Washington. The letter was also referred to Kelley, who replied:
“…you are informed that although the department appreciates the anxiety of American citizens whose relatives in Russia are suffering from lack of food, it is of the opinion that there are no measures which the government may appropriately take at the present time in order to facilitate relief work being carried on in Russia. In view of this circumstance, it is believed that the sending of a delegation to Washington to discuss this matter, as suggested by you, would serve no useful purpose.”
Dr. Hiebert, understandably, was not satisfied. On April 7, he decided to write a similar letter directly to the president in the hope that the energy Roosevelt had shown in domestic affairs might also be turned to help those in dire need abroad. One passage was particularly urgent: “Even though America has not officially recognized the Soviet government, IS THERE NOT SOME WAY BY WHICH IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO SEND FOOD TO THOUSANDS OF STARVING INNOCENT CHILDREN?”
Hiebert also prevailed upon his senator, Arthur Capper, to write FDR on his behalf. Roosevelt promised to take the matter up with the secretary of state. Secretary of State Hull then answered Sen. Capper:
“I can well understand the concern of the Mennonites in this country for their relatives and friends in Russia who are suffering from lack of food. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any measures which this government may appropriately take at this time in order to alleviate the sufferings of these unhappy people.”
The response to Hiebert, again from Kelley, stated that “there is unfortunately little to be added” to the letter of April 5, and that:
“Although sympathy is felt for those American citizens who are so deeply concerned for their relatives and friends in Russia, there appears to be no effective measure which this government can appropriately take at the present time for the purpose of alleviating the sufferings of persons in Russia who are in lack of food.”
Kelley also gave the name and address of Am-Deruta Transport Corporation which could purchase foodstuffs for Soviet citizens through torgsin stores, adding:
“Although the department cannot assume any responsibility for the integrity of the organizations mentioned, it is suggested that you may desire to communicate with the Am-Deruta Corporation with a view to ascertaining whether it is possible for your co-religionists to enter into satisfactory arrangements with that corporation whereby foodstuffs and other necessities may be furnished to their friends and relatives in Russia.”
Hiebert’s group continued to lobby on behalf of the starving. On May 20, he wrote his freshman congressman, Randolph Carpenter, asking that he assist a Mennonite delegation coming to Washington in June. Carpenter approached the White House and was referred to the Department of State. Kelley answered that while the delegation could “serve no useful purpose if the object of its journey is to endeavor to influence this government to intervene or to take other steps on behalf of Mennonites residing in Russia,” it would be received at the State Department “with every courtesy and will be given a full opportunity to discuss with appropriate officials of the department” any matters within the department’s jurisdiction. Meeting the president, however, would be “difficult, if not impossible.”
German Evangelicals also lived in Ukraine, and one who had come from there, the Rev. Charles H. Hagus, wrote to Secretary Hull in June, expressing the anxiety felt by Colorado’s community of “Russian” Germans for the “untold sufferings” endured by their friends and relatives left behind. Again Kelley replied:
“While sympathy is felt for the sufferings of the persons referred to, and for the anxiety of their American relatives and friends, there appear to be no effective measures which this government can appropriately take at the present time for alleviating the conditions alluded to in your letter.”
On September 7, President Roosevelt received a letter from the United Russian National Organizations in America, which proposed offering aid through the Red Cross or another charitable institution. But, the letter pointed out, “It seems evident that a matter of so delicate a nature cannot and will not be acted upon by either the American Red Cross or by any other body without the approval of the president of the United States and his administration.” At the same time, the group wrote similar letters to Hull and the American Red Cross. Not even a pro forma response seems to have been sent.
The first Ukrainian group to send an appeal to a member of the administration was the U.S. World War Veterans of Ukrainian Descent of New York who on September 18 wrote a letter and sent a number of photographs and press accounts to Postmaster General James J. Farley, who was also chairman of the Democratic Committee of Roosevelt’s home state. The letter went through various hands in the New York Democratic Committee, who noted that it contained possible “political dynamite.” Not knowing what else to do, they sent the letter to the State Department, where it too went to Kelley, who wrote:
“There has been referred to this department for attention your letter of September 18, 1933, addressed to the postmaster general, and its enclosures, certain photographs and newspaper clippings relating to the sufferings of persons living in the Ukraine and to the Communist movement in the United States. Your letter and its enclosures have been read with interest.”
With its large and active Ukrainian community, many letters came from Canada. On October 2, President Roosevelt was written by representatives of the Ukrainian community in Ward, Manitoba, asking him to “give a helping hand” and support the starving millions of Ukraine and the North Caucasus. On the same day, the Ukrainian National Council in Canada also appealed to him. Attached to the letter-appeal was a detailed statement by Marie Zuk of Kalmazivka in Odessa oblast, who had been permitted to leave Ukraine on August 7 to join her husband, a farmer in Alberta. The consul general in Winnipeg was directed to inform the organization’s leaders that, since these conditions “do not appear to directly affect American citizens or interests, the department is not in a position to take any action.”
On October 13, the Ukrainian Community in Oshawa, Ont., had a mass meeting to protest the famine and Soviet policies responsible for it, and its resolutions were also sent to the U.S. State Department. The Consulate in Hamilton was directed merely to acknowledge receipt of the communication and nothing further.
On October 20, the White House announced in a press release an exchange of letters between FDR and USSR President Mikhail Kalinin regarding normalization of relations. Formal recognition of the Soviet government was extended on November 16.
The letters from those who wrote about the famine out of humanitarian concerns continued to arrive. Ukrainians throughout the world wrote to President Roosevelt and the State Department. On October 28, Paul Skoropadsky, who had been Ukrainian hetman (monarch) in 1918, appealed to FDR not to recognize the Soviets and, failing that, to insist that the Soviets acknowledge “the right of the U.S. to organize a relief committee for the starving on Ukrainian territory.” No response was sent.
On October 29, Henry Bayne of Edmonton, sent a handwritten letter to the president asking for his help. On November 3, the Ukrainian deputies and senators in Poland sent a telegram which begged him to “consider the tragic situation in Ukraine where (the) population starves” in his negotiations with the Soviets. Only after recognition was extended did the Warsaw Embassy receive orders to even acknowledge receipt of the communication.
On November 6, the Czechoslovaian Committee for the Salvation of the Ukrainians wrote to President Roosevelt, describing the situation in Ukraine and the North Caucasus and asking that a special American mission be sent to Ukraine in order to study Soviet policy toward non-Russians in the Soviet Union. No response is recorded. On November 11, the Committee for Aid to the Starving Ukrainians sent a telegram from Brussels, asking that an American Committee of Inquiry be sent to Ukraine. The U.S. consul in Brussels was instructed to give the now standard response that “although sympathy is felt for the sufferings of the persons referred to, there does not appear to be any measure which this government can appropriately take at the present time to alleviate their sufferings.”
Even Eleanor Roosevelt was approached in November with a request to exert some influence to pressure the Soviet government to allow duty-free admission of relief packages through torgsin. She replied that she realized “that the need was very great” and “deeply regretted” that she could do nothing to help.
The Soviets did everything in their power to deny the existence of the famine. When the London Daily Express reported that the Soviets had purchased even a modest 15,000 tons of wheat abroad in order to alleviate the shortage of bread at home, Pravda on May 27, 1933, published an indignant denial. Had the Kremlin acknowledged the famine, it would have been expected not to sell grain, for want of which its own people were dying. Stalin denied the existence of famine and continued to export grain, albeit at a lower rate. In 1931, the USSR exported 5.06 million metric tons of grain. In 1932 this fell to 1.73 million and in 1933 to 1.68 million.
The famine, however, could not be completely concealed. Early in 1933, Gareth Jones, a reporter and former aide to Lloyd George, traveled to Ukraine, and in March talked about what he saw there: “I walked alone through villages and 12 collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread; we are dying.'” He also estimated that a million people had perished in Kazakhstan since 1930 and now in Ukraine millions more were threatened. Eugene Lyons, at the time the United Press Moscow correspondent, called this the first reliable press report in the English-speaking world. Moscow responded by forbidding journalists to travel there.
Jones had actually based his account primarily on what he had been told by Western correspondents and diplomats in Moscow. Diplomats were forbidden to publish their observations in the press and the journalists were far more circumspect. For example, in January 1933, Ralph Barnes reported to the old New York Herald Tribune from the then Ukrainian SSR capital of Kharkiv, and therefore under the watchful eye of the Soviet censor, about the officially acknowledged “abuses” of the previous year:
“Grain needed by the Ukrainian peasants as provisions was stripped from the land a year ago by grain collectors desirous of making a good showing. The temporary or permanent migration of great masses which followed alone prevented real famine conditions. All those persons with whom I have talked, in both town and village, agree that the food situation in this vast area is worse than it was last year. It is inconceivable, though, that the authorities will let the bread shortage on the collective farms reach a stage comparable to that of the late winter and spring of last year.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, also went to Ukraine during the famine and wrote about it. He later recalled:
“It was the big story in all our talks in Moscow. Everybody knew about it. There was no question about that. Anyone you were talking to knew that there was a terrible famine going on. Even in the Soviets’ own pieces there were somewhat disguised acknowledgements of great difficulties there: the attacks on the kulaks, the admission that people were eating the seed grain and cattle… I realized that was the big story. I could see that all the correspondents in Moscow were distorting it.”
“Without making any kind of plans or asking for permission, I just went and got a ticket for Kiev and then went on to Rostov… Ukraine was starving, and you only had to venture out to smaller places to see derelict fields and abandoned villages.”
Muggeridge’s account appeared in the Manchester Guardian at the end of March. He reported on the famine in both Ukraine and the North Caucasus. In both:
“…it was the same story – cattle and horses dead; fields neglected; meagre harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment.”
In May 1933, Muggeridge gave the following description of what he saw:
“On a recent visit to the North Caucasus and Ukraine, I saw something of the battle that is going on between the government and their peasants. The battlefield was as desolate as in any war, and stretches wider… On one side, millions of peasants, starving, often their bodies swollen with lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU, carrying out the instruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.”
PART III
Despite mounting and increasingly irrefutable evidence that famine was raging in Ukraine, two American correspondents in Moscow, Walter Duranty of The New York Times and Louis Fischer of The Nation took the lead in publicly denying its existence.
Duranty’s attitude vacillated as the famine developed. He initially viewed the developing crisis in foodstuffs with considerable alarm, and by the end of the summer of 1932 seems to have hoped that Stalin would offer further concessions, perhaps even a return to something like the New Economic Policy of the preceding decade.
In late fall, however, it became clear that there would be no new concessions, and Duranty began to minimize and explain away difficulties as “growing pains” and the results of peasant lethargy in some districts and the “marked fall in the living standards of a large number of peasants.” By mid-November he stressed that there was “neither famine nor hunger.” While there were “embarrassing” problems, they were not “disastrous.” Two days later he wrote that while there may be “an element of truth” to reports of a food shortage, the problem was “not alarming, much less desperate.” He suggested that Soviets might not eat as well as in the past but “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.” “The food shortage,” Duranty took pains to explain on November 26, “must be regarded as a result of peasant resistance to rural socialization.” The situation would not have been serious if world food prices had not fallen “which forced the Soviet Union to increase the expropriation of foodstuffs at a time when the shoe was beginning to pinch and the distribution of the food at home would have corrected many difficulties.”
Still, Duranty concluded, “It is a mistake to exaggerate the gravity of the situation. The Russians have tightened their belts before to a far greater extent than it is likely to be needed this winter.” Even The New York Times editorialized on November 30 that collectivization was nothing but “a ghastly failure.” As if in reply, Duranty reported that the Soviets could always release stockpiled grain if the problem became more acute.
Next to Duranty, the American reporter most consistently willing to gloss Soviet reality was Louis Fischer who had a deep ideological commitment to Soviet communism dating back to 1920. But, when he traveled to Ukraine in October and November of 1932, he was alarmed at what he saw. “In the Poltava, Vinnitsa, Podolsk and Kiev regions, conditions will be hard,” he wrote, “I think there is no starvation anywhere in Ukraine now – after all they have just gathered in the harvest but it was a bad harvest.”
Initially critical of the Soviet grain procurement program because it created the food problem, Fischer by February adopted the official Stalinist view which blamed the problem on Ukrainian counter-revolutionary nationalist “wreckers.” It seemed “whole villages” had been contaminated by such men, who had to be deported to “lumbering camps and mining areas in distant agricultural areas which are now just entering upon their pioneering stage.” These steps were forced upon the Kremlin, Fischer wrote, but the Soviets were, nevertheless, learning how to rule wisely.
Fischer was on a lecture tour in the United States when Gareth Jones’ famine story broke. Asked about the million who had died since 1930 in Kazakhstan, he scoffed:
“Who counted them? How could anyone march through a country and count a million people? Of course people are hungry there – desperately hungry. Russia is turning over from agriculture to industrialism. It’s like a man going into business on small capital.”
Speaking to a college audience in Oakland, Calif., a week later, Fischer stated emphatically: “There is no starvation in Russia.”
The Jones story also caught Duranty by surprise. He decided to continue his public denial of the famine. Duranty claimed that Jones had concocted a “big scare story” based on the “hasty” and “inadequate” glimpse of the countryside consisting of a 40-mile walk through villages around Kharkiv. He then went on to write that he himself had made a thorough investigation and discovered no famine, although he did admit that the food shortage had become acute in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga Basin. This he attributed to mismanagement and the recently executed “conspirators” in the Commissariat of Agriculture. Still, he wrote, “There is no actual starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” And it was worth it: “To put it brutally, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Jones replied that he stood by his story and took to task the journalists whom “the censorship has turned…into masters of euphemism and understatement,” giving “famine the polite name of ‘food shortage’, and ‘starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.'”
The “containment” of the Jones story is perhaps the most telling event in what Eugene Lyons called “the whole shabby episode of our failure to report honestly the gruesome Russian famine of 1932-33.” The Soviets were able to gain tacit collaboration from the American press because of an upcoming show trial of British engineers employed by the Metropolitan Vickers corporation. When Jones broke the story of the famine, Lyons recalled how the matter was settled in cooperation with Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet censor. When the Jones story broke:
“We all received urgent queries from our home offices on the subject. But the inquiries coincided with preparations under way for the trial of the British engineers. The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors at least for the duration of the trial was for all of us a compelling professional necessity.
“Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling the facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation…
“The scene in which the American press corps combined to repudiate Jones is fresh in my mind. It was in the evening and Comrade [Soviet censor Konstantin – JM] Umansky, the soul of graciousness, consented to meet us in the hotel room of a correspondent. He knew he had a strategic advantage over us because of the Metro-Vikers story. He could afford to be gracious. Forced by competitive journalism to jockey for the inside track with officials, it would have been professional suicide to make an issue of the famine at this particular time. There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formula of denial was worked out.
“We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski, Umansky joined in the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.”
Only in August 1933, in the course of a story denouncing “exaggerated” emigre claims, did Duranty admit, “In some districts and among the large floating population of unskilled labor” were there “deaths and actual starvation.” Later that month, he reported that while the “excellent harvest” of 1933 had made any report of famine “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” there had been a “food shortage” which had caused “heavy loss of life” in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Lower Volga Basin.
In September, Duranty was the first Western reporter allowed to go to Ukraine and the North Caucasus after the imposition of the ban on travel there by journalists. William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News had managed to find a way to get to Ukraine without permission and had sent out an accurate account, leading the Soviets to send their most favored journalist to sweeten the pill. Now able to truthfully report a good harvest, he also belatedly reported what he had known all along:
“…hard conditions had decimated the peasantry. Some had fled. There were Ukrainian peasants begging in the streets of Moscow last winter, and other Ukrainians were seeking work or food, but principally food, from Rostov on Don to White Russia, and from the Lower Volga to Samara.”
Duranty, in short, admitted the truth only after others had done so more explicitly and always in a context designed to show his readers that things were not nearly as bad as other sources might indicate.
He was more explicit in private: As early as December 1932, he told an American diplomat in Paris he was deeply pessimistic because of “the growing seriousness of the food shortage.” In September 1933, after returning from Ukraine and the North Caucasus, he shared his impressions with a British diplomat who reported to London: “Mr. Duranty, thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”
Eugene Lyons, recalled that dinner with Duranty:
“He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone.
“‘But, Walter, you don’t mean that literally?’ Mrs. McCormick exclaimed.
“‘Hell I don’t…I’m being conservative,’ he replied, and as if by way of consolation he added his famous truism: ‘But they’re only Russians…’
“Once more that same evening we heard Duranty make the same estimate, in answer to a question by Laurence Stallings… When the issues of The Times carrying Duranty’s own articles reached me I found that they failed to mention the large figures he had given freely and repeatedly to all of us.”
Duranty also admitted then denied the famine to John Chamberlain, book critic for The New York Times. Chamberlain wrote in his autobiography:
“To a group in The Times elevator Duranty had almost casually mentioned that 3 million people had died in Russia in what amounted to a man-made famine. Duranty, who had floated the theory that revolutions were beyond moral judgement (‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs’), did not condemn Stalin for the bloody elimination of the kulaks that had deprived the Russian countryside of necessary sustaining expertise. He just simply let the 3 million figure go at that.
“What struck me at the time was the double iniquity of Duranty’s performance. He was not only heartless about the famine, he had betrayed his calling as a journalist by failing to report it.”
On the basis of Duranty’s remark, Chamberlain, then a Communist fellow traveler, decided to review a book titled “Escape from the Soviets.” Written by Tatiana Tchernavina, who had escaped via Finland, the book had earlier been rejected because it presented the Soviet Union in too negative a light. When Chamberlain mentioned peasants starving, he was immediately attacked by the American Communists and their sympathizers. “Duranty, with his visa hanging fire, denied ever having said anything.” With losing his job a distinct possibility, Chamberlain was saved by Simeon Strunsky, a fellow book reviewer and former socialist, who testified that he, too, had heard Duranty make the same statement.
The issue of Duranty’s career raises extremely important issues of journalistic ethics. In 1932, when Duranty was awarded the Pultizer Prize, the committee said that “Mr. Duranty’s dispatches…are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity and are excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.” In the words of Prof. James Crowl, who wrote the standard work on Duranty:
“What is so remarkable about Duranty’s selection for the Pulitzer is that, for a decade, his reports had been slanted and distorted in a way that made a mockery of the award citation. Probably without parallel in the history of these prestigious prizes, the 1932 award went to a man whose reports concealed or disguised the conditions they claimed to reveal, and who may even have been paid by the Soviets for his deceptions.”
Careful reading of Duranty’s dispatches from Moscow show that he attempted to represent the official point of view as he understood it, while at the same time trying to write them in such a way as to cover himself. Muggeridge provided a telling vignette of Duranty in 1933:
“He’d been asked to write something about the food shortage, and was trying to put together a thousand words, which, if the famine got worse and known outside Russia, would suggest that he’d foreseen and foretold it, but which, if it got better and wasn’t known outside Russia, would suggest that he’d pooh-poohed the possibility of there being a famine. He was a little gymnast… He trod his tightrope daintily and charmingly.”
Half a century later Muggeridge put it less elegantly:
“Duranty was the villain of the whole thing… It is difficult for me to see how it could have been otherwise that in some sense he was not in the regime’s power. He wrote things about the famine and the situation in Ukraine which were laughably wrong. There is no doubt whatever that the authorities could manipulate him…”
Why did Duranty engage in such gymnastics? Why did he suddenly alter his reporting with each shift in Soviet policy? Duranty’s own words make it clear that he was in fact a virtual public relations man for the Soviets, whether or not one credits his stated reason for it. In 1931 on one of his trips outside the Soviet Union, Duranty had a conversation with A. W. Kliefoth of the American Embassy in Berlin. The memorandum of this conversation, now declassified, stales: “Duranty pointed out that, ‘in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities,’ his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own.” No such disclaimer ever appeared in The Times.
Rumors of food shortages persisted, however. Writing in the New Republic, Joshua Kunitz, quoting Stalin almost verbatim, put the blame not on collectivization but on “the lack of revolutionary vigilance” and the “selfishness, dishonesty, laziness and irresponsibility” of the peasants.
There was an additional flurry of publicity about the famine following the August 19 plea by Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna to the International Red Cross, appealing for international aid to the starving, announcing his intention of creating an interfaith relief committee, and urging all those currently negotiating for expanded ties with the Soviet government to make those negotiations dependent upon recognition of the necessity of help for the famine stricken areas of the Soviet Union.
William Henry Chamberlin, the initially pro-Soviet Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, had, as early as July 1933, reported that while there was no actual starvation in Moscow, “Grim stories of out-and-out hunger come from southern and south-eastern Russia, from the Ukraine, the North Caucasus and from Kazakhstan, where the nomadic natives seem to have suffered very much as a result of the wholesale perishing of their livestock.” Refused permission to visit Ukraine and the North Caucasus until the famine ended, he was allowed to go a few weeks after Duranty.
In April 1934, after leaving the Soviet Union, he published an article in Foreign Affairs, confirming yet again that the famine had taken place and giving ample “refutation of the idea that as a result of collectivization, Russian agriculture will leap forward…” In May Chamberlin reported that during the preceding year “more than 4 million peasants are found to have perished…” In his book “Russia’s Iron Age,” published in October, he estimated the death toll as a direct result of the famine of 1932-33 to be not less than 10 percent of the population of the areas affected, according to the local officials with whom he had spoken.
The State Department continued its silence. When Frank Roberts, managing editor of the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette asked State about claims from responsible authors that 10 million Russians starved to death during one recent winter because the Stalin government had withdrawn from them all opportunity to earn a livelihood,” Hull’s assistant responded simply that “it is the practice of the department to refrain from commenting on the accuracy of statements of this character.”
Meanwhile, Louis Fischer continued to deny the famine’s existence and extol the virtues of Soviet life. “The first half of 1933 was very difficult indeed,” he admitted in August of 1933. “Many people simply did not have sufficient nourishment. The 1932 harvest was bad and, to make matters worse, thousands of tons of grain rotted in the fields because the peasants refused to reap what they knew the government would confiscate under the guise of ‘collection.'” But Fischer, straining to justify the Soviet government, wrote in January 1934, that “during all those hard years…the state endeavored to beautify life…
“The opera, the ballet and many theaters displayed a dazzling richness of scene and costume incomparably greater than elsewhere in the world. Parks of culture and rest were established throughout the country to provide sensible recreation and civilized leisure.”
Fischer also adopted a line often used to justify evil:
“All governments are based on force, the question is only of the degree of force, who administers it, and for what purpose… Force which eliminates oppressors and exploiters, creates work and prosperity, and guarantees progress and economic security will not be resented by the great masses of people.”
The Ukrainian American community, its kin dying by the millions, could not remain silent. In November and December 1933 there were marches in a number of cities to protest against American recognition of a government which was starving millions of Ukrainians. American Communists sometimes resorted to violence in an attempt to silence the Ukrainians. On November 18, 1933, in New York, 8,000 Ukrainians marched from Washington Square to 67th Street, while 500 Communists ran beside the parade and snatched the Ukrainians’ handbills, spat on the marchers and tried to hit them. Five persons were injured. Only the presence of 300 policemen and a score on horseback leading the parade and riding along its flanks prevented serious trouble.
In Chicago, on December 17, several hundred Communists mounted a massed attack on the vanguard of a 5,000 Ukrainian American marchers, leaving over 100 injured in what The New York Times called “the worst riot in years”:
“Brick, clubs, rotten eggs and other missiles rained on the marchers from the Hermitage Avenue elevated station bridging Madison Street. The street fight which followed saw brass knuckles, blackjacks, fists and rifle butts used until a dozen squads of police restored order.”
One of the most active organizations in the Ukrainian American community was the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America. At their national congress, held in Chicago on November 12, 1933, members unanimously adopted a memorandum to the American Red Cross and appointed an emergency relief committee. Nellie Pelecovich of New York chaired this committee and wrote to the president, his wife, Cordell Hull, Bishop Manning of New York, and a host of newspapers. She prevailed upon the Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko to donate a bronze statue, “Past,” to serve as first prize in a raffle organized to raise funds to purchase foodstuffs through torgshin.
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 reply from Boris Skvirsky, embassy counselor, who called the idea that the Soviet government was “deliberately killing of the population of the Ukraine” was “wholly grotesque.” Claiming that the Ukrainian population increased at an annual rate of 2 percent 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 concluded “and was about 35 percent lower than the pre-war death rate of tsarist days.”
The Ukrainian American community continued to push for action, this time from the Congress. On May 28, 1934, Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, one of FDR’s most indefatigable critics, introduced H. R. 399, blaming the Soviet government for bringing the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 about, expressing the sympathy of the American people, and appealing for the admission of food aid by the Soviet government. The resolution never even came up for a vote.
Meanwhile, information also continued to arrive at the State Department. In January 1934, the Warsaw embassy sent its translation of the November 30 issue of Rosja Sowiecka (Soviet Russia), which contained an exceptional amount of information and astute analysis of what had taken place in Soviet Ukraine. It began with an analysis of the Central Committee decree of January 24, 1933: “the beginning of the destruction by Moscow of the independence of the Ukraine and of the opposition of the Ukrainian communists” on grounds that really meant “that the Ukrainian Communist organizations have not undertaken all the measures necessary to deprive the rural districts of grain.” But the real reason lay deeper:
“On the surface the decision of January 24, 1933, does not change the structure of the Soviet federation nor does it decrease the rights of the Kharkov government. However,… it has become clear that it was the beginning of the destruction of the independence of the Ukraine and the indicating sign for the removal of the most independent functionaries of the Communist Party of the Ukraine in order to subordinate this party entirely to the orders of the Politburo delegated from Moscow… Since the beginning of February 1933, Postyshev has been an autocratic ruler in Ukrainian organizations as well as Stalin’s representative as governor of the Ukraine. The dismissal of the chief Ukrainian officials has since taken pace at an increased tempo.”
The journal then when on to analyze the July suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk as “the best illustration of the passive resistance of the Communist intelligentsia against the ‘general line’ of the party.” It correctly noted that Skrypnyk had never formed any Ukrainian national fraction within the party as other Ukrainians had done in the previous decade; rather, Skrypnyk had always defended the “general line” against any and all such oppositionists. What was really occurring was rather a witch-hunt for “counter-revolution wherever there are Ukrainian influences.”
In surveying the balance sheet of Postyshev’s mission, it pointed out that “Postyshev has indicated that the assistance given to agriculture consisted in ‘the cleansing of the Communist Party of class enemies,'” At least one-fourth of the total membership of the CP(b)U had been purged. Three-fifths of the leading functionaries in the districts had been removed. Virtually the entire personnel of the central offices of the Ukrainian commissariats had been removed and replaced by Postyshev’s men. Meanwhile, Territorial First Secretary Shcheboldaev had carried out a similar operation in the traditionally Cossack territories of the North Caucasus, where 35 percent of the Komsomol membership was purged. In short, Rosja Sowiecka observed:
“As a result of the increasing chaos in Soviet agriculture, the Soviet authorities can less and less rely upon local Communist organizations in the agricultural districts. These Communist organizations cease to be the tools of the agricultural policy of the Kremlin; as a result, their outstanding men are dismissed and replaced by intruders having noting in common with the rural population.”
Simultaneously, there was “a systematic Russification of the Communist parties of the various nationalities inhabiting the USSR.” This involved not only the agricultural conflict, but also the hierarchial reorganization of the party such that territorial and elected bodies were bypassed by political sections and party organizers sent from above, and the centralization of the national organization of the USSR through the diminution of the power of the republics and the growth of that of Moscow. As a result:
“The ‘national’ – according to Soviet terminology – Communist parties, i.e., the Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, etc., have changed into organizations, the heads and most intelligent members of which are coming from abroad in order to rule over the very unreliable ranks recruited from the local population which stir up great mistrust in the Politburo of Moscow.”
This “Russification or, at least, denationalization” of the leadership of the non-Russian organizations was supported by a great migration of party personnel extending even into the lowest ranks, especially in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus: the ranks of the local population thinned by famine or expulsion were filled by personnel from ethnic Russia who did not know the local language. This, in turn, undermined a major foundation of the Ukrainization policy, putting the latter’s future in doubt.
In June 1934, the U.S. Legation in Riga prepared a detailed 105-page analysis for the State Department on “The Russian Peasant Policy, 1933 to 1934.” It, too, left no doubt that there had been a famine: “According to foreign observers (The Soviet press has been persistently silent on this subject), the shortages of food in these parts [Ukraine and the North Caucasus – JM] reached toward the spring of 1933 the stage of famine.”
CONCLUSION
William Randolph Hearst made a final attempt to use the famine to attack FDR. His newspaper chain ran a series of articles on the famine in 1935, in the style for which the term “yellow journalism” was coined. Written by Thomas Walker, the articles may have been a “reworking” of authentic material from 1933 which Hearst either bought or borrowed. Undoubtedly at Hearst’s behest, Walker “updated” the story by placing the famine in 1934 rather than 1932-33. Knowing an easy target, Fischer accused Walker of “inventing” a famine. Fischer had been to Ukraine in 1934 and, of course, saw no famine. He interpreted the whole affair as merely an attempt by Hearst to “spoil Soviet-American relations” as part of “an anti-red campaign.”
Fischer was challenged by Chamberlin who wrote from Tokyo, chiding Fischer for his failure to mention that 1932-33 had seen “one of the worst famines in history”:
“I feel justified in recalling my personal observations of this famine because, although it happened two years ago, I think it will probably still be ‘news’ to readers of The Nation who depend on Mr. Fischer for their knowledge of Russian developments. I have searched brilliant articles on other phases of Soviet life for a single, forthright, unequivocal recognition of the famine although he was in Russia during the period of the famine and was scarcely ignorant of something that was common knowledge of Russians and foreigners in the country at the time.”
Fischer responded that he had not been in the USSR during the famine, that he had mentioned it in his book, “Soviet Journey,” but that he, unlike Chamberlin did not put all of the blame on the Soviet government. This is how he had described it: “History can be cruel… The peasants wanted to destroy collectivization. The peasants used the best means at their disposal. The government used the best means at their (sic) disposal. The government won.”
Hearst then fell back upon more reliable accounts which had been available for some time. A story by Harry Lang, who had earlier published an account of his 1933 journey to Ukraine in the Jewish Daily Forward, was serialized in April. Most interesting about Lang’s account was that he reported being told by a Soviet official that 6 million had perished. Richard Sanger, later a distinguished career diplomat, but a Communist in his youth, went with his wife to the Soviet Union in 1933 and gave the figure of 4.5 million. Hearst serialized his story after Lang’s.
Perhaps the most interesting of these accounts, however, was that of Adam Tawdul, a Ukrainian American whose family had known Skrypnyk in the Bolshevik underground before coming to the U.S. in 1913. Tawdul returned to Ukraine in 1931, and thanks to this acquaintance, was able to move in high circles. Tawdul claimed that before Skrypnyk committed suicide the latter had told him that 8 to 9 million had perished from starvation in Ukraine and the Caucasus, and that another official had told him another million or two had died in the Ural Region, the Volga Basin and western Siberia.
All this led people to make inquiries to the State Department, which was of little help. An economics professor, R. W. France, wrote to the State Department regarding reference to Chamberlin’s statement by a popular lecturer that “due to the exactions of the Russian government more than 4 million persons starved to death in the Russian areas affected by the drought in 1932. This seems to be a rather incredible statement since no such condition was reported in the papers at the time…”
In spite of all the information which, as we have seen, was in State’s possession, Kelley responded that “insofar as the department is aware, the Soviet government has made no official announcement pertaining to the question of deaths resulting from starvation in connection with a drought in 1932,” and enclosed a list of relevant English-language references.
Ignored at the time it took place, the famine in Ukraine was so quickly forgotten that it presents history’s most successful case of the denial of genocide by the perpetrators. “Years after the event,” Lyons wrote in 1937, “when no Russian Communist in his senses any longer concealed the magnitude of the famine – the question whether there had been a famine at all was still being disputed in the outside world.”
As for those who denied the existence of the famine most strenuously: Fischer, who broke with the Soviets following the Spanish Civil War, later admitted that the Ukrainian famine had cost the lives of millions. Looking back, he recalled that even at the time:
“My own attitude began to bother me. Was I not glorifying steel and kilowatts and forgetting the human being? All the shoes, schools, books, tractors, electric light and subways in the world would not add up to the world of my dreams if the system that produced them was immoral and inhuman.”
Duranty, never an idealist like Fischer, could not be disillusioned because he had no illusions in the first place. In later years, when Sovietophilism had gone out of fashion, Duranty lied about ever having lied in the first place. In his last book, published in 1949, he wrote: “Whatever Stalin’s apologists might say, 1932 was a year of famine,” and he claimed that he had said so at the time. And, as we have seen, he had, but not in his dispatches to The New York Times.
There can also be no doubt that both the State Department and the White House had access to plentiful and timely intelligence concerning the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine and made a conscious decision not only to do nothing about it, but to never acknowledge it publicly. For political reasons largely related to FDR’s determination to establish and maintain good relations with the USSR, the U.S. government participated, albeit indirectly, in what is perhaps the single most successful denial of genocide in history. And in this we were hardly alone: the British record, for example, has also been partially told and was, if anything, worse.
The U.S. government was made aware of conditions in the USSR by its embassies and legations throughout Europe, which sent extensive reports based on interviews with American workers and visitors to the USSR, Soviet officials, the foreign press, Soviet citizens and foreign nationals, all of whom understood the gross inefficiency of the Soviet system, the mediocrity of local Soviet management and increasing hostility of the peasants long before diplomatic relations were established with the USSR. State Department officials were aware of thousands of Soviet citizens fleeing to Poland and Rumania and of soldiers and civilian brigades being sent into Ukraine to assist with the harvest. Washington even received letters from hungry Ukrainian peasants, asking for assistance. The official response to all queries regarding the horrors of life in the Soviet Union was to refer to them as “alleged conditions.”
The term “famine” was used in diplomatic dispatches as early as November 1932. Inundated by queries and information regarding the famine, the State Department sought and received confirmation from Athens and from Riga, the premier U.S. listening post for Soviet affairs, a month before FDR recognized the Soviet government.
There can be little doubt that American journalists collaborated with the Soviets in covering up the famine. Duranty, who privately admitted his role as a semi-official Soviet spokesman as early as 1931 and who after the famine told British diplomats that as many as 10 million might well have perished, seems to have played an especially crucial role. Even as a candidate, it was Duranty with whom FDR first publicly broached the issue of recognition.
Duranty seems to have been determined that American public opinion not be negatively influenced on the eve of the Roosevelt-Litvinov negotiations. He thought it imperative that the United States and the USSR establish diplomatic relations and the famine, especially if it was the result of Stalin’s malevolence, was a stumbling block that had to be removed. His influence on Roosevelt’s perception of the Soviet Union was profound. As Joseph Alsop wrote:
“The authority on Soviet affairs was universally held to be The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty… The nature of his reporting can be gauged by what happened in the case of the dire Stalin-induced famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s… The Duranty cover-up, for that was what it was, also continued thereafter; and no one of consequence told the terrible truth.
“This being the climate in the United States, Roosevelt and Hopkins would have had to be very different men to make boldly informed judgements of the Soviet system and Stalin’s doings and purposes in defiance of almost everyone else who was then thought to be enlightened.”
Poignant, often agonizing pleas for some type of intervention or assistance for famine victims from the Mennonite Russian, Jewish and Ukrainian communities in America were treated with courteous indifference. Reflecting the portion of the recognition agreement regarding mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, the State Department responded that since neither American citizens nor interests were involved, no action was possible and there was “considerable doubt whether there is any measure which this government could take at the present time which would be helpful.”
From an American public policy point of view, however, a disturbing aftermath to the Roosevelt administration’s failure to come to terms with “unenlightened,” but accurate, intelligence about the famine was a purge of the State Department’s “Russian hands,” almost identical to the purge of its “China hands” in the early 1950s. Disappointed with U.S.-Soviet relations, FDR came to dislike certain career diplomats, especially those who didn’t share his views on the Soviet Union. First among them was Robert Kelley. Following Department policy to make no public acknowledgement of the famine, Kelley remained sharply critical of Soviet policies and methods and was never convinced that the USSR was willing to abandon its revolutionary aims. William Bullitt, America’s first ambassador to the USSR, went with high expectations of friendly relations but was quickly disillusioned. By 1935, he was describing it as “a nation ruled by fanatics who are ready to sacrifice themselves and everyone else for their religion of communism.” He reported to State that “neither Stalin nor any other leader of the Communist Party has deviated in the slightest from the determination to spread communism to the ends of the earth.” Bullitt was ostracized by both the Soviets and the State Department.
Roosevelt attempted to improve sagging relations with the Soviets by replacing Bullitt with Joseph Davies in 1936 and, the following year, at Davies’ insistence, eliminating the Division of Eastern European Affairs and sending Kelley into diplomatic exile in Istanbul. The Riga Legation’s Russian affairs section was also downgraded. Even this failed to satisfy Soviet Ambassador Alexander Troyanovsky, who continued his complaints that all American foreign service officers who dealt with the USSR were “reactionaries.”
The big exception, of course, was Ambassador Davies, who described Stalin as “clean-living, modest, retiring” and a “stubborn democrat” who insisted on rights for his people “even though it hazarded his power and party control.” Davies never even believed Stalin’s show trials of the late 1930s were staged. His last dispatch from Moscow went so far as to state: “There is no danger from communism here, so far as the United States is concerned.”
The man-made famine, given the absence of internationally recognized human rights norms and an administration committed to closer ties with the Soviets, was seen as an internal Soviet affair, viewed with skepticism, or simply not mentioned. Politicians and opinion-makers either turned a blind eye toward Stalin’s famine out of expediency or saw sympathy for the Soviet Union as a litmus test of one’s commitment to a more just society in this country. The tragedy is that the reality of mass starvation and collective victimization became a political football, as is ever the case when human issues are viewed through the prism of one’s commitment to the Right or the Left.
If there is one lesson to be learned from this tragedy, it must reside in the universality of human rights and human suffering. If the quest for a “greater good” or the struggle against some “greater evil” is seen to require a double standard of blindness toward the injustice and evil perpetrated by those who claim to be on our side of the political spectrum, the victims will always be ignored.