A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions

[moundsview]

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: March 15, 2009
New York Times

KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.

Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.

The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame, seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.

“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.”(snip)

In response, Communist officials embarked on a propaganda drive to play down the famine and show that the deaths were caused by unforeseen food shortages or drought. Professor Kulchytsky said he had been given the task of gathering research but concluded that the famine had been man-made.

“I became convinced that everything was not as I once thought,” he said.

He refused to falsify his findings and instead released them publicly, escaping punishment only because glasnost had begun under the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

A memorial to the famine, right, opposite a revered cathedral, was dedicated last November in Kiev. A museum is planned there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/world/europe/16kiev.html?_r=2&ref=world

And yet the New York Times hangs on to Walter Durantys 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his reports denying the famine in Ukraine. How ironic that they publish this story.

The Times can't disappear fast enough.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Huh? This story is tragic enough, but...

then you go making some bullshit point about The Times for something that happened 75 years ago?

If you hate the paper so much, why even bother to read this story, much less post it?

[Igel]

2. I'm sorry, I seem to be missing what's new.

That the NYT is publishing it 75 years late? That's news? I rather thought that was expected--it takes a long time to get over your confirmation bias.

The Ukrainians have talked of the Holodomor for many decades; the Russians briefly accepted it in the late '80s, officially, but in the late '90s the wave of pro-authoritarian/pro-imperialism/anti-Western views caused many to reject it. It's not something you discuss there in polite society if you want to be allowed in any further society.

In the West? As with many things concerning Stalin, opinions were divided until the '70s. Most of the students and poli-sci folk I knew in the '70s were still of the view that Stalin wasn't nearly as bad as the anti-Soviet folks said. Most people on the left had problems through the '60s; Solzhenitsyn was, well, inconvenient. "Evil empire"? Ah. In some cases people low-balled estimates until there was absolutely no wiggle room--in the discussion of how many prisoners went to Kolyma and Magadan and died there, the debate would have continued had it not been discovered that the Soviets weren't stupid and insured their ships and cargo with Lloyd's and that the Lloyd's records were still in existence and available for perusal.

Still, recently, some DUer posted a link to a Canadian left-wing site that denied the Holodomor. He firmly believed that things were entirely an accident, with the government firmly in the "good guy's" camp. The fool.

Let's ponder Osip Menselshtam, who travelled through the S of Russia during the famine, and penned this in late 1933, probably in response (thanks to Wiki for the translation):

Stalin Epigram

We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard,

And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue,
Then they remember the Kremlin Highlander.

His fat fingers are slimy like slugs,
And his words are absolute, like grocers' weights.

His cockroach whiskers are laughing,
And his boot tops shine.

And around him the rabble of narrow-necked chiefs –
He plays with the services of half-men.

Who warble, or miaow, or moan.
He alone pushes and prods.

Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes,
In the groin, in the forehead, in the brows, or in the eye.

When he has an execution it's a special treat,
And the Ossetian chest swells.