Every year on the fourth Saturday in November, the Goverment of Canada marks “Holodomor Remembrance Day.” As part of an ongoing renewed virulent anti-communist assault and agenda to rewrite history, it commemorates a fictitious “man-made famine” that the Soviet Union is spuriously accused of carrying out against Ukraine.

This day was instituted in 2008, when the Harper government adopted the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day Act with the support of all the cartel parties in the Parliament. The Act is subtitled An Act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide. Provinces including Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec passed similar bills and now hold similar annual events.

This promotion of the Holodomor followed closely on the proposal in 2007 by Jason Kenney, a then prominent member of the Harper government, to erect the virulently anti-communist monument to the “Victims of Communism,” a nefarious project to honour Nazi collaborators and war criminals by the Canadian government despite broad opposition from Canadians.

More recently, this veneration of Nazi collaborators as heroes has been used to try to dress up Canada’s participation in the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, which brought neo-Nazis to power, and its role in the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine, in the garb of democracy and human rights.

A serious question to ask is why the government does not see fit to preserve the memory of the 2.2 million people who were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”)? Why has it not declared their memories eternal as it has done for Nazi collaborators? An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Babi Yar in Kyiv, some 34,000 Jews were killed in just the first two days of a massacre in the city, a massacre in which Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who were allowed to immigrate to Canada took part.

The myth of the Holodomor has been unequivocally disproven time and time again as disinformation and fraud. Yet since the declaration of Holodomor Memorial Day in 2008, Canadian governments, regardless of which cartel party has formed them, continue to promote old Nazi propaganda against the Soviet Union. This includes presenting war criminals and Nazi collaborators as freedom fighters, who under this hoax were given refuge in Canada after World War II. Their organizations have been funded and protected by the state ever since to wage the Cold War, and today support for these forces is part of targeting Russia.

Certain facts are not disputed. For instance, the fact that Ukraine’s estimated population of 36.5 million in 1947, which included western Ukraine which had been part of Poland between the two world wars, was almost 5 million less than that of Soviet Ukraine before the war. Due to the onslaught of the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators, Ukraine’s total World War II loss was approximately 7.5 million people. More than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages were destroyed, leaving some 10 million people homeless. Only 20 per cent of the industrial enterprises and 15 per cent of agricultural equipment and machinery remained intact, and the transportation network was severely damaged. The material losses constituted an estimated 40 percent of Ukraine’s national wealth. And it was the Soviet Red Army which liberated Ukraine from the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

But Canada is not interested in committing any of this to “eternal memory,” only the fraud perpetrated by the Holodomor Myth in order to push virulent anti-communism and the aim of the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine to isolate and crush Russia. It is not a worthy cause.

Holodomor Myth

The Holodomor Myth originated with the Nazis, and was taken up by the yellow journalism of the U.S. Hearst newspaper empire. At that time it was thoroughly exposed by eyewitness testimony of prominent individuals such as New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, playwright George Bernard Shaw, author H.G. Wells and French President Édouard Herriot. In 1934, the British Foreign Office in the House of Lords stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations against the Soviet government regarding the food shortages. It based its statement on the testimony of Sir John Maynard, a renowned famine expert who actually visited Ukraine in the summer of 1933.

Since then the Holodomor has been shown to be a myth, a total and complete fabrication, whether through the rigorous investigation published in Douglas Tottle’s 1987 book Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard; the total lack of any supporting documentation for the claim of a “Soviet plot”; the Soviet archives which record active measures to send grain shipments to Ukraine to deal with food shortages; and the research by U.S. historian Professor Mark Tauger providing evidence of the role of natural factors which resulted in poor harvests.

The term Holodomor, which translates as death by hunger, refers to the alleged deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33 and is portrayed as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry who, they claim, resisted Soviet policies. The opposition of the kulaks, the rich peasants and small landlords who generally played a reactionary role, is deliberately confused with the mass of poor peasants, many still in serfdom, who benefited from collectivization and who joined the revolutionary forces in building a new society.

The Hitlerite Nazis created the genocide myth in 1933 to discredit the Soviet Union, the enemy they most feared. They wrote front page stories in German newspapers, which were then taken up by the reactionary British press, including by Lord Rothermere, owner of the London Daily Mail monopoly press. He was anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Semitic and anti-labour to the core. A friend of Hitler and Mussolini and sympathetic to Oswald Mosley’s British fascist party, Rothermere sent congratulatory telegrams to Hitler before the invasion of Poland.

In September 1934, multi-millionaire William Randolph Hearst, leading U.S. publisher of the “yellow press” and an open supporter of Nazism, met with Hitler and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin and signed a cash deal to promote a positive image of the Nazis in the U.S. The Hearst papers soon carried columns paid for by Adolf Hitler, Herman Goering and Benito Mussolini, and Hearst attended the huge 1934 Nazi Party Nuremberg rally, featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Egged on by the Hitlerites, Hearst’s papers became the biggest propagandists for the genocide myth, using fake photographs and printing lies that have been refuted by solid evidence over and over again.

Chicago American, part of the Hearst chain, promoting lie of the Ukrainian famine, March 3, 1935 (click to enlarge).

Hearst’s fraudulent campaign began on February 8, 1935 with a fabricated front-page headline in his Chicago American: “6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union.” But what actually took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a further advancement of the revolution. It was a time of major internal class struggle during which poor landless peasants rose up against the minority of rich landowners and kulaks, and began a struggle for the collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization was undertaken in conjunction with the campaign to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union so as to meet the needs of the Soviet people and to defend the Soviet Union against foreign aggression.

The Hearst press articles were the origin of the larger myth alleging millions died in the Soviet Union. These myths were taken up by the CIA and Britain’s MI5 and, in the post-war period, by the McCarthyite witch hunters, and by paid propagandists such as Stanford Professor Robert Conquest, a former MI5 agent. For decades, such slanders have spread a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union. Combating these fabrications, in 1987 Canadian trade unionist Douglas Tottle published his well-researched book entitled Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, which systematically exposed the Holodomor myth. The book has been reproduced online and is accessible to any reader who has an interest in investigating the facts of the matter.[1]

There were serious food shortages in Russia and Ukraine from 1918 to 1922 mainly due to the long imperialist invasion of Soviet Russia, which included Canadian troops. There were food shortages again in 1933 when poor harvests due to natural factors took place at a time when the remnants of the Czarist regime were attempting to mobilize the kulaks against the collectivization of agriculture. But no “man-made famine” was ever created.

The problems during this period were repeatedly addressed by Soviet leaders. For example, J.V. Stalin, at a talk to students of the Institute of Red Professors, the Communist Academy and Sverdlov University on May 28, 1928, reviewed a table of figures with those attending the talk. The figures showed agricultural production and distribution by landlords, kulaks and middle and poor peasants in the period before the Russian civil war as compared to the results following the war and the collectivization of agricultural production. Stalin said:

“It shows, firstly, that the production of the overwhelming proportion of grain products has passed from the landlords and kulaks to the small and middle peasants. This means that the small and middle peasants, having completely emancipated themselves from the yoke of the landlords, and having, in the main, broken the strength of the kulaks, have thereby been enabled considerably to improve their material conditions. That is the result of the October Revolution. Here we see the effect, primarily, of the decisive gain which accrued to the main mass of the peasantry as a result of the October Revolution.

“It shows, secondly, that in our country the principal holders of marketable grain are the small and, primarily, the middle peasants. This means that not only as regards gross production of grain, but also as regards the production of marketable grain, the USSR has become, as a result of the October Revolution, a land of small-peasant farming, and the middle peasant has become the ‘central figure’ in agriculture.

“It shows, thirdly, that the abolition of landlord (large-scale) farming, the reduction of kulak (large-scale) farming to less than one-third, and the passing to small-peasant farming with only 11 per cent of its output marketed, in the absence, in the sphere of grain production, of any more or less developed large-scale socially-conducted farming (collective farms and state farms), were bound to lead, and in fact have led, to a sharp reduction in the production of marketable grain as compared with pre-war times. It is a fact that the amount of marketable grain in our country is now half what it was before the war, although the gross output of grain has reached the pre-war level.

“That is the basis of our difficulties on the grain front.”[2]

Professor Mark Tauger, associate professor of history at West Virginia University, has done extensive research and concluded that hardships in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union were also caused by natural factors that waxed and waned, causing severe reductions in agricultural production, including periodic drought and persistence of crop pests and diseases when the means to combat them were still being developed.[3]

But today the genocide myth is deliberately revived and promoted to spread disinformation to cover up the crimes which the U.S. imperialists are committing in their striving to dominate the world, along with the Israeli Zionists and their backers in Europe and North America, which includes the government of Canada.

This fraud is exemplified in the statue titled “Bitter Memories of Childhood” which was installed in the park grounds surrounding the Saskatchewan Legislative Building in 2015 to remember the “victims of the Holodomor.” Meanwhile, the “Bitter Memories of Childhood” of the Indigenous Peoples and Métis count for nothing.

The fact is that state policy should not be based on false ideological beliefs (FIBs).

Notes

1. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Douglas Tottle, Progress Books, Toronto, 1987.

Born in Quebec in 1944, Douglas Tottle has spent most of his life in Western Canada. Tottle has worked as a photographer and a photo-lab technician, fine artist, underground miner, and as a steelworker. An active trade unionist, Tottle edited the United Steelworkers journal The Challenger from 1975 to 1985, during which time it received over 20 international and Canadian journalism awards. Tottle has also worked as a labour history researcher, and as an organizer. During the 1970s he assisted the organizing drive of Chicano farmworkers in California and worked with Indigenous farmworkers in Manitoba. Tottle has written for various Canadian and U.S. periodicals, magazines, and labour journals.

To view the book in its entirety, click here.

2. Stalin’s talk to the students was first published in Pravda, No. 127, June 2, 1928.

3. Prof. Mark Tauger is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of agriculture in the Soviet Union during its early years. He is an associate professor of history at West Virginia University. He is the author of the 2010 book Agriculture in World History. His writings on Soviet agriculture – articles, book chapters, and reviews – are listed on his website at West Virginia University. Three of these are provided below:

• “Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization,” Chapter Six in Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, edited by Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

• “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-33,” (2001, 65 pages), Carl Beck Papers No. 1506, Center for Russian and East European Studies (University of Pittsburgh). This is the only study documenting the underlying environmental causes of the famine of those years.

• “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review 1991.

(Hardial Bains Resource Centre Archives)

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