DENIAL OF THE HOLODOMOR: METHODS AND NARRATIVES
Authors: Kozytskyy Andriy 
Published: November 2022

Hiding of the mass extermination, denying the very fact of extermination are essential components of the crime of genocide. The article analyzes the stages of denial of the Holodomor, highlights the models of this denial, as well as the evolution of the main narratives that opponents of the genocidal qualification of the Holodomor are trying to spread. The Soviet Union consistently denied the Holodomor 1932–1933 and actively opposed the dissemination of information about it. The communist regime’s denial of reality was so widespread and pervasive, that even in 1930th in official documents of state and party authorities marked “for official use” and in some cases even “top secret”, the word “famine” was hardly used. Soviet authorities called the catastrophic famine “food shortages” caused by crop failures. Simultaneously with the blocking of information about the Holodomor, the communist regime resorted to a counter-propaganda operation, which consisted in refuting those reports of starvation and deaths, which, despite all the efforts of the Soviet secret services, infiltrated the West. In the USSR communist authorities used tactics that could be described as “aggressive erasure” to deny the Holodomor. This campaign was a combination of destruction of documentary evidence of a crime with the active intimidation of witnesses, who were unequivocally made aware that they must forget everything they saw. Authorities used repression against those who tried to preserve the memory about the Holodomor. In the late 1980s the soviet communists had to admit that the famine of 1932–1933 did occur in Ukraine, but as an official explanation for those events was proposed a version that absolved the Kremlin of responsibility for the multimillion casualties of the Holodomor. Soviet propaganda claimed that the causes of the famine were: objective difficulties in the period of agricultural transformation, organizational weakness of the newly established collective farms, lack of experienced personnel and agricultural machinery, sabotage by the kulaks etc. The main negative role was allegedly played by the disorganization of agricultural production, which, in turn, was caused by the abandonment of “the Lenin plan of cooperation” of farmers, and the accelerated pace of collectivization. At the same time, the propaganda called the accelerated pace of collectivization a forced step by the Soviet government, which felt threatened by the external invasion of the imperialist states and therefore had to prepare country for war at a rapid pace. At the same time, soviet propaganda continued to deny fact that the famine was anti-Ukrainian. The communist regime claimed that the famine affected the entire territory of the USSR, ad had no local specifics in Ukraine and others regions of the country with densely Ukrainian population (especially the Kuban). Calling the famine a “common tragedy of the entire Soviet Union” authorities insisted that its intensity throughout the USSR seemed to be the same everywhere. Denial of the Holodomor did not stop after the collapse of the USSR. At the beginning of the XXI century struggle against the recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide has become one of the priorities of the policy of memory in the Russian Federation. The main narratives of denying the Holodomor today are the allegations that the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine was not intentional, was not related to the anti-Ukrainian policy of the Bolsheviks, did not have fatal demographic and social consequences. A characteristic feature of the denial of the Holodomor in Russia in the second half of the 2000s was its twofold nature: along with the moderate denial of an academic nature there was an aggressive propaganda narrative of polemical and journalistic denial, the main purpose of which was anti-Ukrainian mobilization of Russian society.