The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine



One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine.  This campaign began on 8 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American '6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union'.  Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine.  The truth of the matter was altogether different.  In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes. 



This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions.  Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases.  These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world.  Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens.  The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind.  It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained.  This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s. 



The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine - a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists - went into graphic and lurid detail.  The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union.  This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union.  In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union's denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987!  For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union. 



The Hearst mass media empire in 1998



William Hearst died in 1951 at his house in Beverly Hills, California.  Hearst left behind him a mass-media empire which to this day continues to spread his reactionary message throughout the world.  The Hearst Corporation is one of the largest enterprises in the world, incorporating more that 100 companies and employing 15,000 people.  The Hearst empire today comprises magazines, books, radio, TV, cable TV, news agencies and multimedia. 



52 years before the truth emerges



The Nazi disinformation campaign about the Ukraine did not die with the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.  The Nazi lies were taken over by the CIA and MI5, and were always guaranteed a prominent place in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union.  The McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts after the Second World War also thrived on the tales of the millions who died of starvation in the Ukraine.  In 1953 a book on this subject was published in the US.  This book was entitled 'Black Deeds of the Kremlin'.  Its publication was financed by Ukrainian refugees in the US, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War and to whom the American government gave political asylum, presenting them to the world as 'democrats'. 



When Reagan was elected to the US Presidency and began his 1980s anti-communist crusade, propaganda about the millions who died in the Ukraine was again revived.  In 1984 a Harvard professor published a book called 'Human Life in Russia' which repeated all the false information produced by the Hearst press in 1934.  In 1984, then, we were finding Nazi lies and falsifications dating from the 1930s being revived, but this time under the respectable cloak of an American university.  But this was not the end of it.  In 1986 yet another book appeared on the subject, entitled 'Harvest of Sorrow', written by a former member of the British secret service, Robert Conquest, now a professor at Stamford University in California.  For his 'work' on the book, Conquest received $80,000 from the Ukraine National Organization.  This same organisation also paid for a film made in 1986 called 'Harvest of Despair', in which, inter alia, material from Conquest's book was used.  By this time the number of people it was alleged in the US had lost their lives in the Ukraine through starvation had been upped to 15 million! 



Nevertheless the millions said to have died of starvation according to the Hearst press in America, parroted in books and films, was completely false information.  The Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle, meticulously exposed the falsifications in his book 'Fraud, famine and fascism - the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard', published in Toronto in 1987.  Among other things, Tottle proved that the photographic material used, horrifying photographs of starving children, had been taken from 1922 publications at a time when millions of people did die from hunger and war conditions because eight foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War of 1918-1921.  Douglas Tottle gives the facts surrounding the reporting of the famine of 1934 and exposes the assorted lies published in the Hearst press.  One journalist who had over a long period of time sent reports and photographs from supposed famine areas was Thomas Walter, a man who never set foot in the Ukraine and even in Moscow had spent but a bare five days.  This fact was revealed by the journalist Louis Fisher, Moscow Correspondent of The Nation, an American newspaper.  Fisher also revealed that the journalist M. Parrott, the real Hearst press correspondent in Moscow, had sent Hearst reports that were never published concerning the excellent harvest achieved by the Soviet Union in 1933 and on the Ukraine's advancement.  Tottle proves as well that the journalist who wrote the reports on the alleged Ukrainian famine, 'Thomas Walker', was really called Robert Green and was a convict who had escaped from a state prison in Colorado!  This Walker, or Green, was arrested when he returned to the US and when he appeared in court, he admitted that he had never been to the Ukraine.  All the lies concerning millions dead of starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, in a famine supposedly engineered by Stalin only came to be unmasked in 1987!  Hearst, the Nazi, the police agent Conquest and others had conned millions of people with their lies and fake reports.  Even today the Nazi Hearst's stories are still being repeated in newly-published books written by authors in the pay of right-wing interests. 



The Hearst press, having a monopolist position in many States of the US, and having news agencies all over the world, was the great megaphone of the Gestapo.  In a world dominated by monopoly capital, it was possible for the Hearst press to transform Gestapo lies into 'truths' emitted from dozens of newspapers, radio stations and, later on, TV channels, the world over.  When the Gestapo disappeared, this dirty propaganda war against socialism in the Soviet Union carried on regardless, albeit with the CIA as its new patron.  The anti-communist campaigns of the American press were not scaled down in the slightest.  Business continued as usual, first at the bidding of the Gestapo and then at the bidding of the CIA. 



Robert Conquest at the heart of the myths



This man, who is so widely quoted in the bourgeois press, this veritable oracle of the bourgeoisie, deserves some specific attention at this point.  Robert Conquest is one of the two authors who has most written on the millions dying in the Soviet Union.  He is in truth the creator of all the myths and lies concerning the Soviet Union that have been spread since the Second World War.  Conquest is primarily known for his books The Great Terror (1969) and Harvest of Sorrow (1986).  Conquest writes of millions dying of starvation in the Ukraine, in the gulag labour camps and during the Trials of 1936-38, using as his sources of information exiled Ukrainians living in the US and belonging to rightist parties, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War.  Many of Conquest's heroes were known to have been war criminals who led and participated in the genocide of the Ukraine's Jewish population in 1942.  One of these people was Mykola Lebed, convicted as a war criminal after the Second World War.  Lebed had been security chief in Lvov during the Nazi occupation and presided over the terrible persecutions of the Jews which took place in 1942.  In 1949 the CIA took Lebed off to the United States where he worked as a source of disinformation. 



The style of Conquest's books is one of violent and fanatical anti-communism.  In his 1969 book, Conquest tells us that those who died of starvation in the Soviet Union between 1932-1933 amounted to between 5 million and 6 million people, half of them in the Ukraine.  But in 1983, during Reagan's anti-communist crusade, Conquest had extended the famine into 1937 and increased the number of victims to 14 million!  Such assertions turned out to be well rewarded: in 1986 he was signed up by Reagan to write material for his presidential campaign aimed at preparing the American people for a Soviet invasion.  The text in question was called 'What to do when the Russians come - a survivalists' handbook'!  Strange words coming from a Professor of History! 



The fact is that there is nothing strange in it at all, coming as it does from a man who has spent his entire life living off lies and fabrications about the Soviet Union and Stalin - first as a secret service agent and then as a writer and professor at Stamford University in California.  Conquest's past was exposed by the Guardian of 27 January 1978 in an article which identified him as a former agent in the disinformation department of the British Secret Service, i.e., the Information Research Department (IRD).  The IRD was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task it was to combat communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion.  The activities of the IRD were very wide-ranging, as much in Britain as abroad.  When the IRD had to be formally disbanded in 1977, as a result of the exposure of its involvement with the far right, it was discovered that in Britain alone more than 100 of the best-known journalists had an IRD contact who regularly supplied them with material for articles.  This was routine in several major British newspapers, such as the Financial Times, The Times, Economist, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Express, The Guardian and others.  The facts exposed by the Guardian therefore give us an indication as to how the secret services were able to manipulate the news reaching the public at large. 



Robert Conquest worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956.  Conquest's 'work' there was to contribute to the so-called 'black history' of the Soviet Union fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion.  After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with secret service support.  His book 'The Great Terror', a basic right-wing text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services.  The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD.  A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources.  Conquest's book was intended for presentation to 'useful fools', such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV, to ensure that the lies of Conquest and the extreme right continued to be spread throughout large swathes of the population.  Conquest to this day remains for right-wing historians one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union. 

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