Another view of Stalin (20 page)

Lies about the collectivization have always been, for the bourgeoisie, powerful weapons in the psychological war against the Soviet Union.

We analyze the development of one of the most `popular' lies, the holocaust supposedly perpetrated by Stalin against the Ukrainian people. This brilliantly elaborated lie was created by Hitler.  In his 1926 Mein Kampf, he had already indicated that Ukraine belonged to German `lebensraum'. The campaign waged by the Nazis in 1934--1935 about the Bolshevik `genocide' in Ukraine was to prepare people's minds for the planned `liberation' of Ukraine. We will see why this lie outlived its Nazi creators to become a U.S. weapon. Here are how fabrications of `millions of victims of Stalinism' are born.

On February 18, 1935, the Hearst  press in the U.S. began the publication of a series of articles by Thomas Walker.  (Hearst  was a huge press magnate and a Nazi sympathizer.) Great traveler and journalist, Walker  had supposedly crisscrossed the Soviet Union for several years. The February 25 headline of the Chicago American read, `Six Million Perish in Soviet Famine: Peasants' Crops Seized, They and Their Animals Starve.' In the middle of the page, another headline read, `Reporter Risks Life to Get Photographs Showing Starvation.' At the bottom of the page, `Famine --- Crime Against Humanity'.

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Douglas Tottle,  Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler  to Harvard (Toronto: Progress Books, 1987), pp. 5--6.

At the time, Louis Fischer  was working in Moscow for the U.S. newspaper The Nation. This scoop by a completely unknown colleague intrigued him greatly. He did some research and shared his findings with the newspaper's readers:

`Mr. Walker,  we are informed, ``entered Russia last spring,'' that is the spring of 1934. He saw famine. He photographed its victims. He got heartrending, first-hand accounts of hunger's ravages. Now hunger in Russia is ``hot'' news. Why did Mr. Hearst  keep these sensational articles for ten months before printing them ....

`I consulted Soviet authorities who had official information from Moscow. Thomas Walker  was in the Soviet Union once. He received a transit visa from the Soviet Consul in London on September 29, 1934. He entered the USSR from Poland by train at Negoreloye on October 12, 1934. (Not the spring of 1934 as he says.) He was in Moscow on the thirteenth. He remained in Moscow from Saturday, the thirteenth, to Thursday, the eighteenth, and then boarded a trans-Siberian train which brought him to the Soviet-Manchurian border on October 25, 1934 .... It would have been physically impossible for Mr. Walker,  in the five days between October 13 and October 18, to cover one-third of the points he ``describes'' from personal experience. My hypothesis is that he stayed long enough in Moscow to gather from embittered foreigners the Ukrainian ``local color'' he needed to give his articles the fake verisimilitude they possess.'

Fischer  had a friend, Lindsay Parrott,  also American, who visited the Ukraine in the beginning of 1934. He noticed no traces of the famine mentioned in Hearst's  press. On the contrary, the 1933 harvest was successful. Fischer  concluded:

`The Hearst  organizations and the Nazis are beginning to work more and more closely together. But I have not noticed that the Hearst  press printed Mr. Parrott's  stories about a prosperous Soviet Ukraine. Mr. Parrott  is Mr. Hearst's  correspondent in Moscow.'

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The Nation 140 (36), 13 March 1935, quoted in Tottle,  op. cit. , p. 8.

Underneath a photograph of a little girl and a `frog-like' child, Walter wrote:

`FRIGHTFUL --- Below Kharhov (sic), in a typical peasant's hut, dirt floor, thatched roof and one piece of furniture, a bench, was a very thin girl and her 2 1/2 year old brother (shown above). This younger child crawled about the floor like a frog and its poor little body was so deformed from lack of nourishment that it did not resemble a human being.'

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Tottle,  op. cit. , p. 9.

Douglas Tottle,  a Canadian union worker and journalist, found the picture of this same `frog-like' child, dated spring 1934, in a 1922 publication about the famine of that year.

Another photo by Walker  was identified as that of a soldier in the Austrian cavalry, beside a dead horse, taken during the First World War.

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James Casey,  Daily Worker, 21 February 1935, quoted in Tottle,  op. cit. , p. 9.

Poor Walker:  his reporting was fake, his photographs were fake, even his name was assumed. His real name was Robert Green.  He had escaped from the Colorado state prison after having done two years out of eight. Then he went to do his false reporting in the Soviet Union. Upon his return to the States, he was arrested, where he admitted in front of the court that he had never set foot in the Ukraine.

The multi-millionnaire William Randolph Heast met Hitler  at the end of the summer of 1934 to finalize an agreement under which Germany would buy its international news from the Hearst-owned  company International News Service. At the time, the Nazi press had already started up a propaganda campaign about the `Ukrainian famine'. Hearst  took it up quickly, thanks to his great explorer, Walker. 

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Tottle,  op. cit. , pp. 13, 15.

Other similar reports on the famine would show up in Hearst's  press. For example, Fred Beal  started to write. A U.S. worker sentenced to twenty years of prison after a strike, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1930 and worked for two years in the Kharkov Tractor Works. In 1933, he wrote a little book called Foreign workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant, favorably describing the efforts of the Soviet people. At the end of 1933, he returned to the U.S., where unemployment and prison awaited him. In 1934, he started to write about the Ukrainian famine, and soon his prison sentence was dramatically reduced. When his `eyewitness account' was published by Hearst  in June 1935, J. Wolynec,  another U.S. worker who had worked for five years in the same Kharkov factory, exposed the lies that showed up throughout the text. Although Beal  pretended to have heard several conversations, Wolynec  noted that Beal  spoke neither Russian nor Ukrainian. In 1948, Beal  offered his services to the far-right as an eyewitness against Communists, in front of the McCarthy Committee. 

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Ibid. , pp. 19--21.

A book from Hitler

In 1935, Dr. Ewald Ammende  published a book, Muss Russland hungern? (1936 English title: Human Life in Russia) Its sources: the German Nazi press, the Italian fascist press, the Ukrainian йmigrй press and `travelers' and `experts', cited with no details. He published photos that he claimed `are among the most important sources for the actual facts of the Russian position'.

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Ibid. , pp. 23--24.

There are also photos belonging to Dr. Ditloff,  who was until August 1933 Director of the German Government Agricultural Concession --- Drusag in the North Caucasus. Ditloff  claimed to have taken the photos in the summer of 1933 `and they demonstrate the conditions ... (in) the Hunger Zone'.

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Ibid. , p. 25.

Given that he was by then a civil servant of the Nazi government, how could Ditloff  have freely moved from the Caucasus to the Ukraine to hunt pictures? Among Ditloff's  photos, seven, including that of the `frog-like' child, had also been published by Walker.  Another photo presented two skeletal-like boys, symbols of the 1933 Ukrainian famine. The same picture was shown in Peter Ustinov's  televised series Russia: it comes from a documentary film about the 1922 Russian famine! Another of Ammende's  photos was published by the Nazi paper Volkischer Beobachter, dated August 18, 1933. This photo was also identified among books dating back to 1922.

Ammende  had worked in the Volga region in 1913. During the 1917--1918 Civil War, he had held positions in the pro-German counter-revolutionary governments of Estonia and Latvia. Then he worked in liaison with the Skoropadsky  government set up by the German army in the Ukraine in March 1918. He claimed to have participated in the humanitarian aid campaigns during the 1921--1922 Russian famine, hence his familiarity with the photos of the period. For years, Ammende  served as General Secretary of the so-called European Nationalities Congress, close to the Nazi Party, which included regrouped йmigrйs from the Soviet Union. At the end of 1933, Ammende  was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Interconfessional and International Relief Committee for the Russian Famine Areas, which was led by the pro-fascist Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna. Ammende  was therefore closely tied to the Nazi anti-Soviet campaign.

When Reagan  started up his anti-Communist crusade at the beginning of the eighties, Professor James E. Mace  of Harvard University thought it opportune to re-edit and re-publish Ammende's  book under the title Human Life in Russia. That was in 1984. So all the Nazi lies and the fake photographic evidence, including Walker's  pseudo-reporting on the Ukraine, were granted the `academic respectability' associated with the Harvard name.

The preceding year, far-right Ukrainian йmigrйs in the U.S. published The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust. Douglas Tottle  was able to check that the photos in this book dated to 1921--1922. Hence the photo on the cover comes from Dr. F. Nansen's  International Committee for Russian Relief publication Information 22, Geneva, April 30, 1922, p. 6!

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Ibid. , pp. 4--31.

Neo-Nazi revisionism around the world `revises' history to justify, above all, the barbaric crimes of fascism against Communists and the Soviet Union. First, it denies the crimes that they themselves committed against the Jews. Neo-Nazis deny the existence of extermination camps where millions of Jews were slaughtered. They then invent `holocausts', supposedly perpetrated by Communists and by Comrade Stalin. With this lie, they justify the bestial crimes that the Nazis committed in the Soviet Union. For this, revisionism at the service of the anti-Communist struggle, they receive the full support of Reagan,  Bush,  Thatcher  and company.

A book from McCarthy

Thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators succeeded in entering the U.S. after the Second World War. During the McCarthy  period, they testified as victims of `communist barbary'. They reinvented the famine-genocide myth in a two-volume book, Black Deeds of the Kremlin, published in 1953 and 1955 by the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror and the Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime in the USA. This book, dear to Robert Conquest,  who cites it regularly, contains a glorification of Petliura,  responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in 1918--1920, as well as a homage to Shukhevych,  the fascist commander of the Nazi-organized Nachtigall Battalion and later the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

Black Deeds also contains a series of photos of the 1932--1933 famine-genocide. They are all fakes. Deliberate fakes. One picture is captioned `A little cannibal'. It appeared in issue 22 of the Information bulletin of the International Committee for Russian Relief in 1922, with the original caption `Cannibal from Zaporozhe: has eaten his sister'. On page 155, Black Deeds included a picture of four soldiers and an officer who had just executed some men. The caption reads `The Execution of Kurkuls [Kulaks]'. Small detail: the soldiers are wearing Tsarist uniforms! Hence, Tsarist executions are given as proof of the `crimes of Stalin'.

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Ibid. , pp. 38--44.

One of the authors of volume I of Black Deeds was Alexander Hay-Holowko,  who was Minister of Propaganda for Bandera's  `government' of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Western Ukraine. During the brief existence of this fascist clique, Nationalist mobs and Ukrainian auxiliary troops killed some thousands of Jews, Poles and Bolsheviks in the Lvov region. Hay-Holowko,  who now resides in Vancouver, also served in the SS.

Among the persons cited as `sponsors' of the book is Anatole Bilotserkiwsky,  alias Anton Shpak,  a former officer in the Nazi police at Bila Tserkva. According to witnesses and documents Shpak/Bilotserkiwsky   and others personally took part in the execution of two thousand predominantly Jewish civilians.

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Ibid. , p. 41.

Between 1 and 15 Million Dead

In January 1964, Dana Dalrymple  published an article in Soviet Studies, entitled `The Soviet Famine of 1932--1934'. He claimed that there were 5,500,000 dead, the average of 20 various estimates.

One question immediately comes to mind: what are these sources of the `estimates' used by the professor?

One of the sources is Thomas Walker,  who made the famous `trip' to Ukraine, where he `presumably could speak Russian', according to Dalrymple. 

Another source was Nicolas Prychodko,  a Nazi collaborator who worked for the Nazi-controlled `Minister of Culture and Education' in Kiev. Prychodko  was evacuated West by the Nazis during their retreat from Ukraine. He provided the figure of seven million dead.

These are followed by Otto Schiller,  Nazi civil servant charged with the reorganization of agriculture in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. His text, published in Berlin in 1943 and claiming 7,500,000 dead, was cited by Dalrymple. 

The next source was Ewald Ammende,  the Nazi who had not been in Russia since 1922. In two letters published in July and August 1934 in the New York Times, Ammende  spoke of 7,500,000 dead and pretended that in July of that year, people were dying in the streets of Kiev. A few days later, the NYT correspondent, Harold Denny,  gave the lie to Ammende:  `Your correspondent was in Kiev for several days last July about the time people were supposed to be dying there, and neither in the city, nor in the surrounding countryside was there hunger.' Several weeks later, Denny  reported: `Nowhere was famine found. Nowhere even the fear of it. There is food, including bread, in the local open markets. The peasants were smiling too, and generous with their foodstuffs'.