Another view of Stalin (22 page)
Before, the Nazis had imposed their direct authority on Ukraine, leaving no autonomy to their Ukrainian allies. It was on the basis of this rivalry between German and Ukrainian fascists that the Ukrainian nationalists would later build their myth of `opposition to the Germans'.
Pushed back by the Red Army, the Nazis changed tactics in 1943, giving a more important rфle to the Ukrainian killers. The creation of a `Ukrainian' division of the Waffen SS was seen as a victory for `Ukrainian nationalism'.
On May 16, 1944, the head of the SS, Himmler, congratulated the German officers of the Galizien Division for having cleansed Ukraine of all its Jews.
Wasyl Veryha, a veteran of the 14th Waffen SS Division, wrote in 1968:
`(T)he personnel trained in the division [14th Waffen SS] had become the backbone of the UPA, ... the UPA command also sent groups of its people to the division to receive proper training .... This reinforced the UPA which was left on the Native land [after the Nazi retreat], in particular its commanders and instructors.'
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Ibid. , p. 118.
Although the Melnyk and Bandera tendencies of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were at odds with each other and even fought each other, we can see here how they collaborated against the Communists under the leadership of the German Nazis.
The Nazi officer Scholtze revealed in front of the Nuremberg tribunal that Kanaris, the head of German intelligence, had `personally instructed the Abwehr to set up an underground network to continue the struggle against Soviet power in the Ukraine. Competent agents were left behind specially to direct the Nationalist movement'.
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Ibid.
Note that Mandel's Trotskyist group always supported the `anti-Stalinist' armed struggle that the OUN fascist thugs led between 1944 and 1952.
After the war, John Loftus was an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department Office of Special Investigations, in charge of detecting Nazis who were trying to enter the United States. In his book The Belarus Secret, he affirms that his service was opposed to the entry of Ukrainian Nazis. But Frank Wisner, in charge of the U.S. administration's Office of Policy Coordination, a particularly important secret service at the time, systematically allowed former Ukrainian, Croatian and Hungarian Nazis to enter. Wisner, who would later play an important rфle at the head of the CIA, asserted: `The OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the partisan army it created in 1942 (sic), UPA, fought bitterly against both the Germans and the Soviet Russians'.
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Ibid. , pp. 121--122.
Here one sees how the U.S. intelligence services, immediately after the war, took up the Ukrainian Nazis' version of history in order to use the anti-Communists in the clandestine struggle against the Soviet Union. Loftus commented:
`This was a complete fabrication. The CIC (U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps) had an agent who photographed eleven volumes of the secret internal files of OUN--Bandera. These files clearly show how most of its members worked for the Gestapo or SS as policemen, executioners, partisan hunters and municipal officials.'
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Ibid. , p. 122.
In the United States, former Ukrainian Nazi collaborators created `research institutes' from which they spread their revision of the history of the Second World War. Loftus wrote:
`Funding for these `research institutes,' which were little more than front groups for ex-Nazi intelligence officers, came from the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, now known as Radio Liberty. The committee was actually a front for OPC.'
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Ibid. , p. 128.
`Against Hitler and against Stalin': it was around these words that former Hitlerites and the CIA united their efforts. For uninformed people, the formula `against fascism and against communism' may seem to be a `third path', but it surely is not. It is the formula that united, after the defeat of the Nazis, former partisans of the disintegrating Greater Germany and their U.S. successors, who were striving for world hegemony. Since Hitler was now just part of the past, the far-right in Germany, Ukraine, Croatia, etc., joined up with the U.S. far-right. They united their efforts against socialism and against the Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the anti-fascist war. To rally the bourgeois forces, they spread lies about socialism, claiming that it was worse than Nazism. The formula `against Hitler and against Stalin' served to invent Stalin's `crimes' and `holocausts', to better cover up and even deny Hitler's monstrous crimes and holocausts. In 1986, the Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the very ones who pretended to have fought `against Hitler and against Stalin', published a book entitled, Why is One Holocaust Worth More than Others?, written by a former member of the UPA, Yurij Chumatskyj. Regretting that `revisionist historians who claim there was no plan to exterminate Jews, there were no mass gassings and that fewer than one million Jews died of all causes during World War II, are persecuted', Chumatskyj continues:
`(A)ccording to Zionists' statements Hitler killed six million Jews but Stalin, supported by the Jewish state apparatus, was able to kill ten times more Christians'.
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Ibid. , p. 129.
Conquest's fascist sources
The title of the crucial part --- Chapter 12 --- of Harvest of Sorrow is `The Famine Rages'. It contains an impressive list of 237 references. A more careful look shows that more than half of the these references come from extreme-right-wing Ukrainian йmigrйs. The Ukrainian fascist book Black Deeds of the Kremlin is cited 55 times! No wonder that Conquest uses the version of history provided by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and the U.S. secret services.
In the same chapter, Conquest cites 18 times the book The Ninth Circle by Olexa Woropay, published in 1953 by the youth movement of Stepan Bandera's fascist organization. The author presents a detailed biography for the thirties, but does not mention what he did during the Nazi occupation! A barely concealed admission of his Nazi past. He took up his biography again in 1948, in Muenster, where many Ukrainian fascists took refuge. It is there that he interviewed Ukrainians about the famine-genocide of 1932--1933. None of the `witnesses' is identified, which makes the book worthless from a scientific point of view. Given that he said nothing about what he did during the war, it is probable that those who `revealed the truth about Stalin' were Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who had fled.
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Ibid. , pp. 58--59.
Beal, who wrote for Hearst's pro-Nazi 1930's press, and later collaborated with the Cold War McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities, was cited five times.
Kravchenko, the anti-Communist йmigrй, is a source ten times; Lev Kopelev, another Russian йmigrй, five times.
Among the included `scientific' references is Vasily Grossman's novel, referenced by Conquest fifteen times!
Then, Conquest cites interviews from Harvard's Refugee Interview Project, which was financed by the CIA. He cites the McCarthy-era Congressional Commission on Communist Aggression as well as Ewald Ammende's 1935 Nazi book. Conquest also refers five times to Eugene Lyons and to William Chamberlin, two men who, following World War II, were on the Board of Trustees of Radio Liberty, the CIA Central European radio network.
On page 244, Conquest wrote: `One American, in a village twenty miles south of Kiev, found ... they were cooking a mess that defied analysis'. The reference given is the New York Evening Journal, February 28, 1933. In fact, it is a Thomas Walker article in Hearst's press, published in 1935! Conquest deliberately ante-dated the newspaper to make it correspond to the 1933 famine. Conquest did not name the American: he was afraid that some might recall that Thomas Walker was a fake who never set foot in Ukraine. Conquest is a forgerer.
To justify the use of йmigrй books recording rumors, Conquest claimed `truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay' and that `basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor'.
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J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933--1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5.
This statement gives fascist slanders, disinformation and lies academic respectability.
The causes of famine in the Ukraine
There was famine in the Ukraine in 1932--1933. But it was provoked mainly by the struggle to the bitter end that the Ukrainian far-right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture.
During the thirties, the far-right, linked with the Hitlerites, had already fully exploited the propaganda theme of `deliberately provoked famine to exterminate the Ukrainian people'. But after the Second World War, this propaganda was `adjusted' with the main goal of covering up the barbaric crimes committed by German and Ukrainian Nazis, to protect fascism and to mobilise Western forces against Communism.
In fact, since the beginning of the fifties, the reality of the extermination of six million Jews had imposed itself on the world conscience. The world right-wing forces needed a greater number of deaths `caused by communist terror'. So in 1953, the year of triumphant McCarthyism, a spectacular increase in the number of deaths in Ukraine took place, twenty years previous. Since the Jews had been killed in a scientific, deliberate and systematic manner, the `extermination' of the Ukrainian people also had to take the form of a genocide committed in cold blood. And the far-right, which vehemently denies the holocaust of the Jews, invented the Ukrainian genocide!
The 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine had four causes.
First of all, it was provoked by civil war led by the kulaks and the nostalgic reactionary elements of Tsarism against the collectivization of agriculture.
Frederick Schuman traveled as a tourist in Ukraine during the famine period. Once he became professor at Williams College, he published a book in 1957 about the Soviet Union. He spoke about famine.
`Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941.
`... Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. More refused to sow or reap, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and would in any case feed them.
`The aftermath was the ``Ukraine famine'' of 1932--33 .... Lurid accounts, mostly fictional, appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921 .... The ``famine'' was not, in its later stages, a result of food shortage, despite the sharp reduction of seed grain and harvests flowing from special requisitions in the spring of 1932 which were apparently occasioned by fear of war in Japan. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.'
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Tottle, op. cit. , pp. 93--94.
It is interesting to note that this eyewitness account was confirmed by a 1934 article by Isaac Mazepa, leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, former Premier under Petliura in 1918. He boasted that in Ukraine, the right had succeeded in 1930--1932 in widely sabotaging the agricultural works.
`At first there were disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustation of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest .... The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921--1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown, in addition when the crop was being gathered ... in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.'
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Ibid. , p. 94.
The second cause of the famine was the drought that hit certain areas of Ukraine in 1930, 1931 and 1932. For Professor James E. Mace, who defends the Ukrainian far-right line at Harvard, it is a fable created by the Soviet rйgime. However, in his A History of Ukraine, Mikhail Hrushevsky, described by the Nationalists themselves as `Ukraine's leading historian', writing of the year 1932, claimed that `Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions'.
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Ibid. , p. 91.
Professor Nicholas Riasnovsky, who taught at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, wrote that the years 1931 and 1932 saw drought conditions. Professor Michael Florinsky, who struggled against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, noted: `Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions'.