The Battle for Truth: Who Told the World the Truth About the Holodomor Despite the Total Blockade

On the fourth Saturday of November, Ukraine annually commemorates the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor and Political Repression. The memorial day was introduced by a presidential decree in 1998.

The term Holodomor is used to refer to the massive, artificially organized famine of 1932-1933 by the regime of dictator Joseph Stalin on the territory of temporarily occupied Ukraine by the USSR. This definition is also used for the famines of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947.

The exact number of victims is unknown. During the Holodomor, no such calculations were made, and the Soviet occupiers tried in every way to conceal the scale of the tragedy. According to the estimates of the Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, about 4.5 million people died in Ukraine as a result of the Holodomor in 1932-1933.

ICTV Fakty tells why it was impossible to objectively cover the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s and who tried to tell the truth about the tragedy to the world. We talked to Andriy Ivants, a leading researcher at the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide, PhD in History, about the Soviet regime’s silencing of the famine in Ukraine.

Why the West’s reaction to the famine in Ukraine was “quiet”

– The situation with the recognition of the famine in Ukraine is related to the complex international relations at that time. 1933 was the year Hitler came to power, so some Western countries tried to find a counterweight to Hitler and turn a blind eye to the crimes of another totalitarian state. We know that information about the famine actually reached the Western world through diplomatic channels, through refugees, the active work of Ukrainian public organizations, and Ukrainian politicians,” explained Andriy Ivanets.

Milena Rudnytska, a representative of the Committee for the Rescue of Ukraine, who was also a member of the Polish Sejm, managed to get the issue considered by the Council of the League of Nations in 1933.

The chairman of the meeting, Johan Ludwig Mowinkel, the prime minister of Norway, raised the issue three times, trying to reach a positive decision for Ukrainians so that aid could be sent. However, the proposal received only three votes, so it could not be implemented through the League of Nations.

As a result, this issue was passed to the International Red Cross, which turned to the Red Cross in the USSR, and they answered that there was no famine.

– Similarly, fascist Italy had enough information about the crime committed by the communist regime. The same Milena Rudnytska met with Benito Mussolini and convinced him that they, as anti-communists, should support the Ukrainian nation, which was being destroyed by the communist regime. Mussolini promised her to consider this issue, but in fact, at that moment, he also decided to move closer to the USSR,” said Ivanets.

The historian noted that Adolf Hitler was also informed about the famine in Ukraine, but provided assistance only to the German minority: “That is, he tried to provide assistance. This was fraught with certain difficulties. Nevertheless, he spoke about it.

Many other countries were aware of the Holodomor, but at the time there was no political will to call it a crime and provide assistance to Ukrainians. On the other hand, the Soviet regime organized performances for foreign officials, during which a picture of “happy” life in the USSR was demonstrated.

For example, a trip to the USSR was organized for the Sovietophile former French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot. Cities and towns were prepared for his visit, clearing them of hungry people, beggars, and queues.

– He was fed very well when he was taken to the village. There, he was met by disguised secret service officers who told him about the joy of life on collective farms in the USSR. Les Taniuk’s version is that they even took actors from one of the Kyiv theaters. He describes a visit to, for example, a village in the Odesa region, where Errio not only saw villagers in embroidered shirts, but they were also singing and dancing in the field. “So you can understand that, indeed, even the use of artists is not excluded,” the historian says.

Ivanets emphasized that after such a trip, which was completely orchestrated by the Soviet authorities and Soviet services, Errio told the West that it was impossible to talk about famine.

Later, the USSR regime also destroyed material evidence in the form of the graves of the dead, and built other facilities on them. In Soviet Ukraine itself, witnesses to the famine had to remain silent because they knew about the threat of reprisals.

At the same time, the propaganda was telling how successfully the agricultural sector was being reformed and how the collective farm system was developing. On the other hand, they talked about some “hunger strikes” in the United States and Great Britain and other capitalist countries. In this way, through information, political, and repressive methods, the truth was hidden for many decades.

Jones-Duranty: the confrontation between truth and lies

The most famous journalists who covered the events of the Holodomor in Ukraine were the British Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Walter Duranty. But while the first two reported on the mass famine artificially created by the USSR, the latter went down in history as a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda. Moreover, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his series of reports from the USSR.

In 1932, Jones of the British newspaper Times and Muggeridge of the Guardian began reporting on the famine in Ukraine. They secretly traveled to the eastern part of Ukraine and saw the tragedy with their own eyes.

– The USSR tried to hide its criminal actions in Ukraine. To do this, it used a wide range of measures: from destroying documents to banning foreign journalists from visiting Ukraine, which happened after Jones and Muggeridge’s unauthorized trips. “They used the so-called useful idiots, that is, those opinion leaders in the West who had sympathy for the Soviet Union and who denied the very fact of the famine to please the USSR,” Ivanets said.

Between 1930 and 1933, Jones visited the USSR three times and wrote articles for a number of publications about the conditions that developed as a result of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. He visited Ukraine in 1932, when he accompanied the grandson of Heinz founder Jack Heinz II. They personally witnessed the beginning of the famine.

Jones described his impressions of the trip in his diary, which was later published anonymously by Heinz, albeit with a preface under the name Gareth. The journalist, in particular, wrote two articles in a series entitled Will There Be Soup? He came to the USSR for the third time in 1933, arriving illegally in Kharkiv. Jones visited Ukrainian villages and saw people who were starving. He described all this in publications for Western publications.

In early March 1933, Gareth revealed to the world the truth about the genocide of the Ukrainian people through famine, naming the cause of the tragedy. That same week, Muggeridge published three unsigned articles about the famine in The Manchester Guardian, although at the time, due to the large number of reports of Jewish persecution in Germany, they went almost unnoticed.

However, the story of Gareth Jones made headlines around the world, in part because he was an adviser to former British Prime Minister Lloyd George. This happened after his interview with the Berlin press on March 29, 1933. As an exclusive, it was published in the United States on the same day by Pulitzer Prize winners Hubert Renfroe Knickerbocker and Edgar Adsel Maurer.

Despite the truth, Jones was publicly branded a “liar.” The campaign was launched by Western journalists working in Moscow, including Walter Duranty of The New York Times. Later in 1937, Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons apologized for his actions in his book, Appointment in Utopia.

– Destroying Jones was as unpleasant as years of manipulating facts to suit dictatorial regimes has been for any of us, but we destroyed him, unanimously and with almost identical ambiguous language. Poor Gareth Jones must have been more surprised than any man alive to find the facts he had so painstakingly gathered snowed under with denials from our lips,” Lyons wrote.

Duranty stated: “The Holodomor is a fiction created with the money of Nazi Germany.” It sounds like a narrative of Russian propaganda, but such words from the mouth of a reputable journalist formed a puzzle for the world to question whether the famine was artificial, intentional or not, and its scale. Later, the historian Robert Conquest said that he played a major role in concealing the Holodomor and received the Pulitzer undeservedly.

In the August 1933 issue, Duranty wrote about the Holodomor in Ukraine that “any reports of famine are exaggerations or malicious propaganda.” In an article titled Russians Are Hungry, But Not Starving, he ridiculed “the frightening stories in the American press about the famine in the USSR, where thousands are said to have died and millions are threatened with starvation.”

Duranty wrote that “there is in fact no famine or starvation, but deaths from diseases caused by malnutrition are very common.” After these articles, Muggeridge called Duranty the biggest liar in journalism. In 1933, in a private conversation with the British diplomat William Strang, Duranty admitted that “it is quite possible that at least 10 million people died in the Soviet Union during the past year.”

Undaunted, in a published letter to The New York Times, Gareth confirmed his observations about the famine and also scathingly rebutted Duranty, calling Moscow’s foreign correspondents “masters of euphemisms.

– They refer to the famine by the polite name of “food shortage,” and they soften starvation to “mass deaths from diseases caused by malnutrition.” In private conversations, consuls are not as discreet,” Jones wrote.

In August 1935, Gareth Jones was kidnapped and later murdered in Manchuria. Some suspect that his murder was planned by the Soviet NKVD as revenge for the shame he brought to the Soviet regime. As for Duranty, he wrote several books about the USSR after 1940. His name was also on the list of people who were sympathizers of communism or suspected of being agents of the USSR, which was kept by the writer George Orwell.

The role of Sheptytsky and the UGCC in saving Ukrainians during the Holodomor

The western part of Ukraine was not under Soviet occupation at that time. In 1932, people began to flee from the famine from the eastern territories to the west. Ukrainian-language newspapers in Galicia published their testimonies, and one of those who actively helped Ukrainians who were being starved to death was Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. At the Metropolitan’s request, funds were raised for the needs of the starving.

On July 24, 1933, Sheptytsky and the senior clergy of the UGCC wrote a pastoral letter to Ukraine in its death throes. In it, they revealed Moscow’s crime and called on believers around the world to spread the truth about the Holodomor in Ukraine and to help the starving Ukrainian people.

The Metropolitan informed the Vatican about the crime of the Soviet government. After that, the Ukrainian Public Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine was established, which became the coordinator of assistance to those who were starving. Sheptytsky maintained contacts with similar organizations in other countries.

– The text of the pastoral letter was translated into Italian and sent to Italy. It was known in the Vatican, and not only there. Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky did a lot of work to collect aid and inform the public. Unfortunately, it was not possible to actually transfer this aid to the USSR, because the communist regime did not accept such aid, which is also one of the evidences of the artificiality of the famine and the fact that the number of victims could have been less if the communist regime had not sought to destroy Ukrainians during the Holodomor,” says Andriy Ivanets.

“A number of European countries tried to organize actions to help those dying of starvation in Ukraine, but the Soviet authorities refused any external assistance, concealing the fact of genocide in Ukraine.

How the Holy See reacted

The Vatican reacted very painfully to the news of the Holodomor in Ukraine and tried to help Ukrainians. There were also letters from Ukraine that referred to those events and were published in the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano magazine.

– Pope Pius XI, when he learned about the terrible humanitarian catastrophe that Moscow had organized, is said to have even cried. He was emotionally moved and said that something had to be done. He instructed Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican’s secretary of state, to address the USSR with a proposal to help the starving,” Ivanets said.

“In the early 1920s, when the first mass artificial famine in Ukraine was raging, the communist regime allowed foreign structures and organizations to provide assistance. At that time, the Papal Curia provided assistance to some of the starving in Ukraine.

But in the early 1930s, the situation was different. The historian says that Secretary of State Pacelli probably convinced Pius XI that it was not worth raising this issue with the USSR leadership, as Stalin would be dissatisfied, and this could lead to the fact that the aid would not be accepted. There were fears that Catholics in the USSR would be subjected to a new wave of persecution.

At the same time, there was a special mission that dealt with Catholics in the USSR. Its head also proposed to start a collection to help the starving in Ukraine, but this was not done on a large scale.

– “It is worth noting that in the information sense, the breakthrough of the information blockade around the famine was also an important action in that situation, because the papal media associated with the Vatican did provide information about the famine,” the historian noted.

“There is information that the Vatican tried to send aid to the starving in Ukraine through Germany, which provided aid to the German population in Ukraine. Although it is not clear who actually received it, the intention to help the starving Ukrainians was evident.

Now, 90 years after the tragedy of the Holodomor of the Ukrainian people, the story seems to be continuing. Russia is terrorizing not only Ukraine, but the whole world with hunger. They hush up their crimes against Ukrainians, lie about them, and try to get away with it again. In the information age, it is crucial for us to win the battle for the truth, so that such a tragedy as the Holodomor will never happen again.