The Holodomor

The Ukrainian (Soviet) famine (holodomor)[1] of 1932-3 attracted relatively little attention until the mid-1980s

History is written by the oppressors and not until 1991, at the time of the break up of the Soviet Union, was Ukraine in a position to refer to the Great Famine. The only authentic accounts of the famine should be taken from the spectators of the terrible crisis. The whole tragic event was cleverly concealed by the manoeuvres and covered up by the Soviet Government in 1933. One act of subterfuge was the Metrovik Affair and trial whereby the Moscow correspondents were forced not report the famine. In fact, Walter Duranty stated there was no famine and denied my uncle, Gareth Jones’ honest reporting to be true. Duranty’s colleagues accused Gareth of lying, “The throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes - but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.… We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. ...iv

The British Government have much to answer for in suppressing the news of the tragedy from history. I have no doubt that the HMG prevented any reporting by Gareth after his last article in the Western Mail and South Wales News on April 20^th1933. He has been curiously airbrushed out of history. Hitler had been made Chancellor in January 1933 and it was then that the government commenced their policy of appeasement. I shall quote Sir Laurence Collier, head of the Foreign Office Northern Department furnished reply to Sir Waldron Smithers on July 2, 1934 who had enquired as to the economic situation and the famine in the Soviet Union:

“The truth of the matter is, of course, that we have a certain amount of information about famine conditions in the south of Russia [Ukraine] similar to what has appeared in the press, and that there is no obligation on us not to make it public. We do not want to make it public, however, because the Soviet Government would resent it and our relations with them would be prejudiced.... We cannot give this explanation in public.[i]”

I can only quote the figures at the time. On 26, September 1933, Walter Duranty known for his duplicity called at the British Embassy and gave to a member of the staff an account of the impressions he had gathered following his visit in September 1933 with Stanley Richardson to Ukraine:xi

According to Mr. Duranty, the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga has decreased in the past year by 3 million, and the population of the Ukraine by 4-5 million. Estimates that he had heard from other foreigners living in the Ukraine were that approximately half the population had moved either into the towns or into more prosperous districts. ... Mr. Duranty estimated that about 30 per cent. of the harvest would be lost as a result of pilferage and weather conditions. ... The Ukraine had been bled white. ... Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.

In 1931 Gareth visited a German Commune near Dneiperstroy and was told: “They sent the kulaks away from here and it was terrible. We heard in a letter that ninety children died on the way - ninety children from this district.” No account of figures has ever been given for the deaths en route to the forced labour camps or while in these camps.

“The German Consul in Kharkoff and his wife thought that my Russian articles gave a wonderful picture, but that it was really much worse than I described it. Since March, it has got so much worse that it is horrible to be in Kharkoff. So many die, ill and beggars. They are dying off in the villages, he said, and the spring sowing campaign is catastrophic. The peasants have been eating the seed. To talk of a bumper crop, as Molotoff did, was a tragic farce, and he only said that to keep their spirits up, but nobody believed Molotoff. Many villages are empty. The fate of the German colonists is terrible, in some villages 25% have died off, and there will be more dying off until August.”

Allan Monkhouse, who had been one of the six engineers on trial in the Metrovik Affair wrote in his unbiased book:

“Last autumn, sixteen villages in the Ukraine failed to produce the grain required from them, and their failure was attributed by the authorities to deliberate sabotage. A decree was published in the local papers, announcing that all grain hoarded in the offending villages was to be confiscated, the co-operative stores in the villages were to be closed, and no State distributing authority was to arrange to send food to them—in other words sixteen villages were condemned to starve or secretly flee from their homes. When I was told of this decree I frankly did not believe it, but, when I saw for myself, I had to express my apologies to the friend who first told me of it for having doubted his statement.

“Speaking at Nijni Novgorod in June 1933, [President] Kalinin himself is reported as having said: “There are collective farms in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus where the supply of bread does not suffice, or suffices with difficulty.” He interpreted this, however, as a righteous judgment upon the collective farms where work had not proceeded energetically..[ii]…

“It may be assumed from Kalinin’s words already quoted that the peasants on the mismanaged collective farms will be left to their fate.”

The main one, according to Davies and Wheatcroft, was the over-riding importance attached by the Kremlin to the policy of industrialisation at break-neck speed by ruthlessly squeezing the agricultural sector. This was to be achieved by stripping the countryside of food through forcible grain requisitions. The food would then be used to feed the USSR's rapidly-expanding urban work-force.

I question this last statement. The grain requisitions were to pay for imports of machinery for her newly-founded industries and for armaments to combat an anticipated invasion by the Japanese from the recently established Manchukuo. Due to the global slump of the Depression the Soviet Union was finding it difficult to export her wheat, timber and other goods to an ever-diminishing market with a decreasing financial return. Despite starvation in the Soviet Union, the ruthless Stalin continued to sell grain on the open market endeavouring to convince the outside world that peasants, particularly in Ukraine, were not suffering nor dying of starvation.

The theory of Collectivisation was a failure. According to Allan Monkhouse in his book wrote without bitterness:

“The outlook in the agricultural areas is not good. The better-class and experienced peasants have been banished from the villages. Their herds have been to a large extent destroyed. The collective farms have fallen into the hands of political organizers with comparatively little farming experience and the poorer peasants, the bedniaki, who have in the past proved themselves unsuccessful farmers. Discontent is rife everywhere in the villages, except amongst the young people.[iii]

Following the October Revolution of 1917 Ukrainian Nationalism was encouraged by Mykola Skrynik who took over from Oleksander Shums’ki as Commissar for Education and Ukraine became an autonomous, though still a Bolshevik country. The diaries (March 1933), which Gareth wrote, we still have in our possession and he made the cryptic notes:

“Skrypnik, the Commissar for Education has been removed (now in Gosplan) was for Ukrainian rights. He was accused over Ukrainisation.

He was removed the beginning of March.”[iv] Stalin had sent his henchman, Pavel Postyshev to remove Skrypnik, who was charged with Ukrainisation.

During the first year of Postyshev’s presence in Ukraine, nearly 100,000 were purged from the CP(b)U.[v] Skrypnik committed suicide in the July of 1933.

To quote part of Gareth’s article in The Washington Herald, Sunday, June 4^th 1933:

“The famine is man made. It is the result of the Soviet policy of abolishing the private farm and replacing it by large collective farms, where the land and cattle were owned in common….

“The second point of the governments new policy is the new agricultural tax, by which the collective farms will pay in tax so much gain (usually about 2 ½ centners) per hectare of the sowing area PLANNED, and be free to sell the rest in open.

"Yes, they said it would be alright last year to sell the surplus on the private market, yet they took everything away. We do not believe them any longer. They say they will only take 15 poods per hectare, but they will take everything.

“In most districts the yield will be so small that it may be less than the tax. The peasants have so lost faith in the government that the new policy will not encourage the peasants to work. The outlook for the harvest therefore, remains black in spite of the new policy.”[vi]

But was the famine a genocidal[2] act directed against the Ukrainian nation? There is a widely-held belief, in Ukraine and elsewhere, that it was.

It is true that other areas in the Soviet Union suffered from famine – Siberia, the Volga and West Russia. Gareth reported one million out of five million of the nomadic Kyrgyz had died in Kazakhstan.” It is true that Stalin carried out many purges, but Ukraine was the first on his list of his barbarism.

Ukraine was the country that put up most resistance. It is difficult to see how such a rapid change in the agricultural policy could be achieved and yet supply enough grain for export. The better off peasants, the Kulaks were harried to Siberia. Stalin was determined to suppress Ukraine and ‘russify’ the country. The intelligentsia and politicians were ‘liquidated’and the latter replaced by Stalin's Communist henchmen. Above all the quota of wheat grown did not reach the amount that was a required by tax.

Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones died in mysterious circumstances in Inner Mongolia on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, August 12 1935. He never lived to be vindicated or expose the truth about the famine in Ukraine.

[1] Derived from a Ukrainian expression which means 'to inflict death by hunger'.

[2] Defined in Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention & Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.' For the full text, see http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

iv Eugene Lyons XE "Eugene Lyons" , Assignment in Utopia, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1937.p.576.

[i] The Foreign Office and the Famine British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-1933. Edited by Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan. The Limestone Press Kingston, Ontario - Vestal, New York 1988. p. 397 no 71.

xi Ibid. p. 309-313.

[ii] Allan Monkhouse, MOSCOW, 1911—1933 Being the Memoirs of

Victor Gollancz Ltd, London 1933, p. 116

[iii] Allan Monkhouse, MOSCOW, 1911—1933 Being the Memoirs of

Victor Gollancz Ltd London 1933 p. 118.

[iv] http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/Powerpoint_hero_ukraine.htm

[v] THE WASHINGTON HERALD Sunday, June 4^th 1933 http://www.margaretcolley.co.uk/washington_herald.htm

[vi]Ibid