Fraud, Famine, and Fascism by Douglas Tottle
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Fraud, Famine and Fascism The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitter to Harvard Douglas Tottle ABOUT THE AUTHOR Born in Quebec, Douglas Tottle has spent most of his life in Western Canada. Tottle has worked as a photographer and photo-lab technician, fine artist, underground miner, and as a steelworker. An active trade unionist, Tottle edited the United Steelworkers' journal The Challenger from 1975 to 1985, during which time the paper received over 20 international and Canadian labor journalism awards. Tottle has also worked as a labor history researcher, and as an organizer. During the 1970s he assisted the organizing drive of Chicano farmworkers in California and worked with Native Indian farmworkers in Manitoba. Tottle has written for various Canadian and U.S. periodicals, magazines, and labor journals. Fraud, Famine and Fascism The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard Douglas Tottle lb PROGRESS BOOKS TORONTO Copyright © 1987 by Douglas Tottle No part of this book may be reproduced, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations for purposes of review. Cover art: Richard Slye Published by Progress Books 71 Bathurst Street Toronto, Canada M5V 2P6 Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Tottle, Douglas, 1944- Fraud, famine and fascism Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-919396-51-8 1. Ukraine - History - 1921-1947 - Public opinion. 2. Ukraine - History - 1921-1947 - Historiography. 3. Famines - Ukraine - Public opinion. 4. Famines Ukraine - Historiography. 5. Ukraine - Foreign public opinion. 6. Propaganda, Anti - Russian. I. Title. DK508.833.T6 1987 947'.710842 C87-095359-1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 FRAUD 1 Thomas Walker: The Man Who Never Was 5 2 The Hearst Press: The Campaign Continues 13 3 Famine Photographs: Which Famine? 23 4 Cold War I: Black Deeds 36 5 The Numbers Game 45 6 Cold War II: The 1980s Campaign 57 7 Harvest of Deception 75 FAMINE 8 The Famine 91 FASCISM 9 Collaboration and Collusion 103 10 War Criminals, Anti-Semitism and the Famine-Genocide Campaign 121 APPENDIX From Third Reich Propagandist to Famine-Genocide Author 135 Notes 141 Bibliography 160 / To Shayndeleh, my sister and friend ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to many persons of Ukrainian background, both Canadian born and of post-war immigration, who shared with me their personal knowledge of the events discussed in this book. Their assistance in translating necessary materials is very much appreciated. I would like to particularly thank those of the post-war immigration who had the courage to offer or verify information about the presence of former Nazi war criminals and collaborators presently hiding behind the good name of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Nor do I wish to forget the valued assistance of Ukrainian academics from four universities for their assessments, criticisms and encouragement in the preparation of this book. Finally, I am honored by my acquaintance with Jewish survivors from Western Ukraine and Poland. They related to me their experience of Ukrainian Nationalist pogroms and police round-ups, verifying the experience of others with Ukrainian Nationalists as willing tools of the Nazis in town, country and concentration camps. Particularly helpful were the personal memoirs and written accounts made available to me by Galician Jews who survived the death camps or who survived in the forests. Canada is greatly enriched by their presence among us. Without their inspiration, which greatly encouraged me to get to the truth on a whole number of questions, this book could not have been completed. г INTRODUCTION From the earliest days of the Russian revolution to the present, propaganda campaigns have been conducted against the Soviet Union. Those in positions of power in capitalist countries see socialism as a threat to their continued profit and privilege. Both to undermine support of a socialist alternative at home, and to maintain a dominant position in international economic and political relationships, all manner of lies and distortions are employed to cast the USSR in as negative a light as possible. Stereotypes and caricatures have come to dominate many people’s understanding of Soviet history and current reality. The particular issues of this psychological war are wide-ranging and are at times short-lived. The idea that the socialist revolution "nationalized children” — my teacher’s explanation of day care, years ago — has long since faded into history. American allegations (in 1981) of Soviet chemical warfare in Southeast Asia — "yellow rain” — eventually collapsed when the offending chemical was shown by scientists to be dung produced naturally by bees in flight. But it is the charges that are remembered; the retractions, if ever made, are relegated to the newspapers’ back pages and forgotten. The various campaigns combine to shape popular perceptions in the service of political ends. This book is the story of one campaign that has endured. Based on the thesis that the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine was a deliberately planned "genocide” of Ukrainians by the Soviet government, the famine-genocide campaign has surfaced intermittently over the past five decades. The 1980s' revival of the famine-genocide campaign has sought to win acceptance of this theory in historiography. However, while historians accept that famine occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933 — as well as in other areas of the USSR — they are still debating the causes, extent and results. My examination of the campaign and its charges of "Ukrainian genocide” does not attempt to study the famine in any detailed way. Nonetheless a few words are in order. The 1917 Russian revolution was followed by military intervention by fourteen foreign powers (including the United States, Britain and Canada) and an extended civil war. The destruction of seven years of war, revolution and intervention, combined with severe drought, resulted in widespread hunger and starvation — the Russian famine of 1921-1922. Having survived these ordeals, the Soviets charted a course that had no precedents in world history: the building of a socialist society. They sought 2 FRAUD, FAMINE AND FASCISM to transform a backward land plagued by poverty and illiteracy into an industrialized country with a modern agricultural sector. This was seen by the Soviets as necessary not only for economic and social development, but also for the very survival of socialism in a hostile international environment. In the early 1930s, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria and Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany were seen as particularly menacing. The mass collectivization of agriculture and an ambitious industrialization program were the central features of the first five-year plan launched in 1929. Collectivization met with active opposition from sections of the peasantry, and in many areas the struggle approached the scale of civil war. Drought (a complicating factor), widespread sabotage, amateurish Soviet planning, Stalinist excesses and mistakes caused the famine of 1932-1933. Throughout the famine-genocide campaign however, the factors of drought and sabotage have been ignored, denied, downplayed or distorted. Soviet excesses and mistakes, in contrast, are emphasized, given an "anti- Ukrainian” motivation, described as consciously planned, and the results exaggerated in depictions of starvation deaths in the multi-millions. Fraudulent photographs and suspect evidence are extensively used to embellish charges of "genocide,” and are in fact the dominant images of the campaign. The sheer volume of non-authentic material used to support the genocide claim should in itself be grounds for the outright rejection of such a dubious thesis. Featured in the Nazi press in 1933, the famine-genocide campaign moved to Britain in 1934, and to the United States the year after. In Germany, a country with a history of strong communist, socialist and trade union movements, the Nazis created the first organized propaganda campaign (1933-1935) as part of their consolidation of power. In Britain and the United States, on the other hand, the campaign was advanced as part of right-wing efforts to keep the Soviet Union isolated and out of the League of Nations. It also served to discourage growing working class militancy in the Great Depression. The famine-genocide campaign finds its most ardent promoters among Ukrainian Nationalists. (The term Ukrainian Nationalist is used here and throughout the book to denote the right-wing and fascist minority in the Ukrainian community, among whose goals is an "independent” Ukraine on an anti-socialist basis. The author in no way seeks to identify this extreme Nationalism with the Ukrainian nation or persons of Ukrainian origin in general.) The campaign was given fresh impetus in the post-war period with the arrival in North America of several thousand Ukrainian Nationalists. Among the bona-fide INTRODUCTION 3 immigrants in the years just after the war, were thousands of former Nazi collaborators and sympathizers. Their direct interest in the campaign coincided with the Cold War propaganda of that time. The Cold War climate of the Reagan era has seen a revival of the campaign, surpassing that of the 1930s and 1950s. While movies like Rambo and Red Dawn occupy the fantasy phase of this political assault on the Western cultural intellect, the exhumation of the "Ukrainian famine-