Erasing memory
Information blockade was an important tool of genocide in Ukraine. It was not only people dying in the devastated villages who were censored, no word of truth was allowed to come out anywhere else. Afterwards, the KGB carefully concealed the huge scale of the Great Famine.
Any information about the deaths caused by mass starvation emerging abroad could not only damage the international image of the Soviet Union, which in the early 1930s began to actively establish diplomatic relations with Western countries, but also cause attempts to help those who were starving. It was international awareness of the famine in 1921-22 which allowed the world to provide substantial assistance to the victims, saving many of them from death. This was not to happen again. People who were doomed to starve by Stalin had to die. So the military siege of the affected territories, which was to block any attempts to escape from the Great Famine ghetto, was effectively supplemented by a wall of silence that had to prevent even a single word of truth from coming out.
Despite all this, in 1932 there were publications by British journalists Gareth Jones of the London Times and Malcolm Maggeridge of The Guardian who at their own risk traveled to Ukrainian villages to tell the world about the horrific hunger scenes they saw. In response, the Soviet Union launched a serious propaganda attack. They used the famous American journalist working with The New York Times as an effective tool. The 1932 Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty, who repeatedly visited the USSR, and, as he himself admitted in private conversations, knew the truth about the terrible famine, publicly denied it and called it fiction. Stalin’s words “There is no famine in the USSR!” sounded especially convincing to many Western politicians when they were pronounced by Mr. Duranty. Moreover, they wanted to believe these words so as to establish “mutually beneficial economic relations” as soon as possible with a state which was ready to sell grain taken from peasants at dirt cheap prices and buy huge amounts of industrial equipment.
The Soviet security organs closely monitored German, Italian and Japanese consuls, who were interested in the situation in Ukraine and could transmit information about the famine abroad. In addition, the security men skillfully performed “leakings” of the information they wanted to be transmitted. In August 1933, former French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot visited Ukraine, accompanied by three other French politicians. The visit was seen as an important step of the PR campaign, which was to testify to the effectiveness of Stalin’s forced-tempo reforms. Soviet followers of Prince Potemkin worked tirelessly.
According to reports sent by the Odesa regional office of the State Political Department, the French politicians were constantly under the supervision of security personnel who determined their itinerary and arranged for meetings with “happy collective farmers.” Villagers told the guests of their ‘sated life’: they were allegedly issued rations of 15 kg of bread a day, as well as some fruit and vegetables; they were entitled to a garden, a vegetable garden, and cattle. Cattle feed was alledgedly provided by the collective farm, while field workers received hot meals directly in the fields, brought in by the collective farm managers. To convince the guests that there were no food difficulties, collective farmers showed “storehouses, full of grain.” At the end of the visit, “happy Ukrainians” presented the Frenchmen with Ukrainian embroidered shirts and towels, implying that the farmers were not just well fed, but also spiritually rich because of their national traditions. As a result, the security men in the reports noted with satisfaction that Mr. Herriot expressed enthusiasm with what he saw during his trip and wrote appropriate comments in his notebook. French journalists sent to their editors such articles that Soviet propaganda officers could hardly have written better ones.
The strict information blockade of the terrible famine continued afterward. Now its main goal was to hide the huge scale of the crime. The population collapse at that time was visible to all. Mykola Reva, a collective farmer, in his letter to Joseph Stalin, naively wanting to “open the nations’ leader’s eyes” to the famine, told him that only three first-graders were to attend the village school in 1941. Obviously, this population reduction would be noticed by statisticians. Therefore, the census, which was to be held in January, 1937, was tightly controlled by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Nevertheless, the census results did not satisfy the Communists: the population losses reflected in them were still too large. So they initially classified data, and then had a significant part of it destroyed. Later, the census-takers themselves were eliminated, having been accused of conspiracy and malicious anti-Soviet activities.
In 1941, thousands of files from the 1930s were destroyed at the People’s Commissariat of Health in Kyiv; obviously, they contained information about the famine. There was to be no documentary material with information about this tragedy left. As a result, only top secret documents survived, as the Soviet government found its security classifications a reliable guarantee of inaccessibility of information, and therefore it did not destroy them.
The memory of the famine was to be removed not only from official documents, but the memory of witnesses of the tragedy, too. Therefore, the security men brutally persecuted all those who tried to keep this memory alive, or even worse, spread it. Reva received six years of imprisonment for his abovementioned letter. His case is not unique one in the Security Service of Ukraine’s Archives, as during the 1930s and 1940s people were convicted as criminals for any mention of the famine, oral or written. We can see in these “libel cases” the “evidence of crime”: letters (often addressed to Stalin), poems or diaries. The photographs, one of which, dated April 3, 1933, contains an inscription which says “300 days without a piece of bread,” were found at Mykola Bokan’s home in the town of Baturyn and became “evidence” of anti-Soviet agitation.
One of the last such cases took place in 1945. Oleksandra Radchenko, a former teacher, was arrested on the basis of a diary which she kept since 1926. “The purpose of my records,” she explained at the trial, “was to pass them on to my children. I wrote that in 20 years they would not believe that socialism was built with such brutal means. The Ukrainian people suffered horrors in Ukraine in 1930-33.” Even 12 years after the famine, Radchenko was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment for her “crimes.”
Security men were sure that the memory of the Great Famine, having been erased from memories of witnesses and documents had disappeared forever, and one of the biggest crimes in human history, the genocide against the Ukrainian people, was safely hidden. But thousands of Ukrainians, who survived the tragedy, were beyond the reach of Soviet security services. They were able to tell the truth, and thus became dangerous for the communist regime.
P.S. The article was based on declassified documents about the Great Famine from the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. The review of these documents can be found in the book The Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine according to documents from the Main State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. The annotated guide. It was compiled by V. Danylenko (chief compiler), L. Aulova, and V. Lavreniuk, and published by the Center for Studies of the Liberation Movement in cooperation with the Main State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine in November 2010.
