On December 2 of this year, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on day two of a three-day “residence” sponsored by the Ann Arbor Coalition Against War. The first day, December 1, saw a wonderful event the organizers called “Pubology,” set in the upstairs bar of the
Thanks. A helpful article. I studied the 1930s USSR at Oxford in the mid 80s and do not recall the term Holodomor either. Our tutor (now Director at some Estonian think tank...) did say that Stalin sought to eliminate the Ukrainian peasant class. But I do not recall any evidence for that other than Robert Conquest’s assertions.
Classic historical myth making. I sometimes point out to British people who reference this alleged genocide that Indian Nationalists accuse us (perhaps fairly) of creating or at least not alleviating famines in India. Including in Calcutta in 1944. But not only then. They get very indignant.
Feels a bit like how Scottish Nationalists use events such as the Battle of Culloden, which they present as English versus Scots, when the reality was much more complex and as much akin to a civil war within both England and Scotland than a war between the two kingdoms. The tragic 1930s USSR famines hurt all nationalities but are now being used as a way to sow ethnic hatred. Good to push back on that.
Excellent article Scott, as usual. I appreciate your work. I always wonder how can a well informed person like yourself be labelled a propagandist by what is clearly nothing but a textbook propagandist himself. An uniformed one at that. People also fail to see that the leader of the Ukrainian ssr at the time was Lazar Kaganovich, a Ukrainian. Some of the most important people in the soviet Union weren't Russian, brezhnev, kruschev, beria, stalin. Why are all the Soviet Union tragedies or even atrocities inherited by Russia but not Ukraine? They were both part of the soviet Union. I am sure no one in 1970 in the USA would call someone from Kiev, ukranian, I am sure he would be addressed as a Russian. Hell even he himself might call himself a Russian.
Starvation and famine, whatever the cause, is a terrible opportunity to waste with these people. Yet, they’d perpetuate it on their own Russian speaking eastern Ukrainian brothers in a heartbeat given the chance. I’m glad you were ready to stomp him if he caused you to.
EU, and especially the German parliament should very very carefully not to be relativising the term genocide... especially the Germans. No matter what are they trying to say, they are the last nation on the continent that should be throwing that term with ease... the definition of genocide is very clear, and tragedy of USSR’s famine can be called many names, but not a genocide.
All that stated with US whitewashing of their role in the Bosnian war, and using the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide so that their version of narrative would be cemented for ever, and no universally or academic could ever look i to it or question it, or any journalist writing about, without a danger of being labelled a genocide denier, something reserved, up to that point, only for some fringe holocaust deniers. Chomsky was one of these Srebrenica war crimes “deniers” because he pointed that if what happened in Srebrenica was a genocide, we need to find a different term for what happened with Jews in Nazi Germany, what happened to American natives, Armenians, Serbs in nazi Croatia and so on.
Perhaps that is the plan of EU parliament’s decision, even if its non legally binding, it is the start of that process or banning discussion on that topic, labelling Russians as genocidal, and therefore worth punishing, dehumanising and destroying.
Again, the German parliament followed with that formulation of the events, that is very very dangerous thing to do. No one has right to play with that term, to revoke a memory of monstrosities of genocide for their political gains.
Funny you claim that this was an economic mistake. That because Stalin, in direct conversation with Churchill, I believe in Iran, termed the holodomor "the war on the Peasants". He claimed it was a bigger threat at the time than the then current war agajnst the NAZIs.
The internal passport system of the Soviet Union was instituted at the time so folks from targeted areas, the Ukraine, could not escape.
Why you feel necessary to trash history in order to defend Putin against what a Georgian Dictator did in the 1930s is bunk.
Putin is in no way a Soviet Dictator. Nor is he Georgian as the Dictator was or Jewish as many if the Commissars who commited the atrocities were.
Putin as a matter of fact requires the reading of the Gulag Archepelago in school. He is not Stalin.
But there is a documented forced starvation in which more than 4 millions of Bengali Indian people were starved to death by no other than Winston Churchill. Still everyone in the west worship Churchill, no one in the west talked about his crime against humanity.
The Holodomor stems from the "War Communism" practiced by the Communists during the revolution. That is where the factories in the Cities run by the workers produced nothing to trade with the farmers for food. So the Cities starved. Under "War Communism" Red Army detachment stole every scrap of food the Peasants had and let them starve. It turned out to be a very effective counterinsurgency method as fighters could not live off starving people.
Ukraine was a problematic province the the Communists. The Anarchist Black Army had held swaybin the area during the Revolution. Trotsky once complained that everyone in the Ukraine had a rifle, except his Red Army Troops. The Counter-Revolution was strong in Ukraine.
The same starvation/collectivazation strategy is employed in most Communist Countries to consolidate power in rural areas.
In China the Great Leap Forward may have killed 30-45 million people in 1958 to 1961.
The laughable part of historical analysis is that all these kook Historians buy the goals stated by the Communists. Better farming. The reality is better control.
in our small town on rapidly growing long island there wsas a ukraiian 'catholic' church and a few kids in school..... typical of polish kids in size.....
from the stalin famines one claim i heard was the 'anti collectivists' threatened to starve the industrial centers, the industrialization which was in process to compete with germany.,..
ukraine partisans killed general vatutin a front commander who excelled at kursk in donabs region in spring 1944.
last ukraine infantry was involved at omaha beach operating mk 34's on us assault troops.
i do not give a tinker's dam for ukraine and even less for the us' strategy to break up russia.
the anti russian propagandists have been working the area since the usa tried to ruin russia in 1990 with the harvard ecvonomists sent to set up a capitalist economy....
Great summary. The narrative the Ukrainians use is consistent with other young "nationalisms" that constantly use the victim narrative and invent genocides (sometimes dozens of them, common among Balkan muslims for some reason) to mask their own virulent chauvinism.
The farmers in Ukraine, who had their crop stolen, were almost exclusively ethnical Russian. living in the part of Ukraine that just a bit more than a decade earlier, was part of Russia. The people that suffered most from the Holodomor in Ukraine were livining in the Russian part of Ukraine. To claim that this was a genocide against Ukrainians is ridiculous. The number of ethical Ukrainian who died during the Holodomor is in the range of single digit percentage of the total death toll
Professor Grover Carr Furr did an archive dive after the Soviet Union fell, and one of the books he wrote on his archive research covers the subject, with many points in accord with Scott Ritter's comments. However Furr has a much lower number than Conquest in total deaths. One other thing Scott does not mention, so he may also not agree, is Furr reports at that time there was a 2nd civil war going on in Ukraine, where the Kulaks were not only hording grain with the intent to cause famine, but ala KKK, using night riders and other terror tactics to undermine the government's attempts to distribute relief.
Scott quotes Robert Conquest that there is no documentation that Stalin ordered the Holodomor.
There is no documentation showing that Hitler ordered the Holocaust. Yet, I'm pretty sure he did. He threatened to murder all the Jews in Europe during speeches aimed at those who were organizing a World War against him. There is lots of circumstantial evidence that Hitler knew and wanted it done.
Scott, you are being disingenuous. Stalin was inundated with letters about what was going on in the Ukraine. The letter writers would end up arrested. Stalin's minions continually were replaced as they wore out conducting his terror campaigns. The head of the NKVD would appear at Stalins nightly drunken parties with brain matter on his tunic from where he had been beating the skulls of high level prisoners.
Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. Just as Trotsky knew what he was doing during War Communism and the Famine then. Both men, and Lenin ordered extreme ruthless measures to be taken from the early days on.
The Collectivization Campaign was Soviet Union wide, but it was especially brutal in places like the Ukraine that had been a continous threat to Soviet Rule.
It was not a Racial Campaign, but it might as well have been. But it was not a Russian Campaign, it was a Soviet one.
Stephan Bandera was a brutal guy. You think someone who was not ruthless would have had any success fighting the Soviets? The less brutal types were dead.
The fact that the Holodomor was a political move is irrelevant. If you were some Ukrainian Peasant of the time watching your people, moms, dads, sons, daughters, cousins, either dying of starvation, being gunned down for resistance, or exiled to a Siberian Death Camp you would hate the Soviet power structure. I've read personal accounts from the Holodomor where the folks living through that time are convinced that it was a campaign to murder everyone in the Ukraine.
That power structure was overly Jewish and Russian. The Ukrainians who had died or lived through hell in 1932-34 were only 7 years later "rescued" by the NAZIs and it was entirely logical for them to join them and help murder the Jews they had seen supporting the Communists, and etc.
Yeah, it was not only Jews, or Russians, it was Ukrainian Commisars too. But from some poorly educated Ukrainian Peasant of the time seeing what he had witnessed, I understand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A great man whose works did as much as anyone to defeat the Soviet Union blames the Jews for what happened and he too was there. He studied the situation a lot closer than either of us. His book "200 Years Together" is effectively banned in the United States and its not even Antisemitic. It merely tells the truth about the complicated relationship between the Russian and Jewish people. For that it was banned. Or can you find a published copy in English in this country?
Stephan Bandera was fighting evil, fighting allied with evil, and became evil. But you tend to attack only him completely out of context with what was going on.
There is plenty of evil going on now in Ukraine with our Puppet Regime murdering its own people and our money going to the deaths of so many brave Ukrainians for nothing.
The biggest crimes against Humanity in world history is the purposeful famines of the Communists from Russia to China to Pol Pot and beyond. Stop with the ignorant denialism.
"fuck off" - I love it!! So wish I could tell that to all the blowhards that think Ukraine is the righteous party in the crazy back-to-front information war currently waging in all across western social media. Keep it up Scott, for all our sakes.
For some on the left, this serves an additional purpose: shifting blame to rehabilitate collectivization and central planning more generally.
By this logic, there was nothing *essentially* wrong with the system. Rather, the famine was caused by things that were not essential elements of the system: Stalin, animus towards Ukrainians per se, anything OTHER than communism per se.
Thanks. A helpful article. I studied the 1930s USSR at Oxford in the mid 80s and do not recall the term Holodomor either. Our tutor (now Director at some Estonian think tank...) did say that Stalin sought to eliminate the Ukrainian peasant class. But I do not recall any evidence for that other than Robert Conquest’s assertions.
Classic historical myth making. I sometimes point out to British people who reference this alleged genocide that Indian Nationalists accuse us (perhaps fairly) of creating or at least not alleviating famines in India. Including in Calcutta in 1944. But not only then. They get very indignant.
Feels a bit like how Scottish Nationalists use events such as the Battle of Culloden, which they present as English versus Scots, when the reality was much more complex and as much akin to a civil war within both England and Scotland than a war between the two kingdoms. The tragic 1930s USSR famines hurt all nationalities but are now being used as a way to sow ethnic hatred. Good to push back on that.
Mr. Ritter, I sincerely admire your self-control and dedication to the truth. Thank you, sir.
Excellent article Scott, as usual. I appreciate your work. I always wonder how can a well informed person like yourself be labelled a propagandist by what is clearly nothing but a textbook propagandist himself. An uniformed one at that. People also fail to see that the leader of the Ukrainian ssr at the time was Lazar Kaganovich, a Ukrainian. Some of the most important people in the soviet Union weren't Russian, brezhnev, kruschev, beria, stalin. Why are all the Soviet Union tragedies or even atrocities inherited by Russia but not Ukraine? They were both part of the soviet Union. I am sure no one in 1970 in the USA would call someone from Kiev, ukranian, I am sure he would be addressed as a Russian. Hell even he himself might call himself a Russian.
This article by Nikolay Starikov should be of interest as well as the comments that follow.
https://orientalreview.org/2012/12/17/episodes-10-who-organised-famine-in-the-ussr-in-1932-1933/
Starvation and famine, whatever the cause, is a terrible opportunity to waste with these people. Yet, they’d perpetuate it on their own Russian speaking eastern Ukrainian brothers in a heartbeat given the chance. I’m glad you were ready to stomp him if he caused you to.
EU, and especially the German parliament should very very carefully not to be relativising the term genocide... especially the Germans. No matter what are they trying to say, they are the last nation on the continent that should be throwing that term with ease... the definition of genocide is very clear, and tragedy of USSR’s famine can be called many names, but not a genocide.
All that stated with US whitewashing of their role in the Bosnian war, and using the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide so that their version of narrative would be cemented for ever, and no universally or academic could ever look i to it or question it, or any journalist writing about, without a danger of being labelled a genocide denier, something reserved, up to that point, only for some fringe holocaust deniers. Chomsky was one of these Srebrenica war crimes “deniers” because he pointed that if what happened in Srebrenica was a genocide, we need to find a different term for what happened with Jews in Nazi Germany, what happened to American natives, Armenians, Serbs in nazi Croatia and so on.
Perhaps that is the plan of EU parliament’s decision, even if its non legally binding, it is the start of that process or banning discussion on that topic, labelling Russians as genocidal, and therefore worth punishing, dehumanising and destroying.
Again, the German parliament followed with that formulation of the events, that is very very dangerous thing to do. No one has right to play with that term, to revoke a memory of monstrosities of genocide for their political gains.
Funny you claim that this was an economic mistake. That because Stalin, in direct conversation with Churchill, I believe in Iran, termed the holodomor "the war on the Peasants". He claimed it was a bigger threat at the time than the then current war agajnst the NAZIs.
The internal passport system of the Soviet Union was instituted at the time so folks from targeted areas, the Ukraine, could not escape.
Why you feel necessary to trash history in order to defend Putin against what a Georgian Dictator did in the 1930s is bunk.
Putin is in no way a Soviet Dictator. Nor is he Georgian as the Dictator was or Jewish as many if the Commissars who commited the atrocities were.
Putin as a matter of fact requires the reading of the Gulag Archepelago in school. He is not Stalin.
But there is a documented forced starvation in which more than 4 millions of Bengali Indian people were starved to death by no other than Winston Churchill. Still everyone in the west worship Churchill, no one in the west talked about his crime against humanity.
The Holodomor stems from the "War Communism" practiced by the Communists during the revolution. That is where the factories in the Cities run by the workers produced nothing to trade with the farmers for food. So the Cities starved. Under "War Communism" Red Army detachment stole every scrap of food the Peasants had and let them starve. It turned out to be a very effective counterinsurgency method as fighters could not live off starving people.
Ukraine was a problematic province the the Communists. The Anarchist Black Army had held swaybin the area during the Revolution. Trotsky once complained that everyone in the Ukraine had a rifle, except his Red Army Troops. The Counter-Revolution was strong in Ukraine.
The same starvation/collectivazation strategy is employed in most Communist Countries to consolidate power in rural areas.
In China the Great Leap Forward may have killed 30-45 million people in 1958 to 1961.
The laughable part of historical analysis is that all these kook Historians buy the goals stated by the Communists. Better farming. The reality is better control.
what i know of ukrainians:
in our small town on rapidly growing long island there wsas a ukraiian 'catholic' church and a few kids in school..... typical of polish kids in size.....
from the stalin famines one claim i heard was the 'anti collectivists' threatened to starve the industrial centers, the industrialization which was in process to compete with germany.,..
ukraine partisans killed general vatutin a front commander who excelled at kursk in donabs region in spring 1944.
last ukraine infantry was involved at omaha beach operating mk 34's on us assault troops.
i do not give a tinker's dam for ukraine and even less for the us' strategy to break up russia.
the anti russian propagandists have been working the area since the usa tried to ruin russia in 1990 with the harvard ecvonomists sent to set up a capitalist economy....
Great summary. The narrative the Ukrainians use is consistent with other young "nationalisms" that constantly use the victim narrative and invent genocides (sometimes dozens of them, common among Balkan muslims for some reason) to mask their own virulent chauvinism.
The farmers in Ukraine, who had their crop stolen, were almost exclusively ethnical Russian. living in the part of Ukraine that just a bit more than a decade earlier, was part of Russia. The people that suffered most from the Holodomor in Ukraine were livining in the Russian part of Ukraine. To claim that this was a genocide against Ukrainians is ridiculous. The number of ethical Ukrainian who died during the Holodomor is in the range of single digit percentage of the total death toll
Professor Grover Carr Furr did an archive dive after the Soviet Union fell, and one of the books he wrote on his archive research covers the subject, with many points in accord with Scott Ritter's comments. However Furr has a much lower number than Conquest in total deaths. One other thing Scott does not mention, so he may also not agree, is Furr reports at that time there was a 2nd civil war going on in Ukraine, where the Kulaks were not only hording grain with the intent to cause famine, but ala KKK, using night riders and other terror tactics to undermine the government's attempts to distribute relief.
Scott quotes Robert Conquest that there is no documentation that Stalin ordered the Holodomor.
There is no documentation showing that Hitler ordered the Holocaust. Yet, I'm pretty sure he did. He threatened to murder all the Jews in Europe during speeches aimed at those who were organizing a World War against him. There is lots of circumstantial evidence that Hitler knew and wanted it done.
Scott, you are being disingenuous. Stalin was inundated with letters about what was going on in the Ukraine. The letter writers would end up arrested. Stalin's minions continually were replaced as they wore out conducting his terror campaigns. The head of the NKVD would appear at Stalins nightly drunken parties with brain matter on his tunic from where he had been beating the skulls of high level prisoners.
Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. Just as Trotsky knew what he was doing during War Communism and the Famine then. Both men, and Lenin ordered extreme ruthless measures to be taken from the early days on.
The Collectivization Campaign was Soviet Union wide, but it was especially brutal in places like the Ukraine that had been a continous threat to Soviet Rule.
It was not a Racial Campaign, but it might as well have been. But it was not a Russian Campaign, it was a Soviet one.
Stephan Bandera was a brutal guy. You think someone who was not ruthless would have had any success fighting the Soviets? The less brutal types were dead.
The fact that the Holodomor was a political move is irrelevant. If you were some Ukrainian Peasant of the time watching your people, moms, dads, sons, daughters, cousins, either dying of starvation, being gunned down for resistance, or exiled to a Siberian Death Camp you would hate the Soviet power structure. I've read personal accounts from the Holodomor where the folks living through that time are convinced that it was a campaign to murder everyone in the Ukraine.
That power structure was overly Jewish and Russian. The Ukrainians who had died or lived through hell in 1932-34 were only 7 years later "rescued" by the NAZIs and it was entirely logical for them to join them and help murder the Jews they had seen supporting the Communists, and etc.
Yeah, it was not only Jews, or Russians, it was Ukrainian Commisars too. But from some poorly educated Ukrainian Peasant of the time seeing what he had witnessed, I understand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A great man whose works did as much as anyone to defeat the Soviet Union blames the Jews for what happened and he too was there. He studied the situation a lot closer than either of us. His book "200 Years Together" is effectively banned in the United States and its not even Antisemitic. It merely tells the truth about the complicated relationship between the Russian and Jewish people. For that it was banned. Or can you find a published copy in English in this country?
Stephan Bandera was fighting evil, fighting allied with evil, and became evil. But you tend to attack only him completely out of context with what was going on.
There is plenty of evil going on now in Ukraine with our Puppet Regime murdering its own people and our money going to the deaths of so many brave Ukrainians for nothing.
The biggest crimes against Humanity in world history is the purposeful famines of the Communists from Russia to China to Pol Pot and beyond. Stop with the ignorant denialism.
"fuck off" - I love it!! So wish I could tell that to all the blowhards that think Ukraine is the righteous party in the crazy back-to-front information war currently waging in all across western social media. Keep it up Scott, for all our sakes.
For some on the left, this serves an additional purpose: shifting blame to rehabilitate collectivization and central planning more generally.
By this logic, there was nothing *essentially* wrong with the system. Rather, the famine was caused by things that were not essential elements of the system: Stalin, animus towards Ukrainians per se, anything OTHER than communism per se.