Ukraine’s Genocide by Famine

‘We went to a field. We had nothing to eat. Everything was taken from us. So my mother decided we would go to the field, find some half-frozen potatoes, some kind of vegetables, to make a soup. At that time the Soviet Union was teaching people to report on each other, to spy on each other. Somebody saw that we came with some vegetables, half-frozen, and they arrested my mother. That was the last time I saw her.”

So Eugenia Dallas, originally Eugenia Sakevych, began her story to me. Born in Ukraine around 1925 (she does not know her exact age), Eugenia lived through the Holodomor — genocide by famine — as a young girl.

Shortly before her mother was taken, her father was sent to Siberia, deemed a criminal because he owned a few acres of land.

In 1932–33, Ukraine was brought to its knees. After years of mass arrests and deportations had failed to bring the Ukrainians into line, Stalin decided to crush this proud nation with a new weapon: food. Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe, was stripped of its grain.

With its borders sealed and its citizens imprisoned, an estimated 4 to 14 million people starved to death as food rotted in silos or was sold abroad. Stalin wanted purity, and Ukraine’s nationalism threatened his perverse utopia.

“I would go to the store where the bread was; there were lines of no end, and people standing overnight waiting for a loaf of bread,” Eugenia told me of her time living in Kiev during the genocide. “One man came out of the store with a loaf of bread. As he was biting his bread, he dropped dead. He died immediately because bread on an empty stomach is like cement. And many, many people died. Nobody paid attention.”

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor. In remembrance of this crime, the Center for U.S.-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR) hosted an academic conference, “Taking Measure of the Holodomor,” to try to answer the most basic questions about the genocide. Why? Where? How? Who carried it out? Who suffered? How many suffered?

A surprisingly small amount is known for certain about an event with a death toll that rivals that of the Holocaust. I spoke with Walter Zaryckyj, the coordinator of the conference and executive director of CUSUR, and asked him why answers to such basic questions remain indefinite. In short, he said, the records are spotty and, for a long time, the world press was not interested in bringing the truth to light.

“The Bolsheviks were never as efficient as the Nazis, and therefore evidence of the scope and ultimate meaning of the atrocity committed upon the Ukrainian nation, in contrast to the terror unleashed upon the Jews in Europe, has been harder to cull and identify,” Professor Zaryckyj told me. “As a consequence, it has been difficult to provide simple and succinct responses concerning the Holodomor that would allow for the kind of full-throated condemnation that the Holocaust justly receives.” Fortunately, archives — notably, formerly classified KGB archives — are finally making their way to the West.

However, the historiography of the Holodomor must overcome not only the relative deficiency of records but also a past of denial and deception. The USSR began its propaganda campaign to convince the world there was no famine before the genocide even ended. As the Ukrainian people starved, the country’s grain was gathered and sold to the West, fueling the Soviet industrial machine.

The word “famine” itself was banned from use in Ukraine Though reports of mass starvation leaked out, the West could not believe a food shortage would exist amidst such abundance. In those pre-Holocaust days, Westerners could not believe a regime would strategically murder its people.

Journalists, such as the now-infamous Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty of the New York Times, told the world, “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” And, as one speaker at the conference put it, the West, “either deceiving or wanting to be deceived,” looked away.

Later attempts to bring the Holodomor to public attention were denounced by the Soviets as lies and, at times, even denied coverage by Western media outlets. As Peter Paluch reported in NATIONAL REVIEW (“Spiking the Ukrainian Famine, Again,” April 11, 1986), Time and PBS, among others, refused to cover a critically acclaimed documentary on the genocide, Harvest of Despair.

Though some European papers reported on the Holodomor, “the American media were damningly silent,” Paluch wrote, “both about the genocide and about Soviet manipulation of the foreign press.” (Because of the lack of coverage, William F. Buckley Jr. hosted a special session of Firing Line on which he showed the documentary in full.)

Though the most basic questions haven’t been definitively answered, the legacy of the Holodomor lives on “We always heard about the genocide; now we understand that with the genocide we had an additional component called ‘ethnic cleansing,’” Zaryckyj told me in reference to the Soviet efforts to Russify Ukraine through reeducation, deportation, and immigration. “The long-term cultural and political consequences are to break the back of the Ukrainian nation in eastern Ukraine.”

Caught between East and West, Ukraine today is faced with the same choice as the other nations that were in the Soviet bloc. Will it be pulled back into Russia’s orbit or join the world of the democratic West? “Right after the famine, we discovered that the population of non-Ukrainians in Ukraine went from 7 or 9 percent to 21 or 22 percent,” Zaryckyj said. These non-Ukrainians, along with the Russified Ukrainians, “continue to vote, or did until recently, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Putin’s Russia has made little effort to hide its imperialistic ambitions, expanding its influence in Georgia, Syria, and beyond. Ukraine’s choice — whether to turn back to Russia or integrate into the West — will undoubtedly influence power dynamics throughout Eastern Europe and potentially greater Eurasia.

“We’re running against a time limit,” Zaryckyj told me. “This is the 80th anniversary, so even the youngest — the eight-year-olds and seven-year-olds who saw it and lived — are now 87 or 88. So there is a definite urgency to get the story out as quickly as possible.”

The event ended with a reception remembering those who died in the Holodomor and honoring those who survived.

Students from the Ukrainian Student Association of America read the testimonies of several survivors, five of whom were in attendance and were publicly recognized, as well as the names of all those who perished in a very small, unnamed village. As the room sat in silence, the reading continued for over ten minutes.

Speaking with Eugenia, I asked her what it’s like to look back on the Holodomor as one of the last survivors and whether she can ever forgive the Russians for their crimes. At the mention of the Russians, Eugenia spoke more quickly, her brow suddenly furrowed. “They destroyed my life, they destroyed my family, they destroyed my country. My family was a good example of what they did with Ukraine. They’re bandits, I call them. And not one brought to justice. Look at the Germans; all were brought to justice. But for Ukraine, nobody.”

She expressed great pride in Ukraine and told me that she thinks she lived in order to bring its message to the world. She is a public speaker on the Holodomor, has written an autobiography titled One Woman, Five Lives, Five Countries with a complementary documentary, and hopes to produce a film soon.

After her mother’s arrest, Eugenia was initially sent from Ukraine to a Nazi work camp and eventually fled to Italy; she has now settled in Los Angeles. “I am very happy that I came to the United States,” she told me. “Freedom for me is a joy. It’s a blessing. We have problems here, but they’re minor. People still live well. They’re free mentally. In Ukraine, they lived in open prisons under the Soviets.”

As other guests shuffled around us, anxious to speak with Eugenia themselves and hear her story in person, she pulled out a copy of her book and read to me one of her poems, called “My Childhood.”

Why was my life spared? . . . Ukraine by evil force was occupied. Million souls were crucified, The rest conveniently Russified. My parents were arrested, Their identity stripped. Why was their destiny so cruel? Today I ask for what reason were they punished?

— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Walter Duranty won his prize in 1932, early in Pulitzer history. While his celebrity faded long ago and his name is largely unknown to younger generations, Duranty occupies what his biographer, S. J. Taylor, considers to be a uniquely infamous place in history.

By 1932, the Briton had served 10 of his 14 years as the Times Moscow correspondent, achieving international renown as the foremost journalist of his day. Duranty’s eminence was such that Franklin D. Roosevelt, a candidate for president, deemed it politically prudent to summon him publicly to confer with him on the state of Soviet affairs.

Duranty’s autobiography, published in 1935 and ironically titled “I Write As I Please,” would become a best-seller. And when the United States formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the first public toast went to President Roosevelt; the second went to Walter Duranty.

But when presented with the biggest story of his career - the Ukraine famine of 1932-33, one of greatest man-made disasters in history in which millions perished during the forced collectivization of agriculture - Duranty chose not only to miss the story but to cover it up.

And, Taylor believes, by virtue of the reporter’s clout and his paper’s prestige, that meant the tragic loss of an opportunity “to change the course of history for the better.”

“There was the chance to save, millions of lives,” she says. “And he did not do it.”

Her recently published biography of Duranty, “Stalin’s Apologist” (Oxford University Press), sets out to explain why. Duranty’s journalistic sins of omission and distortion, as cataloged by Taylor, are staggering. Never a Marxist, Walter Duranty believed only in Walter Duranty.

After Stalin indirectly boosted Duranty’s star by succeeding Lenin in 1924, as the reporter had predicted, the murderous dictator could do no wrong in Duranty’s eyes.

This fact soon earned The New York Times the nickname “The Uptown Daily Worker.” Conversely, Duranty could do no wrong in his host country - or else risk the hobnailed boot.

And leaving his post would mean leaving the life of sybaritic luxury - women, caviar and opium - that he enjoyed in Moscow and risking the fame he had chased after with such success.

And so, the show trials of 1928, 1934 and 1936 according to Duranty? Nothing more than justice served. Stalin’s purges? Duranty had an answer for every atrocity: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” All this, compounded above all by his refusal to report the slaughter of millions in the Ukraine, made British writer Malcolm Muggeridge tell Taylor that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”

Muggeridge should know. He was there. Then a young, zealous socialist who went to the Soviet Union with the intention of settling there, he saw the Ukraine famine, wrote about it and sent his dispatches to the Manchester Guardian, a socialist newspaper in Great Britain.

Buried in the back pages of the paper, Muggeridge’s searing story of monumental tragedy was dismissed all around. No one wanted to hear bad news about the brave new world. “His reward was he couldn’t get work,” says Taylor.

“Mostly bunk” was the phrase Duranty chose to describe the famine. Even after he finally ventured into the devastated regions, his dispatches remained optimistic in tone.

His private report to the British Embassy was another story, grimmer and far more realistic, estimating that “as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food.”

As Taylor notes in the book, “This estimate was the highest ventured of the famine of 1932-33.” Why the British Embassy, among others with more than an inkling of what was going on, did nothing is yet another travesty.

Duranty was not alone in his behavior, although his special position made him unique. James E. Mace, staff director of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, puts it this way: “Duranty was probably the most effective public relations agent that Stalin had in terms of making his denial of the famine stick in the West.”

With this background in mind, the irony in the citation that appears in the Times Pulitzer pantheon is all the more mordant: Duranty is commended for “dispassionate interpretive reporting of the news from Russia.”

Duranty, who died in 1957, “actually won that Pulitzer for economic reporting, and his economic reporting was very good indeed. Right after he won it, the famine occurred,” explains Taylor, a native Oklahoman, in a telephone interview from London, where she has lived for the past 10 years. “If he had told the truth, he quite possibly would have faced the same problems as Malcolm Muggeridge. But if he had, he would have been one of the greatest figures in the 20th century. But he didn’t.”

There is a trace of wistfulness in Taylor’s voice, a note of sadness that out of her decade of research on Duranty emerged so amoral and reprehensible a figure - in spite of his legendary charm.

“I have to tell you I read his autobiography and was completely taken in,” she says. “Each time I saw evidence to the contrary [disproving his word], I looked for excuses. It came as a shock when I found the opposite to be true. I felt I was personally betrayed. It caused me personal pain.”

After Taylor journeyed to the Ukraine herself, “the pain cut deeper than before. I didn’t see how anyone could see these human beings and continue to operate out of self-interest. I don’t think he ever regretted anything in his life except having fallen from the pinnacle of his success.”

With the Soviet Union struggling to reveal and revise the distortions and lies from which its history is fashioned, Duranty’s largely forgotten case becomes increasingly pertinent. Is there anything The New York Times should do about him? Drop his name from the honor roll (a Stalinist technique in itself)? Add an asterisk? Return the Pulitzer?

Abe Rosenthal does not care to give much thought to the subject. A Times man since 1944, Rosenthal served as executive editor from 1977 until 1986, snagging his own Pulitzer for “perceptive and authoritative reporting” from Poland in 1960. Sure, he knows who Walter Duranty is, and yes, he is familiar with “Stalin’s Apologist” through a book review or two, but no, he does not want to discuss the matter - not, he adds, because he finds the matter too controversial but because “I don’t know much about it.”

“Thank God, [it was] before my time,” says Rosenthal. “I have really given no thought to Walter Duranty. I assume he was a lousy correspondent.” (Does this remind us of Pontius Pilot washing his hands prior to the Jews killing Jesus Christ?)

That’s more than Executive Editor Max Frankel will say. Although the 38-year veteran of the Times is reading the book, Frankel, 60, declines to comment on the subject except to say, through his secretary, “He didn’t know him and doesn’t know his writing, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

Some Times men are better acquainted with the subject. Karl E. Meyer , 62, a member of the paper’s editorial board (which, in Duranty’s day, was in disagreement with its Moscow correspondent), wrote a June editorial about the correspondent and his work - “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper” - which ran on the same Sunday the newspaper (favorably) reviewed the biography.

“I think it’s fabulous they’ve done the review,” says Taylor. “I think it’s wonderful they’re bringing attention to it. It’s important that everyone know what happened in that decade. I’m really happy at long last it’s happening.”

What is no longer happening, according to writer Peter Braestrup, is the creation of Duranty-style reporters. “When I was starting out in the ‘50s, everybody knew Duranty had been a shill for the Soviets. That was no big deal,” says Braestrup, a former journalist whose two-volume study, “Big Story,” chronicled the rampant misreporting of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive. “I don’t think anybody at The New York Times would leave anybody like Duranty in place now. The mystery to me is how they left him there so long at the time.”

Today, Braestrup points out, foreign correspondents rotate with a frequency that prevents one from digging in for 14 corrupting years. In addition, he says, the “semimonopoly” The New York Times used to have on the news is long broken. “The importance of any single news organization or correspondent is vastly diminished,” he says.

Still, Taylor sees in Duranty a cautionary tale that remains relevant.

“We attribute to our newspeople almost godlike status, and they’re only human beings.

Today we seem to have transferred our adulation to the broadcast media, and there’s simply no basis for this. When we consider these people’s interpretations of reality, we should always look a little at who they are and what their motivations may be.”

Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times

Grahams of the Washington Post

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