Famine was widespread under Stalin: why do we only know about Ukraine’s.
JVL Introduction
Gareth Jones has been recognised for his important role in making known the terrible Soviet famines in the early 1930s, particularly the one in Ukraine now known as the ‘Holodomor’. However, his great nephew, Phil Colley, argues that his findings have been distorted in the interests of Ukrainian nationalism. Here he provides more information along with his concerns at the Senedd’s recent emotional but ahistoric recognition of the ’Holodomor’ as genocide.
He argues that one aim in focusing so strongly on genocide and victimhood has been to deflect attention from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, led by the antisemitic fascist Stepan Bandera, and its role in the murder of Jews and Poles. Colley points out that calling the famine a genocide is not agreed by many respected historians. He further says that the revisionists consciously used the Holocaust as its model, even down to the ‘brand’ name, which is not an etymological coincidence, but a construction adopted for effect in recent times.
The original article has been updated and expanded by the author for JVL
LL
This article was originally published by https://www.voice.wales/ on Mon 20 Nov 2023. Read the original here.
Ukrainian Nationalists Distorted The Truth Of My Great Uncle Gareth Jones – Now The Senedd Is Too
As the Welsh Parliament prepare(d) to mark Ukrainian Holodomor Memorial Day, Philip Colley, the great nephew of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who brought the man-made famine to the world’s attention, argues that truth is being sacrificed on the altar of nationalist interests.
Loading article text…
This article on Gareth Jones is most interesting and convincing. I saw the film Mr Jones some years back, but this article puts a whole new perspective on the man and his story. Thank you for it.
This is a fair question.
And here is another one: Why do we only hear about sexual violence against women, usually German women, by Soviet troops during World War II?
A problem such as this needs to be looked at properly and we need to go where the evidence takes us.
The Holodomor narrative takes a fact — that several million Ukrainian citizens of the Soviet Union died in a famine that was caused by the Soviet regime — and ties it into a right-wing Ukrainian nationalist discourse that is quite false and misleading. It views the famine as a deliberate move by the Moscow — that is, Russian — bureaucracy to destroy the Ukrainian nation.
The famine that hit Ukraine in the early 1930s also affected other regions the Soviet Union, including southern Russia, the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. The population losses in Kazakhstan were as proportionally as large as those in Ukraine, perhaps even higher. The Soviet regime did not intend its forcible collectivisation policy to lead to a famine, but the slapdash elaboration of the scheme and its forcible and inept implementation provoked resistance on the part of the peasantry and led to chaos in the agrarian sector and a massive fall in livestock numbers and output in grain and other crops, thereby creating a widespread famine. The Moscow centre continued to collect and export grain, thus exacerbating the famine.
The collectivisation drive and accompanying crash industrialisation scheme under the First Five-Year Plan necessarily greatly increased the centralisation of the Soviet economy and an ideological reflection of this was cultural Russification. This reversed the encouragement the 1920s’ policy of non-Russian cultures, and involved the purging of the non-Russian sections of the Soviet Communist Party. This certainly badly affected the Ukrainian wing of the party, but other non-Russian wings suffered as well.
Ukraine and the Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party suffered numerically badly as they were proportionally the largest non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. I doubt that they suffered qualitatively worse than the other non-Russian parts.
The Holodomor narrative distorts history as it presents an inaccurate explanation for the famine and cultural damage in Ukraine in the early 1930s, and ignores the famine and cultural damage inflicted in other areas of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist regime.
Ukraine & Russia starved their own people through arrogance, ignorance, paranoia & hatred & antisemitism!
Photographs of people selling human body parts through sheer starvation exsist & having seen them those images remain.
As well as the horrific stories told by my late Ukranian step father & my Babcia who lost so many families through those atrocities.
Stalin had the power to silence & had the salt mines to work humans to death!
Several European countries lost their own humanity through propaganda & hatred, Jewish people & Romanies all suffered in fact anyone who was an individual & seen as weird!
Yet the weirdest were the ones who regarded themselves as superior & readily told lies to “remove” a neighbour!
It was a world wide witch hunt which annihilated millions of human beings.