Debunking the “Holodomor” Myth

The “Holodomor”, or the “intentional mass murder through starvation” perpetrated by the Soviets under Stalin in which 60 million Ukrainians supposedly perished, is one of the foundational lies in the fortress of anti-communism. This myth and distortions of the “Great Chinese Famine” of 1962 makes up the bulk of the numbers in the popular liberal chant: “communism killed 100 million people”.

Here is a brief closer look at the famine of 1932 in that region, what is left out of the frame of Western “conventional knowledge”:

1. Famines in Russia and Eastern Europe were naturally occurring periodically, once every few decades, long before the USSR. They were put to a stop by the communist state, and never happened again after 1932.

2. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the entire world was heavily affected by the global financial crash, what is known in the USA as the Great Depression. There were famines in many places, including the USA, but being 100–200 years more industrially and agriculturally developed than Russia at the time, the effects of famine were not as severe.

3. Three weeks after the October revolution in 1918, 14 countries, lead by the US and UK, invaded Russia, and attempted to destroy the revolutionary government (a major military invasion that wikipedia dishonestly refers to as the “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War”). The capitalist forces, called “The White Armies”, not only fought against the Bolsheviks and the Red Armies, but committed mass atrocities in the Russian country sides, slaughtering untold tens of thousands or more civilians, and perhaps most importantly, massively funded the anti-communist forces of reaction: the bourgeoisie, the Tsarists, the fascists, etc. All of this had a myriad of lasting draining, impeding, and poisonous effects upon Soviet state and industry (and the main cause of the great “Stalinist Purges” — there were nazi elements in government, emboldened through financial help from the imperialist powers).

4. In the years preceding the famine, Kulaks, bourgeoisie who owned land and employed generational serfs in slave-like conditions, had slaughtered their livestock, killed many millions of cows, horses, and pigs, burnt crops, poisoned wells, and destroyed other conditions for agriculture, in protest of Bolshevik collectivisation of land and freeing of the serfs.

5. At the time that the famine occured, the USSR was still devastated by WW1, and the Bolsheviks knew that another major European war was coming. Industrialisation from an agrarian economy was a matter of life or death for the entire nation, as manufacturing is central to any war effort. The USSR needed technology and machines from other countries, from capitalist states which funded their early industrialisation and technological advancement with capital amassed from colonialism and slavery. But instead of helping Russia, crippling sanctions and embargoes were placed on the USSR by the US and allies. Specifically, gold sanctions which prohibited USSR to trade with gold, leaving agricultural goods as the only option for currency.

6. In that fateful year Stalin made a bet against nature, that the harvest would be good, and used grains and other agricultural goods to trade for desperately needed machines and technology, but lost. As soon as news of the famine reached Moscow, the Soviets sent aid.

7. The myth of the “Holodomor” is a thousand layered onion, first devised by Ukrainian nationalists/fascists, and pushed in the USA by the fascist devotee media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. His “journalist on the ground” was proven to have never set foot in Ukraine, and used photos of previous famines and from other places to support his wild claims. His story, of course embraced by European fascists, was already completely discredited in the USA in the late 1930s, but was later revived again, and pushed by all bourgeois institutions to saturate Western consciousness. Today it remains one of the central pillars in the fortress of anti-communism, championed by anti-communists everywhere.

8. The numbers were extremely exaggerated, first by Ukrainian nationalists, then by the nazis, and later enshrined by bourgeois academies. According to new scholarship, it was not 80 million, not even 30 million, not 15 million, but between 3 and 6 million, similar to previous episodes of famines in that part of the world.

9. The famine affected a great part of Russia and a great part of Eastern Europe, yet anti-communist mythology only focuses on the Ukrainian experience — a narrative of nothing but Ukrainian nationalism and nazism.

10. The Bolsheviks worked tirelessly to improve living conditions for all people. After the war, Stalin’s administration vastly improved agriculture and in merely 2 decades, doubled the life expectancy from 35 years to 70 years in all of Soviet territory, including, of course, Ukraine.

Soviet collective farming exponentially increased production after recovering from WW2

In comparison:

1. Churchill’s colonial policies in India, for example forcing farmers to grow cash crops for profit instead of food, directly caused the Indian famines which killed dozens of millions. His decision to export food out of disaster areas during the famine, while exclaiming “they will just breed more”, was intended to enrich England while the horrors were unfolding, is much, much closer to a genocide than the Ukrainian famine.

Historian Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts demonstrates that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments.

2. The Great Depression of 1930s USA, which occurred at the same time, in which millions suffered horribly, and an untold number died, is never blamed on capitalism, or the US government.

Soviet family enjoying dinner

1932 was the last famine to ever occur in the USSR, and Soviet citizens enjoyed a more nutritious diet than USAmerican citizens between the 1950s and 1980s, according to declassified CIA Cold War documents.

It always takes longer to debunk a lie than to tell it. And the “holodomor”, viciously named to sound like Holocaust, is nothing but another case of counter-factual exaggeration, extreme distortion, de-contextualisation, cherry-picking, false framing, and total fabrication in a very long list of such capitalist/fascist anti-communist lies.