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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

Efforts to document the Holodomor

The Ukrainian diaspora played a key role in publicizing and documenting the Holodomor. Pre-World War II immigrants certainly knew of the famine. But they were overwhelmingly from western Ukraine (which was not part of the Soviet Union in the 1930s) and so would have had no personal or family connection to the Holodomor. Despite that, they did what they could to raise awareness of the tragedy to a wider public.

Things changed significantly after World War II, with the mass exodus of refugees from central and eastern Ukraine. They could talk and write about the genocide from personal experience, and they did so even while still in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. These testimonies started with the 1946 essay by Ivan Bahranyi entitled “Why Do I Choose Not to Return to the USSR?” and in memoirs written by refugees for a competition organized by Dmytro Doroshenko at the “Oseredok” Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg (Canada).

When the Harvard Refugee Interview Project launched in 1949, its goal was to gather intelligence about life in the Soviet Union and the inner workings of its institutions. Despite the tightly scripted nature of the interviews, refugees from Ukraine would continually go “off-topic”. They were determined to tell their stories about collectivization, dekulakization, and the “Great Famine”.

The Ukrainian Congress Committee, an umbrella organization for Ukrainian American community associations across the country, began to advocate in 1948 for treating the Holodmor as genocide. They worked closely with Rafael Lemkin, the coiner of the word “genocide” and the author of the United Nations Genocide Convention.

Witnesses of the Holodomor also testified at the House Select Committee on Communist Aggression. It had been created in 1953 to investigate the Soviet annexation of the Baltics, but soon expanded to cover the Soviet actions in general. Dozens of witnesses spoke about Ukraine, and the Holodomor and its associated repressions featured prominently in their testimonies. Ukrainians in North America would also continue to write and publish memoirs and other testimonies on their own initiative in the decades that followed.

Pressure by the Ukrainian diaspora would prompt the US Congress to pass a resolution in 1983 describing the 1932-1933 famine as a man-made genocidal act against the Ukrainian people. Two years later, a Congressional Commission would be convened to investigate the famine. Directed by James Mace, the Commission collected hundreds of testimonies from survivors that would appear in print in 1990.

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, for which Ukrainian Americans had provided the initiative and funding through the Ukrainian Studies Fund, was established in 1973. In the 1980s it provided a platform for academic research on the Holodomor. This led to Robert Conquest’s groundbreaking book “The Harvest of Sorrow”, which appeared in 1986 and caused many non-Ukrainians to revise their opinions about the nature of the famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. Not surprisingly, it prompted a severe backlash from the Soviets and their allies in the West, including polemical responses like the 1987 book “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard”.

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Journalism, activism, and disinformation As famine was ravaging Soviet Ukraine, much of the world was left in the dark. Soviet disinformation campaigns worked hard to deny the famine, hide evidence of starvation, and would go to great lengths to prevent outsiders from entering the Ukrainian countryside to see what was happening.

This even extended to turning major cities into Potemkin villages in order to impress foreign dignitaries and to convince them that all was well in Soviet Ukraine. An example of this can be heard in reminiscences by Fr. Ihor Hubarzhevskyi on how Kyiv was miraculously transformed ahead of the visit by Édouard Herriot.

The Soviet campaign received major assistance from the Moscow-based New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who published blatant lies about the situation in Ukraine in one of the United States’ most prominent newspapers. His articles spread disinformation about the famine across America, and resulted in rather limited news coverage of the famine.

The situation changed in March 1933, when the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones returned from a reporting trip to Ukraine and held a press conference in Berlin where he spoke about the famine. His strong knowledge of Russian allowed him to communicate with villagers, and as a result he gained unparalleled insight.

Jones went on to write articles about the famine in Ukraine for The Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post. His reporting was responsible for breaking news of the famine to much of the world. But by that time the famine was already reaching its deadly heights.

Other journalists reported on the famine in addition to Gareth Jones. Malcom Muggeridge, who was also affiliated with The Manchester Guardian, traveled to Ukraine in 1933 and sent reports about the famine back to London. Together, the accounts by Jones and Muggeridge helped to provide a much more accurate assessment of realities in Ukraine. Others, such as Harry Lang of the Jewish Daily Forward, also traveled to Ukraine where they spoke with Ukrainians and witnessed the horrors of the famine first-hand. Rhea Clyman, a Polish born Canadian journalist, wrote several articles about the famine in Canadian newspapers as well.

In late spring 1933, news of the famine could be found in papers across the world. This included outlets in Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, among others. The news, however, came too late. By that time, millions of Ukrainians had already died of malnutrition, starvation, and famine-related diseases.

Ukrainian-language publications in Poland and the U.S. continued to write about the famine during the summer and fall of 1933. Their advocacy efforts helped to establish a day of national protest and mourning in late October 1933 where funds were raised for those Ukrainians who were still going hungry.
Famine coverage in Svoboda
The Ukrainian American newspaper Svoboda provides an interesting case study of how the sparse news about the Holodomor was covered in the Ukrainian diaspora. Svoboda began publication in 1893 in Pennsylvania, but by 1932 was being published out of Jersey City, NJ. It moved its editorial offices to Parsippany, NJ in 1997, where it has continued publishing uninterrupted to the present day.

Svoboda's coverage had already begun in February 1932, when it published an article based on official, "open source" Soviet pronouncements. The headline was extraordinarily prescient:
Moscow Wants to Kill Ukrainian Villagers By Starvation
MOSCOW (USSR) — The newspaper Pravda published a large "Order to the Bolsheviks of Ukraine to Deliver Grain to the State in February." This shows that the Bolsheviks are putting new pressure on Ukrainian villagers to get the rest of the grain that they have left and have not given to the state. The newspaper states that the delivery of grain by the peasants of Ukraine to the state grain storage facilities is far behind schedule. The norm set by the Bolshevik authorities for Ukrainian villagers was too high even for such a grain-growing land as Ukraine.
Interestingly, the literal words in the headline that translate as "to [completely] kill by starvation" ("holodom vymoryty") have the same linguistic roots from which the term "Holodomor" would later be derived.

Another article from early March 1932 is based on reports in the Romanian press and tells of Soviet authorities using machine guns to kill Soviet Ukrainians attempting to flee across the Dnister River (which then formed the boundary between the USSR and Romania). Since the region of Bukovyna currently straddles Ukraine and Romania and was entirely within Romania in 1932, there would have been many ethnic Ukrainians with sufficient knowledge of Romanian to be able to translate Bucharest newspapers.
The Bolsheviks Are Continually Massacring Ukrainian Villagers
Hundreds Have Been Shot By Machine Guns at the Dnister. Corpses Lie On the River Ice.
BUCHAREST (Romania) — Reports of mass shootings by the Bolsheviks of villagers fleeing from Ukraine on the Dnister River were so horrifying that few believed them. Now an official investigation confirms that in fact, many more people were massacred than than was initially reported. On the Bessarabia-Soviet border, a commission works to ensure that the bodies of those shot are collected and buried.
While the article does not explicitly connect it to the famine, in historical hindsight it is very likely that the people fleeing into Romania were seeking refuge from the increasingly desperate conditions in the Ukrainian countryside. We have no way of knowing for certain, but it is entirely possible that readers of this article in 1932 would have made the same connection.

About two weeks later, Svoboda did something very unusual: it published a front-page article in English. Clearly aimed at a non-Ukrainian audience, it provided translations of excerpts from articles in the official Soviet press along with comments and context.

This front page also gives us an idea of the other significant news events happening in 1932 and 1933 that were competing with news from Soviet Ukraine, including the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, infringements on the rights of Ukrainians in Poland, the Great Depression, strikes and other organized labor activities, and later the New Deal, the rise of Hitler in Germany, and the lifting of Prohibition.
The Holodomor and Ukrainian diaspora activism
As can be seen in the pages of Svoboda above, the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States did what it could to make the famine in Ukraine more widely known to the general public, even though — ironically — the vast majority of the ethnic Ukrainians in the US at that time were from western Ukraine, where there was no famine.

By the fall of 1933, Ukrainian Americans had linked the famine with opposition to the Roosevelt administration's efforts to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The United States had not previously recognized the Soviet government due to its refusal to honor prior debts to the United States, its seizure of American property, and its disregard of pre-existing treaty agreements. Roosevelt's willingness to overturn this precedent just as Soviet Ukraine was suffering from a massive artificial famine struck Ukrainian Americans as being extraordinarily ill-timed and ill-considered. This led them to modify their advocacy to include efforts to lobby the American government against diplomatic recognition of the USSR.

On November 13, 1933 (three days before the official diplomatic recognition of the USSR by the United States), readers of Svoboda would have seen this announcement on page 3:

TO THE FIGHT FOR EXISTENCE!
If the Moscow Bolsheviks starve out the Ukrainian nation in Europe, then we will not survive here. There will be no Ukraine and no Ukrainian people. This should be understood by every American Ukrainian and every American of Ukrainian descent when called to join the PROTEST MARCH TO NEW YORK on Saturday, November 18, 1933 at 10 o'clock AM.

The march will start from Washington Square at the foot of the 5th Ave, that is, near West 4th Street, and will end in a great mass RALLY at the Central Opera House, 205 East 67th St., New York N.Y.

Ukrainian men and women! Drop your work for one day and go help your kindred who are in the claws of the bloodthirsty Bolshevik vampire! Don’t cry and complain, but give a proper response to the local Bolshevik thugs who want to intimidate you, a free American citizen, with fire from communist hell. Remember that the day of judgment is coming for the Bolshevik criminals.

— The Committee for the Protest March in New York

It is interesting that the anti-Bolshevik nature of the protest was not based primarily on politics or ideology, but rather on what they felt was an existential threat to Ukrainians as a people (what we today would call "genocide", though that term had not been invented yet). Furthermore, it is clear that these Ukrainians in the United States considered themselves to be an essential part of that "people" and that this genocidal threat extended indirectly to themselves. This supports the argument made by historians such as Olga Andriewsky that Holodomor advocacy in 1933 was instrumental in transforming Ukrainian immigrant communities into a true diaspora.

Ukrainian Americans in the New York City area heeded the call. According to news reports, an estimated 6,000 Ukrainians turned out, as did a much smaller number of Communist-oriented counter-protesters. This led to violent clashes that were eagerly covered by the American mass media in articles that betrayed a basic lack of understanding of Ukraine, Ukrainians, and their history. Similar protests occurred in other US cities with significant Ukrainian populations in mid-November 1933, often accompanied by similar violent scuffles.