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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.

Fr. Ihor Hubarzhevskyi reminiscences about the Holodomor in Kyiv, 1963.

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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.
Impact of the Holodomor in the cities
Cities were less heavily hit by the Holodomor compared to rural areas. However, there was still hunger and hunger-related deaths in the period between 1932-1933. The state instituted a system of rationing that guaranteed access to at least some food for urban residents and factory workers. However, those rations could be very limited and not everyone was eligible to obtain a ration card.

For those who had the means, limited quantities of bread and other products could be purchased at so-called "commercial" food stores, and those with gold, jewelry, or foreign hard currency could by food at a Torgsin. But for people without such resources and who worked at low-level or menial jobs, hunger was an ever-present threat.

Although they themselves were somewhat better off than their rural compatriots, urban dwellers were not shielded from the horrors that were happening in the countryside. Despite the best efforts of authorities, starving villagers would make their way to cities looking for food, and dead or dying men and women in the streets became a part of the urban landscape, particularly in 1933.

"I think I wrote to you that I work at a hospital in a children's clinic and receive a salary of 40 rubles a month. For that money you can buy two and a half kilos of cornbread. I also get [a ration of] 400 grams of bread, but it's not bread but more like mamaliga [thick corn porridge]."

— Letter to Oleksii Balabas from his sister living in Krasondar (Kuban region), June 1933. Oleksii Balabas papers, UHEC Archives.
Fr. Ihor Hubarzhevskyi on the Holodomor in Kyiv This recording from the Mykola Francuzenko papers at the UHEC is the audio of a broadcast by Radio Liberty produced in 1963 in New York City by Mykola Francuzenko, who is also the host. In it, Hubarzhevskyi (who happened to be Francuzenko's father-in-law) recounts his experiences in Kyiv in the early 1930s when he was a linguistics researcher at the Academy of Sciences.

Although the broadcast does not mention it, Hubarzhevskyi later became a priest in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of 1942, and during the post-war period would for a time be the UAOC's administrator in Great Britain.

Click on the video below to hear the complete recording with Ukrainian and English captions, or hover over the video player and click on "Annotations" to hear a particular section of the recording: