Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

In October of that year at the United Nations, Ivan Khmil’ of the Ukrainian SSR’s UN delegation, referred to the Famine as an “alleged famine which was supposed to have occurred in the Ukrainian SSR fifty years ago” and dismissed it as a “slander” perpetrated by “Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalists” who had served Hitler in World War II then came to the United States, and “in order to justify their presence in that country, had circulated the lie about the famine.” Khmil’ also intimated that the United States still had a major problem with famine. 55

In November 1983, Komunist Ukrainy (Ukraine’s Communist) published an article by V. P. Bashtannyk, “Contrary to the Facts (Concerning the Fabrications of Bourgeois Propaganda about Agriculture in the USSR).” Without directly mentioning the Famine, the author complained that “bourgeois propaganda” was being used in “psychological warfare” by defaming the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR. This was being done through the use of “dishonest ways and means, manipulation and falsification of the facts, and by using the ‘memoirs’ of all sorts of renegades and traitors to the fatherland”56 He also virtually quoted Brezhnev, stating:

Certainly, the birth of the collective farm system did not pass without difficulties. With the transition to total collectivization the kulaks and other hostile elements took the path of bitter struggle against Soviet power. Not a few of the fighters for a socialist village perished at their hands. There were also blunders and mistakes. They manifested themselves, as is known, in the violation—in certain circumstances—of the principle of voluntarism and in the hasty implementation of collectivization. These were, however, mistakes of experimentation, and they were made, in the main, because of the lack of experience. The party boldly exposed them, openly told the people about them, and showed the Leninist determination to correct them. This is the historical truth. No one can conceal this. 57

This statement in the monthly journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine was less a statement of fact than a directive. Soviet Ukrainian scholars were apprised of the perils inherent in any other approach.

Then came the turn of the so-called “anti-anti-soviet falsification apparat,” in the Ukrainian case, the Institute for the Study of the History and Socio-Economic Problems of Foreign Countries of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Since works in this genre must respond to the Western “falsifiers,” they have to state the nature of the “anti-Soviet falsification” and formulate a response. Such a work published in 1984 provided the official Soviet Ukrainian response to Western scholarship on the Famine, Nationalism in the Guise of Sovietology (A Critique of Contemporary Bourgeois Historiography of Ukraine), by N. N. Varvartsev, who wrote:

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55 United Nations General Assembly, Thirty-Eighth Session, A/C3/38/SR.17, for October 19,1983.

56 V. S. Bashtannyk, “Vsuperech istyni (Z pryvodu vypadok burzhuaznoi propahandy pro sil’s’ke hospodarstvo SRSR)” (Contrary to Pacts: Concerning Incidents of Bourgeois Propaganda about the USSR’s Agriculture), Komunist Ukrainy (The Communist of Ukraine), 1983, No. 10, p. 85. Summarized and analyzed by Roman Solchanyk, “Ukrainian Party Journal Defends ‘Socialist Transformation of Agriculture’,” RFE/RL Research Report, RL 393/83, October 24,1983.

57 Ibid, p. 87.