Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

Administration in the USA has been especially vigorous in its attempts to discredit the agricultural situation in Ukraine.
A new step in the escalation of the “psychological war” and the intensification of its interference in the internal affairs of the USSR is the provocative and hysterical campaign in Washington in connection with the food supply difficulties which took place in the 1930s in Ukraine. The goal of this diversion, based on lying fabrications, argumentation based on manipulation of the facts (pidtasovana argumentatsiia), and insinuations refuted by life, is to slander and undermine the Soviet political and social system, to shatter the ideological-political and international unity of Soviet society. Bourgeois “scholars” repeatedly turn to this or that event in the history of our country in order to give them a distorted interpretation, and these insinuations could be ignored. But the campaign of which we are speaking here has its own character. This is not an ordinary ideological or propagandistic foray. This is an act of illegal “psychological war” with openly advertised aims. It is not at all accidental that the American head of state publicly identifies his attitude to the Soviet Union as if we were like the war criminals and traitors who actively helped the Nazis carry out in the lands they occupied then-bloody “new order.”

Babii added that America also had its hunger marchers in 1931-32 and, following Khmil, cited Harvard Professor Larry Brown to show that there is still hunger in the United States today. 60

A most significant Soviet Ukrainian response to Western scholarship on the Famine appeared in the January 1986 issue of the Ukrainian Historical Journal under the heading “Against Bourgeois Falsification of History.” It was entitled “Historical Experience of the CPSU in Carrying Out the Leninist Agrarian Policy and the Poverty of Its Bourgeois Falsifications.” This was an extensive report of a “scholarly round table” which took place in Kiev on October 21,1985, sponsored by the Ukrainian Central Committee’s Institute of the History of the Party, the Academy of Sciences’ Institute on the History and Socioeconomic Problems of Foreign Countries, and the editorial board of Ukrainian Historical Journal. 61

Interestingly, the only more or less direct reference to the Famine itself was
made by Iu. Iu. Kondufor in his opening statement:

We must recognize that to this very day in the West bourgeois falsifiers and their lackeys, Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalists, tendentiously distort the process of the socialist reconstruction of the village, the development of the collective farm movement, and the realization of contemporary agrarian policy of the CPSU, and to give a distorted portrayal of the processes which took place and now take place in the village. Yes, there were also errors and excesses in collectivization. The party boldly exposed and overcame them. But they were merely episodes in the tremendous creative activity of building socialism in the village. These were errors of creation, of searching creatively, and they arose out of the lack of experience. For the party and the people there is but one view of collectivization. The collective farm system is our great historic attainment.62

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60 B. Babii, “Anatomiia antykomunizmu: vsuperech normamy mizhnarodnoho prava” (The Anatomy of Anticommunism: against the Norms of International Law), Radians ‘ka Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine), August 11,1985, p. 3.

61 “Istorychnyi dosvid KPRS po zdiisnenniu lenins’koi ahrarnoi polityky i nespromozhnist ii burzhuaznykh fal’syfikatsii (Materialy ‘Knihloho stolu’)” (The Historical Experience of the CPSU in Carrying Out the Leninist Agrarian Policy and the Groundlessness of its Bourgeois Falsifications: Materials of a Scholarly Round Table), Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhumal (Ukrainian Historical Journal), 1986, No. 1, pp. 59-99.

62 Ibid,p.80,