Chapter 2

At no point in the discussion did the reader learn that lives had been lost because of these errors. Instead, they were placed where the paranoia about revealing information about the Famine reached absurd heights. For example, O. F. Ivanov, senior instructor at Kiev State University, discussed a 1983 Senate agriculture subcommittee hearing on the Ukrainian Famine without mentioning what the topic was. He merely noted that “the leitmotif of the testimony of these ‘experts’ was the falsificationist thesis of the ‘absence of the economic prerequisites’ for the party’s course of collectivization, the totalitarian character of the process, the ‘exploitation’ of the peasantry, and so on.” 63

Indeed, nowhere in the various presentations was the year 1933 singled out as having witnessed anything particularly noteworthy in conjunction with either collectivization or procurements in Ukraine. Even customary references to “food supply difficulties” (prodovol’chi trudnoshchi), were missing. The most accomplished expert on collectivization in Ukraine, Professor M. T. Kuts of the Chernihiv branch of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, dealt only with All-Union policies and never once mentioned the particular experience of the Ukrainian SSR. One can only assume that a decision was made simply to deny the historicity of the Famine or, at the very least, to avoid confirming “excesses” in Ukraine beyond the previously conceded level of All-Union errors. The fact that such an elaborate conference was organized without saying much of anything indicated both the growing need of the Soviet Ukrainian authorities address the rising level of public awareness and their inability to do so. The far from convincing performance succeeded only as a warning against the forbidden topic.

Another official response was an interview with Khmil, now returned from the UN and a representative of the Soviet Ukrainian historical profession. This was an “analysis of the pseudo-documentary film ‘Harvest of Despair’,” broadcast on Radio Kiev for Ukrainians living abroad on the first three days of November 1986. According to Khmil’,

the notorious thesis about the artificial famine in the Soviet Union is being used by propaganda services in the USA in order to divert the attention of its own population from their own difficulties. …it was not by chance that the start of the anti-Soviet campaign coincided with an acute exacerbation of the food situation in the USA itself. 65

After reiterating his discovery of a famine-ravaged contemporary America, he declared that the “totally conscious falsification of the food situation in the Land of the Soviets, including our republic, in the 1930s” ignored the 1931-32 drought, the Soviet lack of experience in running collectivized agriculture, and the sabotage committed by class enemies. According to Prof. Khmil’, the film is based on falsified sources, the use of traitorous emigr€s as eyewitnesses to the “alleged” Famine and of “professional anti-communists specializing in the field of Sovietology” like James Mace. Khmil’ concluded by assuring his audience:

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63 Ibid,p.84.

64 Ibid, pp. 6-68. Kuts in 1965 published Pytannia kolhospnoho budivnytstva na Ukraini (1929-1941 rr.) (Problems of Collective Farm Construction in Ukraine, 1919-1941), cited above.

65 Summary of World Broadcasts, 21 November 1986, SU/8422/A1/9.