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    Scott Ritter: The Holodomor Myth Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on December 14, 2022, 10:30 pm

    14 December 2022

    (quote)
    "It is time," the flyer declared, "to acknowledge that the current war in
    Ukraine is an extension of the genocidal policies of the Russian state. Such
    policies were a tactic of the USSR and continue to be so as directed by Vladimir
    Putin, in an effort to extend Russian rule over non-Russian republics of the now
    defunct Soviet Union."

    "It is time," the flyer continued, "to reject Vladimir Putin's claim that
    Ukrainians and Russians are 'one people' as a precursor to and defense for this
    War."

    "It is time," the flyer concluded, "to teach the Holodomor as genocide in
    Michigan Public Schools."

    I was struck by the photograph the man opted to use to illustrate his flyer -
    five gaunt boys, clearly starving. Most students of Russian history, however,
    would recognize the photo as being from the famine of 1920-21, which had nothing
    to do with the period encompassed by the so-called Holodomor.

    Hopefully, that little error would be corrected before finalizing any
    curriculum.

    "The fame of 1932-33," the flyer noted, "is often called the Holodomor, a term
    derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor)."

    What the flyer failed to point out is that the term Holodomor came into being
    only in the late 1980's, conjured up by Ukrainian nationalists trying to fan the
    flames of Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union in its final years, in
    short, a fake word used to define a fake narrative.

    The famine that swept through the Soviet Union in 1932-33 was very real - there
    is no denying this. But it was not an isolated event, but rather part and parcel
    of the Stalin-driven policy of forced collectivization of agriculture. During
    the period of forced collectivization between 1930-37, Robert Conquest estimated
    that some 14.5 million peasants lost their lives; of these, some 5 million were
    Ukrainians who died during the famine of 1932-33.

    These are horrible numbers, reflective of human tragedy and suffering of an
    unimaginable scale. Robert Conquest's groundbreaking work, The Harvest of
    Sorrow, has served as one of the primary sources behind the resurgence of
    Ukrainian nationalism in the late 1980's. Indeed, as Conquest himself concluded,
    "Stalin... saw the [Ukrainian] peasantry as the bulwark of nationalism; and
    common sense requires us to see this double blow at Ukrainian nationhood as no
    coincidence."

    But even Conquest had to admit that this conclusion was pure speculation on his
    part. "As to Stalin's personal guilt," Conquest wrote, "we cannot document the
    responsibility in the sense of any decree exists in which Stalin orders the
    famine."

    Conquest concluded that, from his standpoint, "the facts are established; the
    motives are consistent with all that is known of Stalinist attitudes; and the
    verdict of history cannot be other than one of criminal responsibility."

    This is the narrative that the Ukrainian nationalists use to sustain their
    argument that the Holodomor was a targeted act of genocide carried out by Stalin
    against the Ukrainian people.

    The problem is, the historical record does not support such a conclusion. After
    the fall of the Soviet Union, the Soviet archives were opened to western
    scholars, who were able for the first time to draw upon primary sources of
    information to critically examine the Cold War-era historical narrative, such as
    the one promulgated by Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow. Conquest's conclusions
    were found wanting - there simply was no documentary evidence to back up his
    claims that Stalin was criminally responsible for the targeted starvation of the
    Ukrainian people in 1932-33.

    When confronted by two of these scholars, R. W. Davies and Stephan
    G. Wheatcroft, Conquest was compelled to agree that his conclusion that Stalin
    purposefully inflicted the 1932-33 famine was wrong. With the benefit of this
    new research, Conquest instead argued that Stalin "could have prevented it [the
    famine] but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first - thus
    consciously abetting it."

    No Holodomor, no genocide, but rather a narrative of a society undergoing
    revolutionary transformations (i.e., forced agricultural collectivization) which
    its leadership was unable to effectively manage, leading to great human tragedy.

    But the forces of modern Ukrainian nationalism needed to manufacture a case for
    dividing Ukraine into eastern (pro-Russia) and western (anti-Russia) blocs, and
    in 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a bill which labeled the 1932-33 famine
    an "act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation," ignoring the reality that
    both ethnic Russians and Ukrainians died by the millions during the famine, and
    that there was no documentary evidence that Stalin either orchestrated the
    famine or used it to target the Ukrainian population.

    The bill was backed by then-President Viktor Yushchenko, the same man who, four
    years later, would pressure the Ukrainian Parliament to pass a bill awarding the
    title "Hero of Ukraine" to Stepan Bandera.

    The reality is that far from representing the historical continuity of a
    nefarious Russian scheme that has targeted the Ukrainian people for genocidal
    eradication, the Holodomor "myth" has been used by Ukrainian nationalists to
    criminalize Russia and, by extension, Russians - and their current leader,
    Vladimir Putin, all the while extolling the odious ideology of one of history's
    most vile characters - Stepan Bandera.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/the-holodomor-myth

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