- 28 Jun 2003 00:13
#209794
This is only half of the article. You ought to read the rest of it here: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html Interesting that this is from an American, certainly non-Marxist, writer.
In Search of a SOVIET HOLOCAUST:
A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right
By Jeff Coplon
Originally published in the Village Voice (New York City), January 12, 1988.
Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies.... The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
The girl is dying. She looks about five years old, but we know she may be older, diminished by hunger. She leans wearily against a gate. Her long hair falls lank about bare shoulders. Her head rests against her arm. He neck is bent, like a stalk in parched earth. Her eyes are the worse -- large and dark, glazed yet still wistful. The child is dying, starving, and we feel guilty for our witness...
The Ukrainian émigrés who made Harvest of Despair knew a gripping image when they saw one. The black-and-white still, played over an arching, minor-mode chorus, was chosen to close the Canadian documentary on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. The same photography was used to promote the film, to symbolize a long-dormant cause célèbre: a "man-made" famine, "deliberately engineered" by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism and cow a stubborn peasantry into permanent collectivization. Seven million Ukrainians were killed, the narrator tells us, as "a nation the size of France [was] strangled by hunger."
The result, intoned William F. Buckley, whose Firing Line showed the film last November, was "perhaps the greatest holocaust of the century."
The term "holocaust" still burns the ears, even in our jaded time. As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?
Here is how: The story is a fraud.
The starving girl, it turns out, wasn't found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her pictures was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cynical of swindles -- a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revisionism: a denial of Hitler's holocaust against the Jews.
There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died -- the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.
In 1932, the Soviet Union was in crisis. The cities had suffered food shortages since 1928. Grain was desperately needed for export and foreign capital, both to fuel the first Five-Year Plan and to counter the growing war threat from Germany. In addition, the Communist Party's left wing, led by Stalin, had come to reject the New Economic Plan, which restored market capitalism to the countryside in the 1920s.
In this context, collectivization was more than a vehicle for a cheap and steady grain supply to the state. It was truly a "revolution from above," a drastic move towards socialism, and an epochal change in the mode of production. There were heavy casualties on both sides -- hundreds of thousands of kulaks (rich peasants) deported to the north, thousands of party activists assassinated. Production superseded politics, and many peasants were coerced rather than won to collective farms. Vast disruption of the 1932 harvest ensued (and not only in the Ukraine), and many areas were hard-pressed to meet the state's grain requisition quotas.
Again, Stalin and the Politburo played major roles. "But there is plenty of blame to go around," as Sovietologist John Arch Getty recently noted in The London Review of Books. "It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."
Such a balanced analysis, however, has never satisfied Ukrainian nationalists in the United States and Canada, for whom the "terror-famine" is an article of faith and communal rallying point. For decades after the fact, their obsession was confined to émigré journals. Only of late has it achieved a sort of mainstream credibility -- in Harvest of Despair, shown on PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and at numerous college campuses; in The Harvest of Sorrow, an Oxford University Press account by Robert Conquest; in a "human rights" curriculum, now available to every 10th-grade social studies teacher in New York State; and in the federally-funded Ukraine Famine Commission, now into its second year of "hearings."
After 50 years on the fringe, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center. While one-note faminologists may teach us little real history, they reveal how our sense of history is pulled by political fashion until it hardens into the taffy of conventional wisdom. And how you can fool most of the people most of the time -- especially when you tell them what they want to hear.
The Film
Harvest of Despair was the brainchild of Marco Carynnyk, a Ukrainian translator and poet who lives in Toronto. In 1983, Carynnyk found a sponsor in St. Vladimir's Institute, which formed a Ukrainian Famine Research Committee of well-to-do émigrés. The committee raised $200,000 for the documentary, including a major grant from the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (a spiritual descendant of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), and a loan from the similarly right-wing World Congress of Free Ukrainians.
As chief researcher for the film, Carynnyk had two major functions -- to locate and interview famine survivors, and to find archival photographs. Talking heads would not be enough to make a case for genocide. To gain its intended shock value, the film would have to show what the famine was like. "There can be no question," assessed the Winnipeg Free Press, "that without the films and photographs uncovered from the 1932-33 famine, the film would lose much of its authority."
"I gave them two sets of photographs," Carynnyk said. "I told them, `Here are the ones from the 1930s, and here are the ones from 1921-22.' But in the cutting of the film, they were all mixed up. I said this can't be done, that it will leave the film open to criticism... My complaints were ignored. They just didn't think it was important."
One problem, Carynnyk said, was that producer Slawko Nowitski faced an impossible five-month deadline to ready the film during the famine's 50th anniversary. (In fact, Harvest of Despair would not be completed until late 1984). But the researcher believes it was more than mere sloppiness at work. "The research committee was more interested in propagandistic purposes than historical scholarship," said Carynnyk, who has sued the Famine Research Committee for copyright violation. "They were quite prepared to cut corners to get their point across."
In October 1983, Carynnyk left the project -- "relieved of his duties," according to Nowitsky, "because he did not produce the required material." Three years and seven awards later, the lid blew last November at a meeting of the Toronto Board of Education, where terror-famine proponents were pressing to include the film in the city's high school curriculum. The show stopped cold when Doug Tottle, former editor of a Winnipeg labor magazine, stood up and declared that "90 per cent" of the film's archival photographs were plagiarized from the 1921-22 famine.
Tottle traced several of the most graphic photos, including that of the starving girl, to famine relief sources of the 1920s. (Some of these resurfaced in 1933 as anti-Soviet propaganda in Völkischer Beobachter, an official Nazi party organ). Other pictures were lifted from the 1936 edition of Human Life in Russia, by Ewald Ammende, an Austrian relief worker in the earlier Volga famine. Ammende attributes them to a "Dr. F. Dittloff," a German engineer who supposedly took the photos in the summer of 1933. The Dittloff pictures have their own bastard pedigrees --three from 1922 Geneva-based relief bulletins, others from Nazi publications. Still other Dittloffs were also claimed as original by Robert Green, a phony journalist and escaped convict who provided famine material to the profascist Hearst chain in 1935. Green, a convicted forger who used the alias "Thomas Walker," reported that he took the photos in the spring of 1934 -- almost a year after the Ukraine famine had ended, and in direct contradiction of Dittloff.
Although Green was exposed by The Nation and several New York dailies by 1935, right-wing émigrés have used his spurious photos for decades. "It's not that these pictures were suddenly discovered in 1983 and accidentally misdated" in the film, Tottle noted.
Tottle had done his homework. Carynnyk confirmed that "very few" photos in Harvest of Despair could be authenticated, and that none of the famine film footage was from 1932-33. But the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee decided to stonewall. At first they insisted that any photos from the 1920s were used only when the film discussed the Volga famine -- a blatant evasion, since that segment lasts a scant 28 seconds and uses only two still photos, neither especially potent. Committee chairman Wasyl Janischewskyj recently softened that stance: "We have researched further and made discoveries that some photos we thought were from 1932-33 were not ... We are now having further deep investigations of these pictures."
In the main, however, the filmmakers have sought to justify their fraud. "You have to have visual impact," said Orest Subtelny, the film's historic adviser. "You want to show what people dying from a famine look like. Starving children are starving children." A documentary, added producer Nowitski, must rely on "emotional truth" more than literal facts.
"These people have never attempted to refute my claims," said Tottle. (His book on the subject, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, will be published this fall by Toronto's Progressive Books, an outlet for Soviet releases). "They have tried to lie and cover it up, but they have not tried to refute it."
Nor have the nationalists refuted Tottle's contention that several "witnesses" in the film were Nazi collaborators, including two German diplomats who served in the Third Reich and an Orthodox Church layman who blessedly rose to bishop while the Third Reich occupied the Ukraine in 1942.
"Just because they're collaborators," countered Nowitski, "does that mean we cannot believe anything they tell us? Just because they're Nazis is no reason to doubt the authenticity of what happened."
This slant pervades émigré research on the famine. Soviet sources are rejected out of hand, while Nazi sources (or known liars like Walker and Dittloff) are accepted unconditionally. In the Göbbels tradition, the nationalists' brief always serves their anti-Communism --no matter how many facts twist slowly in the process. Harvest of Despair follows unholy footsteps, and never breaks stride.
The Book
According to a 1978 article in The Guardian of London, Robert Conquest got his big break shortly after World War II, when he joined the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. Staffed heavily by émigrés, the IRD's mission was a covert "propaganda counter-offensive" against the Soviet Union. It was heady, hands-on work for a young writer, a chance to slant media coverage of Russia by adding political "spin" to Eastern bloc press releases and funneling them to top reporters. The journalists knew little about the IRD, beyond the names of their mysterious contacts. The public knew nothing at all, even as their opinions were being sculpted.
After Conquest left the IRD in 1956, the agency suggested that he package some of his handiwork into a book. That first compilation was distributed in the US by Fred Praeger, who had previously published several books at the request of the CIA.
The shy and courtly Conquest has come a long way since then, from gray propagandist to éminence grise. He is now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, as well as an associate of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. But his heart and his pen never left the IRD. The Soviet Union would be Conquest's lifetime obsession. He churned out book after book on the horrors of communism: The Nation Killer, Where Marx Went Wrong, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps. His landmark work of 1968, The Great Terror, focused on Stalin's purges of the late 1930s. But by 1984, his work had turned surreal; What To Do When the Russians Come was the literary equivalent of that politico-teen-disaster flick, Red Dawn. Yet he remained a mainstream heavyweight, coasting on reputation, his excesses accepted as Free World zeal.
In 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute approached Conquest with a major project: a book on the 1932-33 famine. The pot was sweetened by an $80,000 subside from the Ukrainian National Association, a New Jersey-based group with a venerable, hard-right tradition; the UNA's newspaper, Swoboda, was banned by Canada during World War II for its pro-German sympathies. (The grant was earmarked for Conquest's research expenses, including the assistance of James Mace, a junior fellow at the URI).
The nationalists knew they'd be getting their money's worth. At the time, faminology was virgin ground. There was little source material available, since the Soviet archives remain sealed. More to the point, most non-émigré historians viewed the 1932-33 famine as an outgrowth of collectivization, not a political phenomenon of itself, much less a stab at genocide. But Conquest was different. In his Terror book, he'd already concluded that more than three million Ukrainians were killed by the famine. Here, clearly, was the right man for the job, a man who once stated: "Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay ... basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor." And with no one on record to dispute the issue, Conquest's rumors could rule.
In The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest outdoes himself. He weaves his terror-famine from unverifiable (and notoriously biased) émigré accounts. He leans on reportage from ex-Communist converts to the American Way. He cites both "Walker" and Ammende. Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a period piece published by Ukrainian émigrés in 1953, is footnoted no less than 145 times.
Conquest can be deftly selective when it suits his purpose. He borrows heavily from Lev Kopelev's The Education of a True Believer, but ignores Kopelev when the latter recalls Ukrainian villages that were relatively untouched by famine, or relief efforts by a Communist village council.
By confirming people's worst suspicions of Stalin's rule, The Harvest of Sorrow has won favorable reviews from The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. But leading scholars on this era are less impressed. They challenge Conquest's contention that Ukrainian priests and intelligentsia -- two major counterrevolutionary camps -- were repressed more ruthlessly than anywhere else in the country. They point out that the 1932-33 famine was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached deep into the Black Earth region of central Russia. They note that Stalin had far less control over collectivization than is widely assumed, and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they went along.
Most vehemently of all, these experts reject Conquest's hunt for a new holocaust. The famine was a terrible thing, they agree, but it decidedly was not genocide.
"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense."
"This is crap, rubbish," said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. "I am an anti- Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology."
"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY- Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?"
These premier Sovietologists dismiss Conquest for what he is -- an ideologue whose serious work is long behind him. But Dallin stands as a liberal exception to the hard-liners of his generation, while Lewin and Viola remain Young Turks who happen to be doing the freshest work on this period. In Soviet studies, where rigor and objectivity count for less than the party line, where fierce anti-Communists still control the prestigious institutes and first-rank departments, a Conquest can survive and prosper while barely cracking a book.
"He's terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College." He misuses sources, he twists everything."
Then there are those who love to twist, and shout --to use scholarly disinformation for their own, less dignified purposes. In the latest catalogue for the Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler At My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: "The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real `Holocaust' might compete with a Holohoax."
For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the "Holohoax" refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.
In Search of a SOVIET HOLOCAUST:
A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right
By Jeff Coplon
Originally published in the Village Voice (New York City), January 12, 1988.
Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies.... The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed."
-- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
The girl is dying. She looks about five years old, but we know she may be older, diminished by hunger. She leans wearily against a gate. Her long hair falls lank about bare shoulders. Her head rests against her arm. He neck is bent, like a stalk in parched earth. Her eyes are the worse -- large and dark, glazed yet still wistful. The child is dying, starving, and we feel guilty for our witness...
The Ukrainian émigrés who made Harvest of Despair knew a gripping image when they saw one. The black-and-white still, played over an arching, minor-mode chorus, was chosen to close the Canadian documentary on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. The same photography was used to promote the film, to symbolize a long-dormant cause célèbre: a "man-made" famine, "deliberately engineered" by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism and cow a stubborn peasantry into permanent collectivization. Seven million Ukrainians were killed, the narrator tells us, as "a nation the size of France [was] strangled by hunger."
The result, intoned William F. Buckley, whose Firing Line showed the film last November, was "perhaps the greatest holocaust of the century."
The term "holocaust" still burns the ears, even in our jaded time. As we watch the film and see corpses piled in fields, bloated bodies sprawled in streets, pale skeletons grasping for bits of bread, we wonder: How can such a terrible story have been suppressed so long?
Here is how: The story is a fraud.
The starving girl, it turns out, wasn't found in 1932 or 1933, nor in the Ukraine. Her pictures was taken from a Red Cross bulletin on the 1921-22 Volga famine, for which no one claims genocide. Rather than an emblem of persecution, the photograph advances the most cynical of swindles -- a hoax played out from the White House and Congress through the halls of Harvard to the New York State Department of Education. Pressing every pedal, pulling all the strings, is a Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration. By revising their past, these émigrés help support a more ambitious revisionism: a denial of Hitler's holocaust against the Jews.
There was indeed a famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. It appears likely that hundreds of thousands, possibly one or two million, Ukrainians died -- the minority from starvation, the majority from related diseases. By any scale, this is an enormous toll of human suffering. By general consensus, Stalin was partially responsible. By any stretch of an honest imagination, the tragedy still falls short of genocide.
In 1932, the Soviet Union was in crisis. The cities had suffered food shortages since 1928. Grain was desperately needed for export and foreign capital, both to fuel the first Five-Year Plan and to counter the growing war threat from Germany. In addition, the Communist Party's left wing, led by Stalin, had come to reject the New Economic Plan, which restored market capitalism to the countryside in the 1920s.
In this context, collectivization was more than a vehicle for a cheap and steady grain supply to the state. It was truly a "revolution from above," a drastic move towards socialism, and an epochal change in the mode of production. There were heavy casualties on both sides -- hundreds of thousands of kulaks (rich peasants) deported to the north, thousands of party activists assassinated. Production superseded politics, and many peasants were coerced rather than won to collective farms. Vast disruption of the 1932 harvest ensued (and not only in the Ukraine), and many areas were hard-pressed to meet the state's grain requisition quotas.
Again, Stalin and the Politburo played major roles. "But there is plenty of blame to go around," as Sovietologist John Arch Getty recently noted in The London Review of Books. "It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."
Such a balanced analysis, however, has never satisfied Ukrainian nationalists in the United States and Canada, for whom the "terror-famine" is an article of faith and communal rallying point. For decades after the fact, their obsession was confined to émigré journals. Only of late has it achieved a sort of mainstream credibility -- in Harvest of Despair, shown on PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and at numerous college campuses; in The Harvest of Sorrow, an Oxford University Press account by Robert Conquest; in a "human rights" curriculum, now available to every 10th-grade social studies teacher in New York State; and in the federally-funded Ukraine Famine Commission, now into its second year of "hearings."
After 50 years on the fringe, the Ukraine famine debate is finally front and center. While one-note faminologists may teach us little real history, they reveal how our sense of history is pulled by political fashion until it hardens into the taffy of conventional wisdom. And how you can fool most of the people most of the time -- especially when you tell them what they want to hear.
The Film
Harvest of Despair was the brainchild of Marco Carynnyk, a Ukrainian translator and poet who lives in Toronto. In 1983, Carynnyk found a sponsor in St. Vladimir's Institute, which formed a Ukrainian Famine Research Committee of well-to-do émigrés. The committee raised $200,000 for the documentary, including a major grant from the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (a spiritual descendant of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), and a loan from the similarly right-wing World Congress of Free Ukrainians.
As chief researcher for the film, Carynnyk had two major functions -- to locate and interview famine survivors, and to find archival photographs. Talking heads would not be enough to make a case for genocide. To gain its intended shock value, the film would have to show what the famine was like. "There can be no question," assessed the Winnipeg Free Press, "that without the films and photographs uncovered from the 1932-33 famine, the film would lose much of its authority."
"I gave them two sets of photographs," Carynnyk said. "I told them, `Here are the ones from the 1930s, and here are the ones from 1921-22.' But in the cutting of the film, they were all mixed up. I said this can't be done, that it will leave the film open to criticism... My complaints were ignored. They just didn't think it was important."
One problem, Carynnyk said, was that producer Slawko Nowitski faced an impossible five-month deadline to ready the film during the famine's 50th anniversary. (In fact, Harvest of Despair would not be completed until late 1984). But the researcher believes it was more than mere sloppiness at work. "The research committee was more interested in propagandistic purposes than historical scholarship," said Carynnyk, who has sued the Famine Research Committee for copyright violation. "They were quite prepared to cut corners to get their point across."
In October 1983, Carynnyk left the project -- "relieved of his duties," according to Nowitsky, "because he did not produce the required material." Three years and seven awards later, the lid blew last November at a meeting of the Toronto Board of Education, where terror-famine proponents were pressing to include the film in the city's high school curriculum. The show stopped cold when Doug Tottle, former editor of a Winnipeg labor magazine, stood up and declared that "90 per cent" of the film's archival photographs were plagiarized from the 1921-22 famine.
Tottle traced several of the most graphic photos, including that of the starving girl, to famine relief sources of the 1920s. (Some of these resurfaced in 1933 as anti-Soviet propaganda in Völkischer Beobachter, an official Nazi party organ). Other pictures were lifted from the 1936 edition of Human Life in Russia, by Ewald Ammende, an Austrian relief worker in the earlier Volga famine. Ammende attributes them to a "Dr. F. Dittloff," a German engineer who supposedly took the photos in the summer of 1933. The Dittloff pictures have their own bastard pedigrees --three from 1922 Geneva-based relief bulletins, others from Nazi publications. Still other Dittloffs were also claimed as original by Robert Green, a phony journalist and escaped convict who provided famine material to the profascist Hearst chain in 1935. Green, a convicted forger who used the alias "Thomas Walker," reported that he took the photos in the spring of 1934 -- almost a year after the Ukraine famine had ended, and in direct contradiction of Dittloff.
Although Green was exposed by The Nation and several New York dailies by 1935, right-wing émigrés have used his spurious photos for decades. "It's not that these pictures were suddenly discovered in 1983 and accidentally misdated" in the film, Tottle noted.
Tottle had done his homework. Carynnyk confirmed that "very few" photos in Harvest of Despair could be authenticated, and that none of the famine film footage was from 1932-33. But the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee decided to stonewall. At first they insisted that any photos from the 1920s were used only when the film discussed the Volga famine -- a blatant evasion, since that segment lasts a scant 28 seconds and uses only two still photos, neither especially potent. Committee chairman Wasyl Janischewskyj recently softened that stance: "We have researched further and made discoveries that some photos we thought were from 1932-33 were not ... We are now having further deep investigations of these pictures."
In the main, however, the filmmakers have sought to justify their fraud. "You have to have visual impact," said Orest Subtelny, the film's historic adviser. "You want to show what people dying from a famine look like. Starving children are starving children." A documentary, added producer Nowitski, must rely on "emotional truth" more than literal facts.
"These people have never attempted to refute my claims," said Tottle. (His book on the subject, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism, will be published this fall by Toronto's Progressive Books, an outlet for Soviet releases). "They have tried to lie and cover it up, but they have not tried to refute it."
Nor have the nationalists refuted Tottle's contention that several "witnesses" in the film were Nazi collaborators, including two German diplomats who served in the Third Reich and an Orthodox Church layman who blessedly rose to bishop while the Third Reich occupied the Ukraine in 1942.
"Just because they're collaborators," countered Nowitski, "does that mean we cannot believe anything they tell us? Just because they're Nazis is no reason to doubt the authenticity of what happened."
This slant pervades émigré research on the famine. Soviet sources are rejected out of hand, while Nazi sources (or known liars like Walker and Dittloff) are accepted unconditionally. In the Göbbels tradition, the nationalists' brief always serves their anti-Communism --no matter how many facts twist slowly in the process. Harvest of Despair follows unholy footsteps, and never breaks stride.
The Book
According to a 1978 article in The Guardian of London, Robert Conquest got his big break shortly after World War II, when he joined the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. Staffed heavily by émigrés, the IRD's mission was a covert "propaganda counter-offensive" against the Soviet Union. It was heady, hands-on work for a young writer, a chance to slant media coverage of Russia by adding political "spin" to Eastern bloc press releases and funneling them to top reporters. The journalists knew little about the IRD, beyond the names of their mysterious contacts. The public knew nothing at all, even as their opinions were being sculpted.
After Conquest left the IRD in 1956, the agency suggested that he package some of his handiwork into a book. That first compilation was distributed in the US by Fred Praeger, who had previously published several books at the request of the CIA.
The shy and courtly Conquest has come a long way since then, from gray propagandist to éminence grise. He is now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, as well as an associate of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. But his heart and his pen never left the IRD. The Soviet Union would be Conquest's lifetime obsession. He churned out book after book on the horrors of communism: The Nation Killer, Where Marx Went Wrong, Kolyma: the Arctic Death Camps. His landmark work of 1968, The Great Terror, focused on Stalin's purges of the late 1930s. But by 1984, his work had turned surreal; What To Do When the Russians Come was the literary equivalent of that politico-teen-disaster flick, Red Dawn. Yet he remained a mainstream heavyweight, coasting on reputation, his excesses accepted as Free World zeal.
In 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute approached Conquest with a major project: a book on the 1932-33 famine. The pot was sweetened by an $80,000 subside from the Ukrainian National Association, a New Jersey-based group with a venerable, hard-right tradition; the UNA's newspaper, Swoboda, was banned by Canada during World War II for its pro-German sympathies. (The grant was earmarked for Conquest's research expenses, including the assistance of James Mace, a junior fellow at the URI).
The nationalists knew they'd be getting their money's worth. At the time, faminology was virgin ground. There was little source material available, since the Soviet archives remain sealed. More to the point, most non-émigré historians viewed the 1932-33 famine as an outgrowth of collectivization, not a political phenomenon of itself, much less a stab at genocide. But Conquest was different. In his Terror book, he'd already concluded that more than three million Ukrainians were killed by the famine. Here, clearly, was the right man for the job, a man who once stated: "Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay ... basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor." And with no one on record to dispute the issue, Conquest's rumors could rule.
In The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest outdoes himself. He weaves his terror-famine from unverifiable (and notoriously biased) émigré accounts. He leans on reportage from ex-Communist converts to the American Way. He cites both "Walker" and Ammende. Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a period piece published by Ukrainian émigrés in 1953, is footnoted no less than 145 times.
Conquest can be deftly selective when it suits his purpose. He borrows heavily from Lev Kopelev's The Education of a True Believer, but ignores Kopelev when the latter recalls Ukrainian villages that were relatively untouched by famine, or relief efforts by a Communist village council.
By confirming people's worst suspicions of Stalin's rule, The Harvest of Sorrow has won favorable reviews from The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. But leading scholars on this era are less impressed. They challenge Conquest's contention that Ukrainian priests and intelligentsia -- two major counterrevolutionary camps -- were repressed more ruthlessly than anywhere else in the country. They point out that the 1932-33 famine was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached deep into the Black Earth region of central Russia. They note that Stalin had far less control over collectivization than is widely assumed, and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they went along.
Most vehemently of all, these experts reject Conquest's hunt for a new holocaust. The famine was a terrible thing, they agree, but it decidedly was not genocide.
"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense."
"This is crap, rubbish," said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. "I am an anti- Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology."
"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY- Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?"
These premier Sovietologists dismiss Conquest for what he is -- an ideologue whose serious work is long behind him. But Dallin stands as a liberal exception to the hard-liners of his generation, while Lewin and Viola remain Young Turks who happen to be doing the freshest work on this period. In Soviet studies, where rigor and objectivity count for less than the party line, where fierce anti-Communists still control the prestigious institutes and first-rank departments, a Conquest can survive and prosper while barely cracking a book.
"He's terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College." He misuses sources, he twists everything."
Then there are those who love to twist, and shout --to use scholarly disinformation for their own, less dignified purposes. In the latest catalogue for the Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler At My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: "The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real `Holocaust' might compete with a Holohoax."
For those unacquainted with Noontide jargon, the "Holohoax" refers to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.
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