The first of these fallacies is the myth that the Holodomor was not a genocide —merely a tragedy. This myth is propagated by Moscow and echoed by its stooges, like current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
It basically goes like this: the Holodomor wasn’t a genocide of Ukrainians because other nationalities suffered deaths as well.
Well, that’s the equivalent of saying the Holocaust wasn’t a genocide of Jews because other ethnic groups were also killed.
Even though both Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin committed mass murder on a gargantuan scale that involved people of all kinds of backgrounds, Jews were specifically targeted in the Holocaust and Ukrainians were specifically targeted in the Holodomor. That’s what makes both actions genocide.
For the President of Ukraine to make such a statement at an international gathering shows that he is either totally brainless or a slavish puppet of Moscow.
The other refuge of Holodomor detractors is to question the numbers. Some academics have even gone so far as to suggest that Ukrainian nationalists cooked up the figure of 7 to 10 million in order to play up their martyrdom.
Let’s then see where these numbers came from. First, the 10-million figure came directly from the perpetrator of the Holodomor himself — Joseph Stalin — in a private conversation with Sir Winston Churchill, which the British statesman later recorded in his memoirs. Second, it was echoed by Stalin‘s biggest apologist and most notorious Holodomor denier, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, in a secret briefing recorded by the British Embassy and later released publicly.
Most important, however, is that the 7–10 million estimate (and we stress that it remains an estimate) is an internationally accepted number that was included in a Joint Statement on the Holodomor issued at the United Nations on November 10, 2003, and signed by 26 delegations including those of Canada, the United States, Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
At that time, the President of Ukraine was Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s Prime Minister, and Vladimir Putin was the President of the Russian Federation.
So what has changed over the past seven years?
We are now told that new demographic studies conclude that 2.6 million died of hunger. To this a birth deficit of 1.1 million can be added, plus another million transported to the Gulag.
On what basis can demographic studies be made? Unlike the Nazis, who kept meticulous records of their genocide, the Soviets deliberately covered up the Holodomor figures. When the results of the 1937 Soviet census were compiled, Stalin immediately ordered them destroyed and sent all its organizers to the Gulag as saboteurs, because the census showed damningly low population figures. Then, a subsequent census in 1939 was adjusted so that the figures conformed to Stalin’s wishes.
Therefore, it is impossible to determine an accurate demographic figure of the Holodomor victims because, in order to produce an accurate demographic figure, one must have accurate demographic statistics to begin with. Since the only demographic statistics that could have provided an accurate base were destroyed and the census takers arrested and most likely exterminated, any so-called study is based purely on conjecture.
Significantly, some respected scholars who once accepted these demographic studies are now backtracking. As David R. Marples wrote in a Nov. 24 op-ed piece in the Kyiv Post: “The scale of the tragedy, in what had been the most productive grain-growing republic of both the Russian Empire and the 1920s USSR, is hard to fathom. The Italian Consul in Kharkiv (which remained Ukraine’s capital until 1934) reported that some 40-50 percent of peasants had died and estimated the death toll at around 9 million.
“But we do not know the death toll. No one was counting the bodies, many of which lay unburied for days or were dumped into mass graves.”
For those who cannot accept the internationally set estimate (and again we stress the word ‘estimate’) of 7 to 10 million dead, we must simply agree that millions were killed, instead of dredging up “demographic studies” based on inaccurate data. No matter what the actual number of deaths was, the Holodomor was clearly an act of genocide and that has to be recognized. Playing the numbers game only serves to muddy the waters.
