Starvation In Europe's Breadbasket
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday April 26, 1987
IN RECENT years, famine has emerged as a political weapon. The Marxist government of Ethiopia, cynically supported by Russia, has used the spectre of starvation to curb internal dissent and to buy the silence of Western aid-giving nations.
To citizens of the Ukraine, this story is nothing new. In the 1930s, the Soviet Government, under Joseph Stalin, used food as a weapon against a people who proved troublesome to Moscow. Famine was engineered to strangle a nation the size of France.
The extraordinary saga is told in an absorbing 55-minute documentary, Harvest of Despair, to be screened on Two on Tuesday, at 10.30pm. The film, which has won a string of awards, replaces the advertised program in the Encounters series.
Harvest of Despair claims that in one year alone (1932-33), seven million Ukrainians - one quarter of the entire population - died of starvation.
Paradoxically, it was a year of ample harvest in the region then known as"the breadbasket of Europe".
Ukrainian grain - tonnes of it - was exported to Western nations which, in the midst of their own economic depression, felt the benefits of trade outweighed moral considerations.
Much of the program is devoted to exploring the question of just how much the Western nations really knew. The claim is made that Western politicians, including the former French Prime Minister, Edouard Herriot, and the British writer George Bernard Shaw lied or were duped in one of the greatest - but least publicised - cover-ups of the 20th century.
Harvest of Despair was produced by a Ukrainian expatriate director, Slavo Nowytski, in association with the Toronto-based St Vladimir Institute and the National Film Board of Canada.
In the US, apparently because of suggestions of that country's duplicity, the Public Broadcasting Service hesitated for a year about screening it. The reason given, concerning "poor" production standards, seems unconvincing. It was claimed, for instance, that the sound of horses' hoofbeats was inadequately dubbed into a still scene showing human corpses being carted away.
The ABC, which has had the rights to Harvest of Despair for several months, has shown similar dithering, leading to the voicing of conspiracy theories in the Australian-Ukrainian Review. In typical "Auntie" style, the program has now been inserted at such short notice that the wrong Encounters program was advertised, on air, only last week.
The film begins with old newsreel footage from 1917. In that year, a tidal wave of revolution swept aside the Tsarist empire. Ukrainians took the chance to reclaim independence after 200 years of Russian domination, with the ancient capital of Kiev once again the seat of government.
This situation did not please Lenin, who prepared to reclaim the former territories. In four ensuing years of chaos, Ukrainians fought the Red Army, White Army, Germans and Poles. By 1921, Russia had retaken most of the Ukraine, other parts of it being carved up as part of Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.
To end internal resistance, Lenin encouraged, for a while, a Ukrainian cultural renaissance. Then Lenin was replaced by Stalin, who reversed this policy.
In 1928, Stalin instituted a virtual pogrom. Priests, writers, virtually the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia were imprisoned or deported to remote parts of the USSR.
There is newsreel footage of the desecration of churches and humiliation of the local peasantry, in which the camera operator and party hacks from Moscow clearly delighted. In 1930, the regime introduced sterner measures -collectivisation of farming, followed by a deliberate policy of starving to death the very people who produced the grain.
The film relates in gruesome detail how this was done. Still photographs by two junior diplomats of the German Weimar Republic, Johann von Herwarth, a post-war ambassador to Britain, and Andor Hencke, provide much of the evidence. Both unsuccessfully denied the blandishments fed by Moscow to their own, the British and US Governments.
The film interviews surviving dissidents of that period, and Russians who participated in the pogrom but now feel guilty about it. Some are still living in the USSR - their contributions are brave, indeed.
The final section of the film looks at how the Western press, which had reporters based in Moscow, handled rumours of the affair. Only one Western journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, whose faith in international socialism was shattered by what he heard and saw, wrote that they were true, smuggling his reports to London in the diplomatic bag.
The US weighed the Englishman's dispatches against those from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Walter Durante, of the New York Times, and believed Durante. Advocates of US-Russian trade were delighted by his denial of a famine, as was the US Government itself, which (for commercial reasons) wished to endorse Russia's application for membership of the League of Nations, and would have been embarrassed by scandal.
Muggeridge, interviewed in the program, describes Durante as "the greatest liar I have met".
In June 1941, the Nazis invaded the Ukraine. Hitler replaced Stalin's shackles with his own. German occupying troops discovered a mass grave with 9,000 bodies. Recognising the propaganda value, they invited an international commission to inspect it.
The Western allies, with more pressing worries, hardly cared about such claims. The Soviet Union denies to this day that famine ever took place, but the harvest of despair can never be forgotten.
For the Ukraine itself, once more under Russian domination, its only crime was that it never adapted to wearing chains.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
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