PAST TIME

Bearing witness: In 1932, the Pulitzer Prize went to a foreign correspondent who concealed a famine and the deaths of millions. Ukrainians want that prize revoked. (Charles Leroux, June 25, 2003, Chicago Tribune)

After 300 years of Russian occupation, many urban Ukrainians had become Russianized, maybe speaking Russian in preference to Ukrainian, maybe adding a Russian ending to a last name. But the rural people remained staunchly nationalistic, and Stalin -- seeking to consolidate his power -- wanted to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism. He turned the famine -- which conveniently stopped at the border with Russia -- into an opportunity to force farmers to move to industrial jobs in the cities.

He also, the Ukrainian community says, intensified the famine into what they call the Holodomor, roughly translated as "famine-genocide," the "H" intentionally capitalized to emphasize a parallel with the Holocaust.

"My grandparents stayed on the farm and died of starvation. Two uncles died in prison," Kolomayets said. "The children of one of the uncles, a boy and a girl, 5 and 6, came to live with us. One day, my cousins went out looking for food and we never saw them again. My mother heard they had been killed and eaten."

Reporters other than Duranty -- principally Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and The Guardian's Muggeridge -- described scenes of great suffering. One such report told of grain stores (the Soviets exported grain to the West during the famine) guarded by armed Russian troops while Ukrainians died of starvation nearby. Jones wrote, "I walked alone through villages . . . everywhere was the cry, `There is no bread. We are dying.'"

Jones wrote his accounts only after he had gone home. Muggeridge smuggled his articles out to England in diplomatic pouches. In those pieces, he described peasants kneeling in the snow, begging for a crust of bread.

"Whatever I may do or think in the future," he wrote in his diary, "I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go, but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."

Muggeridge's reports were discredited. He was fired, his reputation as a reporter slandered. Duranty chimed in on the vilification, and in an
August 1933 New York Times story called Muggeridge's and Jones' work "an exaggeration of malignant propaganda." At that time, Duranty
reportedly had told a British Foreign Office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had died.

Communist dupe Lincoln Steffens had a line that nicely covered the Left's attitude: "Treason to the Tsar wasn't a sin, treason to Communism is." Posted by Orrin Judd at June 27, 2003 12:12 PM