The
"anti-communists" and national democrats that Professor Moytl
mentions are the ideological children of the Bandera years. What is
very interesting about this especially in light of what is occurring
in Ukraine today is that the areas that were most affected by the
"Holomodor Holocaust" don't remember it the way the storyline was
developed in the US, Canada, and most notably by the Galician Bandera
that were not a part of it and did not suffer through it.
Central and Southeast Ukraine which includes Donbass and Odessa are the areas that years ago suffered through that famine. The famine also claimed over 1 million lives in Siberia. The suffering extended to Belarus and Kuban. There were starvation deaths in Moscow.
The Soviets (Stalin) were still keeping grain production export quotas the same during this famine regardless of what the harvest actually yielded. The SSR Ukrainian government in Kiev was slow to report the famine and resulting bad harvests after predicting record harvests in their forecasts.
During this period collectivization and mechanized farming were forced on all the countries that made up the Soviet Union. Forced mechanization made the problems a lot more widespread. SSR Ukraine, comprised of Central Ukraine and Southeast (Donbass to Odessa) really suffered the most in the Soviet Union. The US and China faced similar issues during this period of technological change (mechanized agriculture) which created similar conditions in both countries also. This resulted in the Dust Bowl years happening in the US and China's famine years resulted.
Compounding this was Stalin's operations to repress anti- Soviets, anti-collectivists(farmers), and the "Kulaks." Kulaks were local land barons that had horses to plow the fields. If you needed a horse to plow yours, you plowed his field and gave a percentage of your harvest to him. The Kulaks slaughtered their horses in an attempt to stop collectivization because it took their power away. They revolted against collectivization every way they could.
"In combination with the brutal repression of much of the intellectual elite in the Ukrainian SSR in the years around 1930, the collectivization and famine left deep scars on central and eastern Ukraine. Until the late 1980s, the famine was denied by the Soviet authorities. Even in the diaspora, which was dominated by Western Ukrainians, there was little knowledge of the famine until the 1970s".- Pers Anders Rudling- Memories of "Holodomor" and National Socialism in Ukrainian political culture
How
this adds up to Holocaust-Denial
In the mid 1970's
the role of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust was opened up
publicly first with Lucy Dawidowcz's book "The War Against the
Jews, 1933-1945 that presented the Ukrainians as far more brutal than
the Germans ever were. In 1978 the miniseries "Holocaust" raised
awareness of what happened during this time frame and brought the
Ukrainian nationalist issues to the forefront. According to Rudling
this infuriated the Ukrainian diaspora. Both Canada and the US opened
investigations on WW2 War Criminality as a result of the rise in
awareness during this time. The Simon Wiesenthal Center started
giving Ukrainian nationalists and other Eastern European nationalists
increased attention. The great fear was the only thing westerners
would know about them was the part they played as prolific
collaborators in mankind's greatest mass murder.
"Thus, in 1982-83, in time for the 50th anniversary of the famine diaspora academics, publicists, and Nationalist activists launched a major effort to produce a new national mythology, centered on the 1932-33 famine. Diaspora academics referred to the famine as a deliberate genocide, in which the western states were complicit. References to the Holocaust were often explicit: "The victims of the famine in Ukraine were consigned to their slow and agonizing deaths as surely as the Jews of Europe were delivered to the planners of the Final solution..."-Rudling(ibid)
Before
1991 this was in hope of securing the state of Ukraine once it was
independent from the Soviet Union. The diaspora demanded the US
government let them set up a "Ukrainian" nationalist government.
Second, Waffen SS officers and fighters played such a large role in
Eastern European emigre life (especially Ukrainian) in the United
States and Canada, the same activist scholars started trying to
rehabilitate their image as well as repackaging their ideologies to
make them look heroic and democratic.
In 1986, the publishing house of the UPA veterans published a book, which explicitly stated that "Zionist Jews" launched the famine as the "real Holocaust" in which Jewish Bolsheviks killed Christians, and in which an allegedly Jewish-controlled press covered up the genocide. - For a discussion of Chumatskyj, Yurij: Why is One Holocaust Worth More than Others?
Within the "scholarly" works came demands for a Nuremburg 2 trial listing all the Soviet leaders including Stalin (as the Georgian Jew) by their Askenazi names. According to the Ukrainian nationalists Soviet Russia was formed and led by Zionist Jewry. The Jews and Soviet Jewish leaders were responsible for all the atrocity.
Andrii Bandera, son of the mass murderer published an article stating - "There were 15,000,000 Ukrainian genocide victims next to the 6,000,000 Jewish victims."- "Major instanced of genocide in the 20th century", Ukrainian Echo: A Monthly English- Language Supplement to "Homin Ukrainy", 7 (1983) 3, p. 2.-(ibid) Rudling
Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper used the figure of "up to 10 million people" to back the assertions of Bandera and the OUN emigre population in Edmonton. Canada hosts the World Ukrainian Emigre government (UWC). It must be comforting to Harper to have the direct support of the Bandera family.
They inflated the numbers deliberately to make them as high and much higher than the Jewish Holocaust. This was in the hope of getting recognition. This was also in hope of burying the OUN genocides.
Today the growing consensus among scholars is that between 2.5 and 3.5 million died of famine in SSR Ukraine during 1932-33. The total number of deaths in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Siberia, Caucasus, and throughout Russia are estimated at 5.5-6.5 million people.
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