Ukraine: Holodomor, Genocide, Crimes of Communism
DATE: Sunday, April 19, 2009
FIVE ARTICLES --
ERRONEOUS HOLODOMOR PHOTOGRAPHS
Washington,
D.C. - Several years ago a group of us started working to stop the
widespread use of real photographs taken by a number of
international relief organizations in
Russia during the Russian famine of 1921-1922 to show
the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933. Most of the real
photographs used in books, pamphlets, journals, documentaries, etc.
over the past 60 years published in the U.S., Canada, UK and
elsewhere, about the Ukrainian Holodomor of
1932-1933, were not actually taken in Ukraine during
1932-1933.
Despite the major effort to stop the use of photographs not
taken in Ukraine in 1932-1933 the practice continues.
Many works for the 75th Commemoration of the
Holodomor published in 2008 still used these well-known,
widely distributed Russian photographs from
1922-1923. Most of the time the publications indicated the
photographs were taken in Ukraine during 1932-1933.
These Russian photographs from 1922-1923 can also still be
found today on various Ukrainian related websites in the U.S.,
Canada, and Ukraine that provide Holodomor
information. We urge everyone to carefully
check any real photographs you are using related to the
Holodomor 1932-1933 to make sure the photographs can
actually be fully and accurately documented to have
been taken in 1932-1933. [Morgan Williams]
1. UKRAINE:
ERRONEOUS FAMINE PHOTOS SPARK FOUL CRIES
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, 10
March, 2009
2.
RUSSIAN PUNDIT ACCUSES UKRAINE OF "FALSIFYING" HISTORY
THROUGH
FALSIFICATION OF MATERIAL SUCH AS PHOTOGRAPHS
Rossiya TV, Moscow, Russia, in Russian, 10 Mar 09
BBC Monitoring Service, UK, in English, Tuesday, March 10,
2009
3. REWRITING
UKRAINIAN HISTORY: TRUTH OR FALSIFICATION?
The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives across
the Soviet Union.
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Friday, 03 April, 2009
4.
GENOCIDE DENIERS AGAIN USING THE ISSUE OF PHOTOS AGAINST US
From: Russ Chelak,
[email protected]
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 6:25 PM
Subject: Check out The New Russian Forum #10261.1
5. RUSSIAN
FAMINE PHOTOGRAPHS INFORMATION
ArtUkraine.com website, Morgan Williams, Publisher, Kyiv,
Ukraine
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1.
UKRAINE: ERRONEOUS FAMINE PHOTOS SPARK FOUL CRIES
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
MOSCOW - In the city of Sevastopol the Ukrainian Security Service
opened a photo exhibition on Holodomor, the 1930’s famine in the USSR,
but local politicians have noticed that some of the pictures have
nothing to do with it.
“We established that some photos were taken from a U.S. photo blog on
the Great Depression of 1929-1930s. One of them made in 1935 in
Arkansas, shot by Benjamin Shahn. Another one was taken in Oklahoma.
Four out of six photos presented at the exhibition have nothing to do
with Ukraine,” said city council deputy Andrey Merkulov.
Historians and politicians in Russia and Ukraine are at odds about both
the reasons and the death toll of the disastrous famine of the 1930s.
Kiev believes the death toll was up to nine million in Ukraine alone
and claims it was genocide against Ukrainians.
Moscow is firm in its view that it was caused by disastrous
agricultural policies of the soviet government and the death toll was
half of Kiev's estimates.
QUEST
FOR NATIONAL TRAGEDY
After being elected, President Yushchenko went on a massive
campaign to have the events recognized as a crime against
humanity. “We recently published 19 books about the
famine. We created the first ever name-by-name death toll list. And
without Yushchenko this would have never happened,” said Vasiliy
Marochko, Ukrainian historian.
Last November these efforts ended in monuments to the famine being
erected all over the country. Some lashed out at the president for what
they describe as excessive attention to things in the past, when it’s
the present which requires serious attention.
“He spent millions on that. That’s in the times when our doctors,
teachers, workers are struggling to make ends meet. It is Yushchenko,
who’s orchestrating a modern day famine in Ukraine,” said Leonid Grach,
Ukrainian opposition MP.
The scandal in Sevastopol is nothing new. Russian historians
previously accused a similar exhibition in Kiev for displaying pictures
from Russia rather than from Ukraine. With new details and twists in
the famine story emerging every year, it appears the tragedy of the
1930s will be making headlines for years to come.
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2. RUSSIAN
PUNDIT ACCUSES UKRAINE OF "FALSIFYING" HISTORY
THROUGH
FALSIFICATION OF MATERIAL SUCH AS PHOTOGRAPHS
Rossiya TV, Moscow, Russia, in Russian, 10 Mar 09
BBC Monitoring Service, UK, in English, Tuesday, March 10,
2009
MOSCOW - [Presenter] A row over an exhibition on the
so-called Holodomor [1932-33 famine] is flaring up in Ukraine. It
opened in Sevastopol. Local deputies have uncovered an evident
falsification of the materials: instead of pictures from starving
Ukrainian villages, pictures taken in the USA during the Great
Depression were displayed. [Passage omitted]
We asked the director of the Institute for Political Studies, Sergey
Markov, for a comment on the pictures. Here is what he told us.
[Markov] It is known that the organizers of the campaign to mark the
Holodomor anniversary in Ukraine are actively using a lot of falsified
sources. The desire to flare up Russophobia and anti-Semitism is the
root of attempts to falsify history because without falsifying history
it would be impossible to do this.
Besides, the promotion of the Holodomor campaign is being
carried out by the [Ukrainian] Institute of [National] Memory,
[Ukrainian President] Viktor Yushchenko personally and many others. It
is they who are committing a comprehensive falsification of Ukraine's
history during World War II.
Their aim is not to show some historical facts but to simply
create a maximally propagandistic illusion of falsifying history. And
we can assume that they will probably use pictures from Nazi camps,
when the Nazis, so to say, used this campaign.
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3.
REWRITING UKRAINIAN HISTORY: TRUTH OR FALSIFICATION?
The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives across
the Soviet Union.
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Friday, 03 April, 2009
MOSCOW- The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives
across the Soviet Union. Ukraine has continuously stressed that it was
a genocide inflicted by the Communist government in Moscow to wipe out
its people. Now, attempts are being made to rewrite history to
back up its claims.
Andrey Merkulov is a deputy at Sevastopol’s city council. He describes
how he found evidence that special services in his town were falsifying
historical facts.
“Here’s a photo by Dorothy Lang, shot in 1936 in Oklahoma. And here’s a
photo by Fritof Nansen made in Russia’s Povolzhe region in 1921. But
both of those pictures and other falsified photos were displayed at
Sevastopol’s exhibition on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933,” Merkulov
says, demonstrating aged photographs.
Kiev claims that Holodomor was artificially directed against Ukrainians
– something denied by Moscow. Russia and Ukraine are also at odds over
the famine's official death toll.
Andrey says that such contradictions are not limited to Sevastopol.
What he and some media describe as a campaign to rewrite history has
been present in Ukraine for several years now. Its goal, Merkulov says,
is to accuse the Kremlin of wrongdoing backed by the highest echelons
of power.
“We go to the Ukrainian president’s official website. Click
on the photo gallery. Click on public events. And we see this picture –
Yushchenko looking at pictures of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930’s.
But the picture he’s looking at is this one, also shot by Nansen in
Russia’s Povolzhie region. It is written here: Famine in Russia.”
Merkulov’s claims were backed by Ukraine’s national archive.
“We have declassified all documents on the famine in Ukraine and there
are only two genuine pictures from that time. The rest are very much
distantly related and are not necessarily shot in Ukraine,” Olga
Ginzburg the head of Ukraine’s State Archive told RT.
FORMAL
APOLOGY BY THE SBU
This confession led to a formal apology by the SBU,
Ukraine’s security service. “These pictures are not a part of our
archive and were used by accident. There were four pictures which got
there by accident,” Vladimir Vyatrovich from SBU archive explained.
In January 2009, the SBU, following Yushchenko’s decree, urged the
national archives to declassify all documents related to repressions in
Soviet times, but its head said that there was nothing to make public.
Olga Ginzburg points out that the gesture was rather superfluous to
begin with: “We have already declassified all documents long time ago.
They have been studied for years.”
The SBU lashed out at the archives for not doing their job, but some
politicians see it as anger for failing to find evidence for an attack
against Moscow.
“There are no documents, proving that there was something
like Kremlin’s genocide against Ukrainians. Simply because there was no
genocide. And because there is a wish to portray Russia as Ukraine’s
enemy. History is for scientists, but when special services try to deal
with it, it leads to bad results,” says Vadim Kolesnichenko from the
Party of Regions.
PRESSING
ISSUES
The disastrous famine of the 1930s is only
one of several historic issues sending shockwaves across Ukraine. The
historic role of the insurgent army, the UPA, is another. It
is believed that during the Nazi invasion these nationalist troops
fought the Germans, but later they allied with their enemy and turned
arms against the Soviet forces.
Many in Ukraine and Russia believe the troops aided the Nazis and
literally shot their own people. Not long ago, some of its members were
made heroes of Ukraine by Yushchenko, sparking even more confusion
among members of the public, who now do not know what to believe.
Revealing the truth or falsifying historical facts – both historians
and society have yet to understand what this governmental campaign is
all about. Regardless, the events of the past will be making
headlines in Ukraine for years to come.
DENYING
CLAIMS
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has
publicly cleared Russia from all responsibility for the Holodomor.In a
live interview for Russian radio station ‘Echo Moskvy’ on Wednesday,
Yushchenko noted that the Holodomor famine “is not the responsibility
of Russia or the Russian people.”
He noted that the government, as well as the ideology and the
composition of the state responsible for what he still refers to as a
crime directed against the Ukrainian people, was different from that of
modern Russia.
However, the Ukrainian president reaffirmed that he is saddened by the
fact that the modern Russian society as well as its government refuses
to give what he calls an adequate evaluation of the USSR’s actions
during the Holodomor.
This is not the first time that Viktor Yushchenko has clarified his
stance on the issue, depicting a line which separates modern Russia
from its Soviet past.
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4.
GENOCIDE DENIERS AGAIN USING THE ISSUE OF PHOTOS AGAINST US
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 6:25 PM
Subject: Check out The New Russian Forum #10261.1
NEW JERSEY - This issue [use of Russian photographs] has come up in the
past and as discussed, the genocide deniers are again using the issue
of photos against us. The images are very effective to let
the uninitiated learn of the horrors of the Holodmor but when photos
actually taken in Russia in 1921 [& 1922] are used, it gives
the deniers another arrow in their quiver to argue against the genocide
argument.
Here [see link below] you can see that they actually discredit several
widely known Holodomor sites and publications because they do not use
authentic photos (which are limited pretty much to the Kharkov photos)
We should all commit to using only the Kharkov
[Ukraine] photos - Gareth Jones was sent into obscurity when
Hearst [newspapers] used these same photos in 1935 - The deniers were
very successful in making these series of true articles a laughing
stock and it was the last time that the Holod made the front
page. RC
NOTE: CLICK ON THE
FOLLOWING LINK TO SEE THE RECENT EXHIBITION IN
SEVASTOPOL AND OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT
THE U.S. AND RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHS:
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5.
RUSSIAN FAMINE PHOTOGRAPHS INFORMATION
ArtUkraine.com website, Morgan Williams, Publisher, Kyiv,
Ukraine
==================================================
Mr. E. Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs, Washington
Office,
SigmaBleyzer, Emerging Markets Private Equity Investment
Group;
President/CEO, U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC)
Publisher & Editor, Action Ukraine Report (AUR)
Founder/Trustee: Holodomor: Through The Eyes Of Ukrainian
Artists