2.
THANK YOU AGAIN, MORGAN
Newark,
Nottinghamshire, UK, Sent: Mon, Nov 16, 2009 6:36 PM
Subject: Thank You again, Morgan
Dear Morgan,
I am here yet again writing to you to thank you
tremendously, for not only your continued
support, for not only your crucial 2003 e-mail to us, 'is this
the 'fabled' Gareth Jones who exposed the Holodomor' when you
first found our new website about Gareth Jones, but also your initial
leap of faith in being the first to put us
personally in touch with James Mace.
I am
sure he is smiling down upon us, like Gareth too as the pen is indeed
at long last proving to be mightier than the Soviet
sword. From little acorns do indeed mighty oak trees grow, but
I wonder whether we are just half way up the mountain; who knows the
height of the summit of what we have unleashed together?
To date, the Cambridge PR machine has gotten the Wren story
into 165 newspapers worldwide (and John Burns, the UK, NYT
correspondent is currently writing a considered article for later this
week, though whether it is published is another matter. Watch this
space; miracles do occasionally happen). BTW - I saw that the
Moscow Times also ran the story today with a legible photo of one of
the diary pages – somewhat poignant don’t you think, that GJ’s
incriminating diaries have come back to the scene of the crime and with
such prestige!
FYI - The UK premiere of The Living on the Friday night was full - 200
people and then there was a Q&A session afterwards for about
half an hour with Siriol and I, followed by a cheese and wine
reception. I was given a room at Trinity Masters' Lodge be-decked with
antique furniture and along with a 300-year old, four poster
bed! My goodness, when they say that academics lived in a
cloistered world, they were not wrong!
On the Saturday morning, my family all went to The Wren to see the
exhibit in situ, which is being displayed for the Michaelmas term, then
who knows, maybe we ought to consider touring it (security,
professional handling and insurances permitting)? BTW I have just
updated the Gareth Jones website with a picture of Siriol and
I at the Wren, along with Irish-American, Rory Finnan, the Lecturer in
Ukrainian Studies at Cambridge, who made it all happen: http://garethjones.org/Gareth_Jones_diaries.htm.
Anyway, enough from me, bar to let you know that I am off States-side
on Saturday to give a speech at the UN at the opening of an Holodomor
exhibition there on the 24th; these are heady days for us all...
As ever, with kindest regards (and hope we meet soon, but please do
keep up the good work as without your help along the way, we would not
be where we are today). Thank you!
Nigel
Nigel Linsan Colley, Newark, Nottinghamshire, UK, E-mail: [email protected]
AUHR FOOTNOTE:
Nigel Linsan Colley is Gareth Jones's grand nephew. Dr.
Margaret Siriol Colley is copied on this e-mail from Nigel Linsan
Colley. Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley is Gareth Jones's niece
and Nigel Linsan Colley's mother. Do not miss the tremendous
amount of very important material on the Gareth Jones website: http://garethjones.org.
=======================================
3.
TALE OF TWO JOURNALISTS
Walter Duranty, Gareth Jones, and the
Pulitzer Prize
Article
by Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 15, 2003
The
lady is the niece of one Gareth Jones (1905-1935), a journalist who had
the courage to tell the truth about the despicable things he had seen
in Ukraine in the spring of 1933. For his courage he paid with his
professional reputation and being long all but forgotten.
The
hatchet man in this tale was one Walter Duranty, winner of the 1932
Pulitzer Prize for writing stories from the Soviet Union, reportage
that he had already freely confessed "always reflected the official
Soviet point of view and not his own." And here begins a tale of one
journalist being crushed for his honesty and another rewarded for his
mendacity. It is a tale that touches directly both on the ethics of
journalism and the history of Ukraine.
Journalists
often like to think of themselves as fearless fighters for the public's
right to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. To
reward those who actually did so an extremely successful Hungarian-born
American journalist named Joseph Pulitzer willed that his legacy be
used in part to fund prizes in his name for outstanding achievements in
drama, letters, music, and journalism. The prizes, modest in money but
tremendous in terms of the honor they convey on their recipients, have
been awarded annually since 1917.
In
reality, journalists, like everyone else, are rarely completely
faithful to the ideals they profess. And prizes, even prestigious ones
like the Pulitzer, sometimes go to scoundrels. Dr. Colley demands the
revocation of the Pulitzer Prize from the scoundrel that led a campaign
for Stalin's Soviet Union from the most prestigious newspaper in the
United States, the New York Times, to discredit her uncle for honestly
trying to do what journalists are supposed to do, for telling people
the truth.
Walter Duranty, born in Liverpool (England) in 1884, was always
something of a scoundrel and openly relished in being able to get away
with it. In S. J. Taylor's excellent biography, "Stalin's Apologist:
Walter Duranty: The New York Time's Man in Moscow" (Oxford University
Press, 1990), he is seen lying even about his own family origins,
claiming in his autobiography to have been an only child orphaned at
ten, neither of which was true: his mother died in 1916 and his sister
fourteen years later, a spinster; when his father died in 1933, he left
an estate of only г430.
After finishing his university studies, he drifted to Paris, where he
dabbled in Satanism, opium, and sex on both sides of the bed-sheets. By
the time World War I broke out, he had a job as a reporter for the New
York Times and could thus avoid actual combat. Duranty seems to have
known that the key to success in journalism can often be in first
determining what the readers want and then gauging how the facts might
fit in with it. His reportage was always lively, eminently readable,
and usually - but by no means always - had some relationship to the
facts.
Still,
he realized that in the American free press, newspapers are made to
make money for their owners, and the reporter's job is to write
something people would want to read enough that they would go out and
buy his employer's newspaper. It is the classic relationship between
labor and management in a market economy: the more effective a worker
is at helping his employer make more money, the better chance he stands
of getting higher pay, a better job, or other attributes of worldly
success.
For Duranty, this system seems to have worked quite well. After the
war, he was sent to the new independent Baltic states and in 1921 was
among the first foreign reporters allowed into the Soviet Union. This
latter achievement was a major one, for the Soviet Union was never shy
about exercising control over who could come or leave. A Western
reporter in the Soviet Union always knew that if one wrote something
offensive enough to the Soviet authorities, he would be expelled and
never allowed to return.
There was thus a strong professional incentive not to be that person.
Duranty understood this better than anyone else, but just in case
someone among the journalists forgot this simple truth, there was a
Soviet press officer to remind him. During the First Five Year Plan,
the head of the Soviet Press Office was Konstantin Umansky (or
Oumansky: he liked it better the French way).
Eugene Lyons, who had known Umansky at a distance since he had been a
TASS correspondent in the United States and the latter chief of its
Foreign Bureau, probably knew this little man with black curly hair and
gold teeth as well as any of the foreign correspondents. He described
the system as more one of give- and-take with the foreign
correspondents sometimes backing the censor down through a show of
professional solidarity (it would have been, after all, too much of an
embarrassment for the Soviets to expel all the foreign correspondents),
often in a spirit of give- and-take and compromise. But the telegraph
office would simply not send cables without Umansky's permission.
Moreover,
convinced that the Soviet experiment was so much superior to the all
too evident evils of capitalism, a huge segment of the West's
intellectuals wanted desperately to look with hope on the Soviet
experiment, which, for all its failures, seemed to offer a beacon. And
in a world where access to newsmakers is often the only thing between
having something to print or not, access to power itself becomes a
commodity. As Lyons himself put it his memoir, "Assignment in Utopia"
(1937):
"The real medium of exchange in Moscow, buying that which neither
rubles nor dollars can touch, was power. And power meant Comrade
Stalin, Comrade Umansky, the virtuoso of kombinatsya, the fellow who's
uncle's best friend has a cousin on the collegium of the G.P.U. To be
invited to exclusive social functions, to play bridge with the
big-bugs, to be patted on the back editorially by Pravda, to have the
social ambitions of one's wife flattered: such inducements are more
effective in bridling a correspondent's tongue than any threats...
Whether in Moscow or Berlin, Tokyo or Rome, all the temptations for a
practicing reporter are in the direction of conformity. It is more
comfortable and in the long run more profitable to soft-pedal a
dispatch for readers thousands of miles away than to face an irate
censor and closed official doors."
Both Lyons and Duranty knew the rules of this game so well that both
had been rewarded before the Holodomor by being granted an interview
with Stalin himself, the Holy Grail of the Moscow foreign press corps.
Umansky knew how to award and punish foreigners. Perhaps this is why he
would later move on into the diplomatic "beau monde" of Washington, DC.
Lyons, who came to Russia as an American Communist sycophant, then
becoming a disillusioned anti-Communist, paid the price. His lady
translator, it seems, brought to his attention an item in "Molot," a
newspaper from Rostov-on-the-Don, designed to cow the local inhabitants
but not for foreign consumption, announcing the mass deportation of
three Ukrainian Cossack "stanitsas" from the Kuban. Nine months after
he broke the story, he was gone from the Soviet Union for good.
Into this world walked a young English socialist, Malcolm Muggeridge,
who had married the niece of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, then icons in
the Soviet Union for their work to turn the Soviet experiment into an
icon for socialist intellectuals in the West. Coming from such a
background, young Malcolm and his wife even sold their furniture,
convinced that they would remain in the Soviet Union as he reported for
the "Manchester Guardian." Yet, when he arrived, he quickly saw that
the Five Year Plan was not quite all it was cracked up to be.
Perhaps
the first inkling of the panoply of characters he happened onto was at
a reception at the British Embassy in Moscow in the fall of 1932 when
he found himself sitting between old Soviet apologist Anna Louise
Strong and the Great Duranty, the most famous foreign correspondent of
his day and fresh from his Pulitzer Prize.
Miss
Strong, he wrote in his memoirs, "Chronicles of Wasted Time" (1972),
"was an enormous woman with a very red face, a lot of white hair, and
an expression of stupidity so overwhelming that it amounted to a
strange kind of beauty," adding, "Duranty, a little sharp-witted
energetic man, was a much more controversial person; I should say there
was more talk about him in Moscow than anyone else, certainly among
foreigners.
"His
household, where I visited him once or twice, included a Russian woman
named Katya, by whom I believe he had a son. I always enjoyed his
company; there was something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous, about
his unscrupulousness which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing.
I suppose no one - not even Louis Fischer - followed the Party Line,
every shift and change, as assiduously as he did. In Oumansky's eyes he
was perfect, and was constantly held up to the rest of us as an example
of what we should be."
"It, of course, suited his material interests thus to write everything
the Soviet authorities wanted him to - that the collectivisation of
agriculture was working well, with no famine conditions anywhere; that
the purges were justified, the confessions genuine, and the judicial
procedure impeccable. Because of these acquiescent attitudes - so
ludicrously false that they were a subject of derision among the other
correspondents and even (Soviet censor - Author) Podolsky had been
known to make jokes about them - Duranty never had any trouble getting
a visa, or a house, or interviews with whomever he wanted."
Such subservience to a regime that was one of two truly evil systems of
the twentieth century, for which the term "totalitarianism" is most
often applied, was marked by a veneer of objective analysis and
certainly not without insight - he was the first to have "put his money
on Stalin," as he put it, and is even credited with having first coined
the word "Stalinism" to describe the evolving System - and he was
always fascinating to read, even more to talk to.
He
was the most famed foreign correspondent of the time; a nice apartment
in Moscow complete with a live-in lover, by whom he did indeed beget a
son, and an oriental servant to do the cooking and cleaning; was the
social center of the life of foreigners in Moscow; and took frequent
trips abroad, as he put it, to retain his sense of what was news.
Simultaneously, there was a strange sort of honesty to his privately
admitting that he was indeed an apologist. In the 1980s during the
course of my own research on the Ukrainian Holodomor I came across a
most interesting document in the US National Archives, a memorandum
from one A. W. Kliefoth of the US Embassy in Berlin dated June 4, 1931.
Duranty
dropped in to renew his passport. Mr. Kliefoth thought it might be of
possible interest to the State Department that this journalist, in
whose reporting so much credence was placed, had told him "that, 'in
agreement with the "New York Times" and the Soviet authorities,' his
official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet
government and not his own'."
Note
that the American consular official thought it particularly important
for his superiors that the phrase, in agreement with the "New York
Times" and the Soviet authorities, was a direct quotation. This was
precisely the sort of journalistic integrity that was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
Into the world of Moscow journalism, a world where everybody had to
make his own decision on the moral dilemma Lyons' framed as "to tell or
not to tell," came one Gareth Jones, a brilliant young man who had
studied Russian and graduated with honors from Cambridge and became an
adviser on foreign policy to former British Prime Minister David Lloyd
George.
At
the age of 25, in 1930 he went to the Soviet Union to inform his
employer what was happening there, his reports were considered so
straightforward that they were then published in the London "Times" as
"An Observer's Notes." The following year he returned and published
some of the materials under his own names. Having gained a reputation
for integrity in honestly trying to get to the bottom of things, in
1932 he wrote with foreboding about the food situation as people asked,
"Will their be soup?"
By the early spring of 1933, the fact that famine was raging in Ukraine
and the Kuban, two-thirds of the population of which happened to be
Ukrainian, was common knowledge in Moscow among foreign diplomats,
foreign correspondents, and even the man in the street. In response to
Lyon's "revelations" from the regional official Soviet press, a ban had
imposed in foreign journalists traveling to the areas in question.
Upon
checking with his colleagues in Moscow what they knew - on the
understanding, of course, that their names would never be mentioned -
Jones decided it was worth it to defy the prohibition and buy a ticket
at the train station to the places affected as a private person, which
was not forbidden. Once there, he employed his simple but logical
method of getting off the train and walking for several hours until he
was certain he was off the beaten track and start talking to the local.
He spent a couple of weeks, walked about forty miles, talked to people,
slept in their huts, and was appalled at what he saw. Rushing back to
Moscow and out of the Soviet Union, Jones stopped off first in Berlin,
where he gave a press conference and fired off a score of articles
about the tragedy he had seen firsthand. "I walked alone through
villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is
no bread; we are dying.' ..." ("Manchester Guardian," March 30, 1933).
Young Muggeridge, who would live to a ripe old age and become one of
the most revered journalists of the twentieth century, had done much
the same, sent his dispatches out through the British diplomatic pouch,
and published much the same earlier but under the anonymous byline of
"An Observer's Notes," created barely a ripple because his story was
the unconfirmed report of some unknown observer.
Yet,
now stood young Mr. Jones, the confidant of prime ministers and
millionaires, a young man who was able to get interviews with Hitler
and Mussolini. Here Mr. Umansky and his superiors in the Soviet
hierarchy encountered a problem that could not be ignored. But Soviet
officialdom already had a trump up its sleeve, one certain to bring
into line any recalcitrant members of the Moscow press corps infected
by an excess of integrity, at least for the duration of their stay.
A couple of weeks earlier, the GPU had arrested six British citizens
and several Russians on charges of industrial espionage. Announcement
was made that public trial was in preparation. This was news. Putting
their own people in the dock was one thing, but accusing white men,
Englishmen, of skullduggery was something else.
This
promised to be the trial of the century, and every journalist working
for a newspaper in the English-speaking world knew that this was
precisely the type of story that their editors were paying them to
cover. To be locked out would have been equivalent to professional
suicide. The dilemma of to tell or not to tell was never put more
brutally.
Umansky read the situation perfectly, and Lyon's summed up what
happened in a way that needs no retelling:
"On emerging from Russia, Jones made a statement which, startling
though it sounded, was little more than a summary of what the
correspondents and foreign diplomats had told him. To protect us, and
perhaps with some idea of heightening the authenticity of his reports,
he emphasized his Ukrainian foray rather than our conversation as the
chief source of his information...
"Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in
the years of juggling facts in order to please dictatorial regimes-but
throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of
equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human
being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths
were snowed under by our denials.
"The scene in which the American press corps combined to repudiate
Jones is fresh in my mind. It was in the evening and Constantine
Umansky, the soul of graciousness consented to meet us in the hotel
room of a correspondent. He knew that he had a strategic advantage over
us because of the Metro-Vickers story. He could afford to be gracious.
Forced by competitive journalism to jockey for the inside track with
officials, it would have been professional suicide to make an issue of
the famine at that time. There was much bargaining in the spirit of
gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effluence of Umansky's gilded
smile, before a formula of denial was worked out.
"We admitted enough to sooth our consciences, but in round- about
phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been
disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski, Umansky joined the
celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning
hours. The head censor was in a mellower mood than I had ever seen
before or since. He had done a big bit for Bolshevik firmness that
night."
Duranty took the point position in the campaign against Jones. On March
31, 1933, "The New York Times" carried on page 13 an article that might
well be studied in schools of journalism as an example of how to walk
the tightrope between truth and lie so masterfully that the two seem to
exchange places under the acrobat's feet.
It
is called "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" and begins by placing
Jones' revelations in a context that seems to make everything quite
clear: "In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and
the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from
a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine
in the Soviet Union, With 'thousands already dead and millions menaced
by death from starvation.' "
Of course, this put everything in its proper place, at least enough for
the United States to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union
in November of that year. So much so that when a dinner was given in
honor of Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov in New York's posh
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, when it came time to pay tribute to Duranty, the
cheers were so thunderous that American critic and bon-vivant Alexander
Woolcott wrote, "Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in
a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty."
At the same time that Duranty was so actively denying the existence of
the famine in public, he was quite open in admitting it in private. On
September 26, 1933 in a private conversation with William Strang of the
British Embassy in Moscow, he stated, "it is quite possible that as
many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from
lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."
The
little Englishman indeed seemed to have gotten away with it. But his
further career was a gradual sinking into obscurity and penury, his
Katia in Moscow berating him for taking no interest in the education of
their son and asking that he send more money, that is, of course, when
he could. He married on his deathbed in late September 1957.
A
week later, on October 3, he died from an internal hemorrhage
complicated by pulmonary emphysema at the age of seventy-three. Nothing
further of his son is known. Jones had attempted to defend himself in a
letter to the "New York Times" and Malcolm Muggeridge, once out of the
Soviet Union declined to write a letter in support of Jones, although
Jones had publicly commended Muggeridge's unsigned articles in the
Manchester Guardian. Various organizations, mostly on the Right, took
up the cause of the telling the world about the Great Famine of
1932-1933, but within two or three years the issue faded into the
background and was largely forgotten.
Gareth Jones was himself nonplussed. In a letter to a friend who
intended to visit the Soviet Union, Gareth wrote: "Alas! You will be
very amused to hear that the inoffensive little 'Joneski' has achieved
the dignity of being a marked man on the black list of the O.G.P.U. and
is barred from entering the Soviet Union. I hear that there is a long
list of crimes which I have committed under my name in the secret
police file in Moscow and funnily enough espionage is said to be among
them. As a matter of fact Litvinoff [Soviet Foreign Minister] sent a
special cable from Moscow to the Soviet Embassy in London to tell them
to make the strongest of complaints to Mr. Lloyd George about me."
Jones and those who sided with him were snowed under a blanket of
denials. When one by one the American journalists left the Soviet
Union, they wrote books about what they had seen. Muggeridge wrote a
thinly disguised novel, "Winter in Moscow" (1934), in which the names
were changed, but it was clear who everybody was. Only Jones, it seems,
was really concealed in the fact that the character of such integrity,
given the name of Pye by the author, was older, a smoker, a drinker,
none of which the real Jones was.
In
his memoirs, Muggeridge seems to have forgotten altogether the man who
actually broke the story of the Ukrainian Holodomor Famine-Genocide
under his own name. Perhaps he felt a little guilty that his courage in
this situation was not quite as great as the Welshman who had the bad
luck to have been murdered in China in 1935, probably to prevent him
from telling the world that the new state of Manchukuo was not nearly
as nice a place as its Japanese sponsors wanted the world to believe.
There is perhaps something of a parallel to the story of Gareth Jones.
There was also in 1981 another young man, then twenty- nine years old
and a newly minted Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, hired by the
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute to study the Holodomor. After
nearly a decade, when the Commission on the Ukraine Famine was wrapping
up, he was informed that the fellowship he had been offered for an
academic year had been cut back to a semester.
Having
nowhere else to turn, he settled for that. "We expected he'd refuse,
but he accepted," a colleague was told. The next year he was invited
for a yearlong fellowship to the University of Illinois. A fund of
well-meaning Ukrainian-Americans was ready to donate a million dollars
to endow a chair for this man. Those who taught Russian and East
European history led him to understand, however, that, while they would
be quite happy to take the money, whoever might get the chair, it would
certainly not be he.
It is unknown who exactly played the role of Umansky in this particular
tale or whether vodka was served afterward, but the carrot and stick
are fairly obvious: access to scholarly resources in Moscow vs. the
veto of any research projects. In a world where a number of scholars
slanted their journal articles and monographs as adroitly as Duranty
did his press coverage, I am tempted to someday venture my own
counterpart to Winter in Moscow, based on the published works that make
the players all too easy to discern. For I was that once young man. But
in contrast to Jones, I have found a place to live, married the woman I
love, teach, and have and a forum from which I can from time to time be
heard.
Despite Duranty's prophesies, the Ukrainians did not forget what had
happened to them in 1933, and seventy years later the Ukrainian-
Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian World Congress,
with support from a number of other leading Ukrainian diaspora
organizations, have organized a campaign to reopen the issue of Walter
Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize with a view to stripping him of it. They
have sent thousands of postcards and letters to the Pulitzer Prizes
Committee at Columbia University, 709 Journalism Building, 2950
Broadway, New York, NY, USA 10027.
We invite our readers who might have any thoughts on the matter to join
them in so doing, in English, of course. Meanwhile, as a professional
courtesy, the editors have already sent an e-mail of this article to
all the members of the Pulitzer Prizes Committee in the hope that it
might help them in their deliberations on this issue.
The whole story of denying the crimes of a regime that cost millions of
lives is one of the saddest in the history of the American free press,
just as the Holodomor is certainly the saddest page in the history of a
nation, whose appearance on the world state was so unexpected that
there is, in fact, a quite successful book in English, "The Ukrainians:
Unexpected Nation."
Still, it would be only appropriate if that nation, which was for so
long so safe to ignore and then appeared so unexpectedly, expressed
itself on the fate of a man who also was victimized so unexpectedly,
simply for trying honestly to find out and then tell the truth.
Ukrainians abroad want justice done by stripping that young man's chief
victimizer of a Pulitzer Prize that makes a mockery of any conceivable
ideals of journalism.
They
have been joined by a host of respected journalists in the West. Is it
not only right that the people most affected by the events in which the
struggle between truth and falsehood, idealism and cynicism, were so
blatant that it reads almost like a melodrama, also make its collective
voice heard? By asserting justice in the past, we help attain it for
ourselves.
======================================================================
4. "HOLODOMOR
STUDIES," JOURNAL VOL 1, ISSUE 2 PUBLISHED
Action Ukraine History Report (AUHR),
Washington, D.C., Tue, Nov 17, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Vol 1, Issue
2 of the new journal "Holodomor Studies," Roman Serbyn,
Editor, has been published by Charles Schlacks, Idyllwild,
CA. Issue 1 was published in the winter-spring of
2009. Copies of both issues of the "Holodomor Journal" are
available for purchase. Information about annual
subscriptions and the purchase of individual copies is found
below. Please order your copy today. More
subscriptions are needed to keep the journal in publication.
The
table of contents for "Holodomor Studies," Vol 1, Issue 2 is shown
below:
EDITOR’S FOREWORD:Roman
Serbyn
SYMPOSIUM: HOLODOMOR
AS GENOCIDE
Introductory Remarks: Cormac
O'Grada
Holodomor
– the Ukrainian Genocide: Roman
Serbyn
Investigating the Holodomor: Stanislav
Kulchytsky
Hunger of
1932-1933 – a Tragedy of the Peoples of the USSR: Viktor
Kondrashin
Causation
and Responsibility in the Holodomor Tragedy: Stephen
Wheatcroft
ARTICLE
The 1932-1933 Holodomor in the Kuban: Evidence of the Ukrainian
Genocide: Volodymyr Serhijchuk
DOCUMENTS
A
Selection of Soviet Documents on the
Holodomor
Compiled, edited and introduced by Roman Serbyn
Public
Pressure on the International Committee of the Red-Cross as it Waited
for the Soviet Reply on the Ukrainian Famine
Compiled, edited and introduced by Roman Serbyn
REVIEW ARTICLES
Two Forceful Collections and Documents on
the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933. Yaroslav Bilinski
Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-Related Resources Recently Acquired
by the Library of Congress: Jurij Dobczansky
BOOK REVIEWS
Papers from Holodomor Conferences at University of Toronto and Harvard:
Andrew Sorokowski
Vasyl Barka and his Zhovty kniaz: Bohdanna Monczak
SUBSCRIPTION RATES:
The journal "Holodomor Studies" is published
semi-annually. Annual subscription rates
are: institutions - $40.00; individuals - $20.00 - Postage in
the USA is $6.00, in Canada it is $12.00; and foreign postage is
$20.00. Sent payment to: Charles Schlacks,
Publisher, P. O. Box 1256, Idyllwild, CA 92549-1256, contact: [email protected]. Order
your copy of the new journal "Holodomor Studies" today!
ARTICLES FOR PUBLICATION:
Contributions submitted for possible publication should be sent to the
editor, Roman Serbyn, in e-mail format to [email protected].
============================================================
5.
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN RECALLING GENOCIDAL
GREAT FAMINE
LAUNCHED
Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation (UCCLF)
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Mon, 16 November 2009
OTTAWA - An educational campaign recalling
the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, known as the
Holodomor, was launched today.
Thousands of postcards are being sent to embassies and consulates
internationally, urging governments to officially recognize that this
famine was an act of genocide perpetrated by the Soviet regime of
Joseph Stalin. Canada is one of the few countries that has already
recognized the Holodomor as genocidal.
Drawing upon the writings of Dr. Raphael Lemkin, the "father of the
[UN] Genocide Convention," who described the "destruction of the
Ukrainian nation" as the "classic example of Soviet genocide," the
Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation and partner groups around
the world are mailing postcards featuring a pastel drawing of Lemkin
and an excerpt from his 1953 speech "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine,"
an effort timed to coincide with the annual day of mourning for the
Holodomor's victims (28 November).
Commenting, Professor Lubomyr Luciuk, editor of the book "Holodomor:
Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine," said:
"Many
millions of men, women and children suffered agonizing deaths in Soviet
Ukraine in 1932-1933 during what was arguably one of the greatest acts
of
genocide to befoul 20th century European history. To this day there are
Holodomor-deniers attempting to obfuscate what happened, continuing to
cover
up this Communist crime against humanity.
"This educational effort is therefore aimed at reminding governments
everywhere that the father of the United Nations Convention on Genocide
was
personally convinced of the genocidal character of Soviet rule in
Ukraine. We are also calling upon countries that believe in upholding
the relevance
of the UN Genocide Convention to officially recognize the truth of what
happened during the Holodomor."
NOTE:
For the full text of Dr. Raphael Lemkin's speech and to see the
postcard, please go to www.uccla.ca
(Sources & Issues: Great Famine section)
or click on www.uccla.ca/SOVIET_GENOCIDE_IN_THE_UKRAINE.pdf.
To contact Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, please e-mail: [email protected]
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6. UKRAINIAN
HOLODOMOR OF 1932-1933:
"THE WORST HOLOCAUST THE
WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN"
18th Annual Genocidal Famine Memorial in New
York City
Consistory
Office of Public Relations, Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA
South
Bound Brook, NJ, Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The
Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933: "The Worst Holocaust the World has
even known." With these powerful words, Senator Charles Schumer, Senior
United States Senator from the state of New York, described and defined
the genocide committed against the Ukrainian Nation and her people 76
years ago in 1932-33.
He
declared that the communist regime of Russia was not simply attempting
to force the Ukrainian people into collective farming, or to erase the
small land owners – the kulaks, or to wipe out the
“intelligentsia”. The real goal of the genocide was to
“completely eradicate Ukraine as a nation”.
Senator
Shumer was participating in the annual Genocidal Famine Memorial, which
takes place each year at St. Patrick Cathedral, New York City, during
the month of November.
This
was the 18th year in a row that Ukrainians-Americans and others from
New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and as far away as
Washington, D. C. joined together in prayer, commemorating those ten
million men, women and children lost in Josef Stalin’s horrifying
effort to destroy a people – a nation – long proud of their rich land,
which was known as the “bread basket of Europe”.
The
weather held down the attendance this year, which was only about
one-half the normal size, but those present were sincere in their
petition to God for the repose of the victims’ souls in that place
where the “Light our Lord’s Countenance shines upon them” and their
memory will be eternal.
The
annual commemoration is hosted each year by the Eastern Eparchy of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA and the Stamford Eparchy of the
Ukrainian Catholic Church of the USA in which the city of New York is
located and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, centered in
New York City. Archbishop Antony of our Church and Bishop
Paul of the Stamford Eparchy are the host hierarchs.
The
Archbishop opened the commemoration this year declaring that “we have
no right to forget those who perished senselessly” in spite of the
attempts of the government of Russia today, along with those of some
other nations to categorize the famine as a ‘natural phenomenon” for
which the godless regime bore no responsibility.”
The
Archbishop continued: “We will continue to remind all mankind of the
sanctity of life and the God-given rights of every individual human
being. We will remind the world’s political leaders that they
no longer have unlimited and unquestioned power to destroy life…in
Ukraine or in any other nation of the world.”
Five hierarchs participated in the Memorial Service, which
followed: His Beatitude Metropolitan Constantine of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church, His Eminence Metropolitan Stefan of the
Ukrainian Catholic Church, His Grace Bishop Emeritus Basil of the
Ukrainian Catholic Church and His Grace Bishop Daniel of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church.
They
were joined by over thirty priests and deacons of the two churches in
beseeching God’s loving mercy for the victims of the famine.
The Dumka Ukrainian Chorus, under the direction of Vasyl Hrechynsky
beautifully sang the responses for the Panakhyda and the prayer for our
Ukrainian nation, “Bozhe Velykyj”
Tamara
Gallo Olexy, President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America,
offered opening remarks and served as Master of Ceremonies for the
program that followed the memorial service. She spoke of the
consequences of the famine for Ukraine and the effect it has had on all
succeeding generations of the Ukrainian population. Mr. John
Love, of the U.S. State Department, read the statement issued by
President Barack Obama on the occasion of the Famine
Commemoration.
Representatives of the government of Ukraine – His Excellency Oleh
Shamshur, Ambassador to the USA and His Excellency Yuriy Sergeyev –
Ambassador to the United Nations – also spoke. Mr. Shamshur
announced that the Ukrainian government will provide funding for the
establishing of a Famine Monument in the heart Washington, D.C. across
from the United States Capitol building and Union Station.
Mr. Sergeyev spoke of continued efforts at the United Nations aimed at
educating the world about the darkest hour of our Ukrainian
history.
Metropolitan
Stefan (Soroka) made concluding remarks about the history of the famine
and its never ending effect upon Ukrainian history. The
Metropolitan also expressed gratitude to all who participated in the
memorial services and program, as well as to His Excellency Archbishop
Dolan, the head of the Roman Catholic diocese of New York, for his
kindness in providing the Cathedral for this ecumenical
service.
CONTACT:
His Grace Bishop Daniel, Consistory Office of Public Relations,
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, P.O. Box 495,
South Bound Brook, NJ, Web: www.uocofusa.org;
E-mail: [email protected].
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