A year on from the debate in the Welsh Parliament on whether to deem the Ukrainian famine a genocide Philip Colley reflects on the use, and misuse, of his great uncle’s Soviet famine testimony
Although the famine in the USSR affected all peoples in the region, not just Ukrainians, it is very likely that Ukrainian famine and famine in the USSR in general was 'helped' to a great degree by Hitler's saboteurs, in particular Chernov. In his book "Sabotage" Michael Sayers writes: "Shortly before Hitler came to power, Paul Scheffer (Hitler's asset, spy and saboteur) traveled to the Soviet Union as “foreign correspondent” for the Berliner Tageblatt. Scheffer’s orders were to contact Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov, who then headed the Peoples' Commissariat of Trade in the Ukraine and was soon to become head of the Peoples' Commissariat of Agriculture of the entire U. S. S. R.
Chernov was already in the pay of the German Intelligence, receiving an average of 4,000 rubles a month in return for providing the Germans with Russian military and trade secrets. Scheffer’s password to Chernov was “Reinhold”—the pseudonym by which Chernov was known in the files of Section IIIB.
Even at this early date the German High Command was planning a vast campaign of sabotage against Soviet agriculture and industry. Chernov later admitted that Scheffer used him to organize a ring of saboteurs among opposition elements in the Soviet Union. Scheffer operated from the Moscow
offices of the Berliner Tageblatt. He still posed as a liberal.
“I had a number of periodical meetings with Scheffer, Chernov later testified before the Supreme Court of the U. S. S. R. “I transmitted information to the German Intelligence Service, and through him received instructions from the latter about the organization of wrecking work. I had an especially long conversation with Scheffer on the organization of wrecking work in the sphere of grain collections and grain supplies. The chief task assigned to me by the German Intelligence Service at that time was to arrange to spoil grain within the country. . .. Those commissions that Scheffer gave me I carried out."
The complete record of the sabotage carried out by Chernov in Soviet Russia during 1930-36 is too long to give here in its entirety. These are just a few of his accomplishments:
1. creating a discrepancy between grain collections and storage space, thus spoiling the grain and arousing the indignation of the peasants who saw their products ruined; 2. arranging for the wholesale contamination of storehouses by pests, particularly by the corn beetles; 3. carrying on wrecking activities in such fields as seed, crop rotation, machine and tractor stations; 4. killing off pedigree breed-stock and raising cattle mortality by preventing the development of fodder resources and especially by artificially infecting cattle with various kinds of bacteria; 5. effecting a shortage of the serum to counteract epidemics of anthrax (in one case, 25,000 horses perished as a result of Chernov’s sabotage in this field)” (p. 19)
-----
In his extremely important essay, "Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union" Mario Sousa has written about a "special" role Ukraine played in Hitler's plans:
"The Ukraine as a German Territory
At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilized in a ‘proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of ‘inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labor force in German homes, factories and fields — anywhere they were needed by the German economy.
The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the ‘liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed ‘genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libelous rumors about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he traveled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.
After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union — murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand.
The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine
One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 8 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American ‘6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathizer, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine.
The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine — a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists — went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union."
--------
The Sousa essay should also clear up the propaganda myth about "Stalin's voiceless victims"...
Stalin’s voiceless victims? If only it were a myth. Sousa is absolutely right that the 1934/35 famine as presented in Hearst’s organs was a propaganda fabrication, one dreamt up in the offices of Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern. They wanted the famine to be the gift that kept on giving even when, after the 1933 harvest, it became a shadow of its former self. And the main reasons for the fabrication are very much the ones Sousa points to. In addition however, and more immediately, they were trying to raise money, on the pretext of famine relief, something done largely through the efforts of Ammende and Cardinal Innitzer. Famine relief went hand in hand with propaganda work at home and among the German colonists Volksdeutsche in the USSR, who were to prove so useful post-1941 and to whom it allowed access. The journalist Louis Fischer incidentally was the person who exposed Hearst’s fraud, something which lead to all famine reporting, including Gareth Jones’ genuine, becoming suspect. But to use the myth of the 1934/35 famine to deny the reality of the 1932/33 famine is pure sophistry. Millions died horrific, agonising deaths across the USSR and, in many parts of Soviet Ukraine in particular, the hellscape in late summer of 1933 lies beyond our imagination. Anyone who denies that is working from a political agenda rather than a historical one and should ask questions of themselves. The figure of 2.6-3.9 million deaths in Ukraine is accepted in all academic circles with a similar if not greater number perishing in the rest of the USSR. In terms of proportion of population the number who died in Kazakhstan and Ukraine dwarfed those who died elsewhere. And the famine was undoubtedly man-made, and although many men were involved, the man in front of whom the buck stops is Stalin. Without the decisions he made the famine in the form it took would not have happened. So those who died were, without question, his victims. You can make the ‘no omelette without breaking eggs’ argument, you can make the argument, as Tottle does, that without Stalin’s breakneck collectivization/ industrialisation the USSR wouldn’t have been able to resist Hitler. But nonetheless those who died in the famine were his victims. And as the Soviets tried to hide the existence of the famine they were, without question, save for the efforts of a very few journalists and other scant witnesses, denied a voice. They were, whether you like it or not, Stalin’s voiceless victims.
There is no question that millions were victims of the famine. What the question, and the point of the article, is is to ask whether that famine has been weaponized by the Ukrainian Far Right, by the OUN-B, firstly to deflect from that organisation’s significant involvement in the Holocaust, secondly to demonise Russia with unfair accusations of genocide as part of NATO’s war effort and thirdly to provide a shared victimhood around which to build the post-Soviet nation – even though most of those in the OUN were from Galicia and therefore unaffected by the famine. I would argue that, in all three cases, it has.
As for the policy of lebensraum, this long pre-dated Hitler. Much of what we now call Ukraine had already been under the control of Germany from the end of Brest-Litovsk until end of World War 1
Finally, apart from Chernov’s highly questionable accusation at the time of his show trial, I’m not sure there is any evidence at all that Scheffer was Hitler’s saboteur and spy. And the idea that Nazis had any role in creating the famine, when still not even or barely in power, is fanciful. They embraced its propaganda value, but they had nothing to do with creating it. It was a Bolshevik thing.
See my comment debunking the myth of "Stalin's victims". It is a very persistent myth that is popular among both anticommunist right and anticommunist left.
Although the famine in the USSR affected all peoples in the region, not just Ukrainians, it is very likely that Ukrainian famine and famine in the USSR in general was 'helped' to a great degree by Hitler's saboteurs, in particular Chernov. In his book "Sabotage" Michael Sayers writes: "Shortly before Hitler came to power, Paul Scheffer (Hitler's asset, spy and saboteur) traveled to the Soviet Union as “foreign correspondent” for the Berliner Tageblatt. Scheffer’s orders were to contact Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov, who then headed the Peoples' Commissariat of Trade in the Ukraine and was soon to become head of the Peoples' Commissariat of Agriculture of the entire U. S. S. R.
Chernov was already in the pay of the German Intelligence, receiving an average of 4,000 rubles a month in return for providing the Germans with Russian military and trade secrets. Scheffer’s password to Chernov was “Reinhold”—the pseudonym by which Chernov was known in the files of Section IIIB.
Even at this early date the German High Command was planning a vast campaign of sabotage against Soviet agriculture and industry. Chernov later admitted that Scheffer used him to organize a ring of saboteurs among opposition elements in the Soviet Union. Scheffer operated from the Moscow
offices of the Berliner Tageblatt. He still posed as a liberal.
“I had a number of periodical meetings with Scheffer, Chernov later testified before the Supreme Court of the U. S. S. R. “I transmitted information to the German Intelligence Service, and through him received instructions from the latter about the organization of wrecking work. I had an especially long conversation with Scheffer on the organization of wrecking work in the sphere of grain collections and grain supplies. The chief task assigned to me by the German Intelligence Service at that time was to arrange to spoil grain within the country. . .. Those commissions that Scheffer gave me I carried out."
The complete record of the sabotage carried out by Chernov in Soviet Russia during 1930-36 is too long to give here in its entirety. These are just a few of his accomplishments:
1. creating a discrepancy between grain collections and storage space, thus spoiling the grain and arousing the indignation of the peasants who saw their products ruined; 2. arranging for the wholesale contamination of storehouses by pests, particularly by the corn beetles; 3. carrying on wrecking activities in such fields as seed, crop rotation, machine and tractor stations; 4. killing off pedigree breed-stock and raising cattle mortality by preventing the development of fodder resources and especially by artificially infecting cattle with various kinds of bacteria; 5. effecting a shortage of the serum to counteract epidemics of anthrax (in one case, 25,000 horses perished as a result of Chernov’s sabotage in this field)” (p. 19)
-----
In his extremely important essay, "Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union" Mario Sousa has written about a "special" role Ukraine played in Hitler's plans:
"The Ukraine as a German Territory
At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilized in a ‘proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of ‘inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labor force in German homes, factories and fields — anywhere they were needed by the German economy.
The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the ‘liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed ‘genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libelous rumors about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the ‘father’ of the so-called ‘yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.
William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he traveled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.
After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union — murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand.
The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine
One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 8 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American ‘6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathizer, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine.
The Hearst press articles asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine — a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists — went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union."
--------
The Sousa essay should also clear up the propaganda myth about "Stalin's voiceless victims"...
that never existed. https://medium.com/@lenabloch/lies-concerning-the-history-of-the-soviet-union-56bff2a6689a
Stalin’s voiceless victims? If only it were a myth. Sousa is absolutely right that the 1934/35 famine as presented in Hearst’s organs was a propaganda fabrication, one dreamt up in the offices of Goebbels’ Anti-Komintern. They wanted the famine to be the gift that kept on giving even when, after the 1933 harvest, it became a shadow of its former self. And the main reasons for the fabrication are very much the ones Sousa points to. In addition however, and more immediately, they were trying to raise money, on the pretext of famine relief, something done largely through the efforts of Ammende and Cardinal Innitzer. Famine relief went hand in hand with propaganda work at home and among the German colonists Volksdeutsche in the USSR, who were to prove so useful post-1941 and to whom it allowed access. The journalist Louis Fischer incidentally was the person who exposed Hearst’s fraud, something which lead to all famine reporting, including Gareth Jones’ genuine, becoming suspect. But to use the myth of the 1934/35 famine to deny the reality of the 1932/33 famine is pure sophistry. Millions died horrific, agonising deaths across the USSR and, in many parts of Soviet Ukraine in particular, the hellscape in late summer of 1933 lies beyond our imagination. Anyone who denies that is working from a political agenda rather than a historical one and should ask questions of themselves. The figure of 2.6-3.9 million deaths in Ukraine is accepted in all academic circles with a similar if not greater number perishing in the rest of the USSR. In terms of proportion of population the number who died in Kazakhstan and Ukraine dwarfed those who died elsewhere. And the famine was undoubtedly man-made, and although many men were involved, the man in front of whom the buck stops is Stalin. Without the decisions he made the famine in the form it took would not have happened. So those who died were, without question, his victims. You can make the ‘no omelette without breaking eggs’ argument, you can make the argument, as Tottle does, that without Stalin’s breakneck collectivization/ industrialisation the USSR wouldn’t have been able to resist Hitler. But nonetheless those who died in the famine were his victims. And as the Soviets tried to hide the existence of the famine they were, without question, save for the efforts of a very few journalists and other scant witnesses, denied a voice. They were, whether you like it or not, Stalin’s voiceless victims.
There is no question that millions were victims of the famine. What the question, and the point of the article, is is to ask whether that famine has been weaponized by the Ukrainian Far Right, by the OUN-B, firstly to deflect from that organisation’s significant involvement in the Holocaust, secondly to demonise Russia with unfair accusations of genocide as part of NATO’s war effort and thirdly to provide a shared victimhood around which to build the post-Soviet nation – even though most of those in the OUN were from Galicia and therefore unaffected by the famine. I would argue that, in all three cases, it has.
As for the policy of lebensraum, this long pre-dated Hitler. Much of what we now call Ukraine had already been under the control of Germany from the end of Brest-Litovsk until end of World War 1
Finally, apart from Chernov’s highly questionable accusation at the time of his show trial, I’m not sure there is any evidence at all that Scheffer was Hitler’s saboteur and spy. And the idea that Nazis had any role in creating the famine, when still not even or barely in power, is fanciful. They embraced its propaganda value, but they had nothing to do with creating it. It was a Bolshevik thing.
See my comment debunking the myth of "Stalin's victims". It is a very persistent myth that is popular among both anticommunist right and anticommunist left.