& 'the Falsifiers of History'
by
Christopher Draper
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HAVING recently reviewed the film 'Mr Jones' for NV
I’d now like to examine the 'Holodomor' that forms the backdrop
to Agnieszka Holland’s work. In 1953 Ralph Lemkin, the man who
coined the term “genocide”, described Stalin’s Ukrainian famine
as 'not simply a case of mass murder' but 'a case of genocide,
of mass destruction, not of individuals only but of a culture and a
nation'. For Stalin, starving the Ukraine was the completion of
unfinished business, his final solution.
Uppity Peasants
From the outbreak of the Russian revolution Ukrainian peasants fought
to not only free themselves from landlords but also from domination
by either Austrian troops or Bolshevik commissars. Armed bands of
guerrillas effectively liberated and defended their villages for
prolonged periods with the most successful led by anarchist Nestor
Makhno. From 1917 until 1921 the Ukraine maintained its effective
independence until finally overwhelmed by Trotsky’s Red Army.
Despite the Bolsheviks’ military victory they never captured the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasants who continued to resist forced Soviet collectivization. Determined to industrialise his Russian empire, in 1932-33 Stalin ruthlessly 'appropriated' Ukrainian grain to sell abroad in exchange for machinery. The 'beauty' of Stalin’s Holodomor campaign was that it killed several million birds with one policy; it earned hard currency, it 'encouraged' peasants to submissively join collective farms in the faint hope of receiving basic sustenance and it offered the prospect of eradicating the last vestiges of independent Ukrainian cultural and political identity.
Despite the Bolsheviks’ military victory they never captured the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasants who continued to resist forced Soviet collectivization. Determined to industrialise his Russian empire, in 1932-33 Stalin ruthlessly 'appropriated' Ukrainian grain to sell abroad in exchange for machinery. The 'beauty' of Stalin’s Holodomor campaign was that it killed several million birds with one policy; it earned hard currency, it 'encouraged' peasants to submissively join collective farms in the faint hope of receiving basic sustenance and it offered the prospect of eradicating the last vestiges of independent Ukrainian cultural and political identity.
Saints and Sycophants
Two British journalists, Gareth Jones and Malcolm
Muggeridge, reported that millions of Ukrainians were being
starved to death but most of their press colleagues looked the other
way, gazing in admiration at Stalin’s imaginary achievements. 'Useful idiot' Bernard Shaw celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday
at a banquet in Moscow, ridiculing those who’d given him tins of
food as he left England, 'They thought Russia was starving but I
threw all of the food out the window in Poland before I reached the
Soviet frontier'. As a consequence of Shaw’s pro-Soviet
sycophancy, as Gareth Jones noted, 'After Stalin the most
hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw'.
Malcolm Muggeridge reported from Russia in 1932-3 as correspondent of
the Manchester Guardian and after witnessing first-hand the
starvation of the Ukraine, in March 1933 he contributed three damning
articles on the famine. Jones’ reporting promptly echoed and
magnified Muggeridge’s observations which provoked the wrath of
Stalin’s apologists, led by celebrated New York Times
correspondent, Walter Duranty.
Curiously Anne Applebaum in her recent magisterial tome, 'Stalin’s War on Ukraine' (page 324) insists, '…nobody came to Jones’ defence, not even Muggeridge' yet in April 1933 Muggeridge wrote to Duranty’s newspaper challenging his claims and unequivocally backing Gareth Jones. Muggeridge’s New York Times intervention was subsequently reported in the Western Mail & South Wales News on 10 May 1933 under the headline, 'The Raging Famine in Russia'. Muggeridge couldn’t have been more explicit or outspoken, '…my own observations of the state of affairs outside Moscow…led me to come to precisely the same conclusions as Mr Gareth Jones.' In his autobiography Muggeridge described Duranty as, 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.'
Curiously Anne Applebaum in her recent magisterial tome, 'Stalin’s War on Ukraine' (page 324) insists, '…nobody came to Jones’ defence, not even Muggeridge' yet in April 1933 Muggeridge wrote to Duranty’s newspaper challenging his claims and unequivocally backing Gareth Jones. Muggeridge’s New York Times intervention was subsequently reported in the Western Mail & South Wales News on 10 May 1933 under the headline, 'The Raging Famine in Russia'. Muggeridge couldn’t have been more explicit or outspoken, '…my own observations of the state of affairs outside Moscow…led me to come to precisely the same conclusions as Mr Gareth Jones.' In his autobiography Muggeridge described Duranty as, 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.'
Duranty’s Dad?
Duranty’s coverage of Stalin’s Five Year Plan gained him a
Pulitzer Prize and the enduring gratitude of the Soviet regtime. His
shady version of events is still occasionally taken at face value by
modern biographers; James William Cowl ('Angels in
Stalin’s Paradise') swallows Duranty’s absurd claim that he
was orphaned as a child when both his parents were killed in a train
crash. Sally J Taylor ('Stalin’s Apologist') is
less credulous yet writes that, in 1899 Duranty was suddenly
transferred from Harrow public school to Bedford Grammar, 'for
reasons never made clear, his father dropped from sight entirely,
leaving his mother to take up modest lodgings on her own'(pg
20) 'His father had simply disappeared'(pg 26).
Duranty’s Wikipaedia entry explains, 'He studied at
Harrow, one of Britain’s most prestigious public schools but a
sudden collapse in the family business led to his transfer to Bedford
College.'
Like Duranty’s press colleagues, his biographers overlooked the elephant in the room. The truth is that Duranty was no orphan and his father’s disappearance no mystery - on Thursday 27 July 1899 William S. Duranty, aged 52, was convicted of fraud at Liverpool Crown Court and sentenced to 'four years penal servitude', whence prisoner Z.285 was transferred to Parkhurst Prison. It is a curious irony of Walter’s affection for Stalin, that his father’s middle name was recorded as “Steel”.
Like Duranty’s press colleagues, his biographers overlooked the elephant in the room. The truth is that Duranty was no orphan and his father’s disappearance no mystery - on Thursday 27 July 1899 William S. Duranty, aged 52, was convicted of fraud at Liverpool Crown Court and sentenced to 'four years penal servitude', whence prisoner Z.285 was transferred to Parkhurst Prison. It is a curious irony of Walter’s affection for Stalin, that his father’s middle name was recorded as “Steel”.
A Bed-Full of Liars
Many shared the liars’ bed alongside Duranty and Shaw. Both the
British and American governments received secret intelligence of the
Holodomor but kept quite, preferring to collude with Stalin for
strategic and commercial advantage. Both The Economist and The
Times broke undertakings to publish Gareth Jones’ Ukrainian
reports. Jones and Muggeridge were cold-shouldered by colleagues and
banned from returning to Russia. Muggeridge went off to work in India
whilst Jones reported first from Germany and then the Far East where
he was killed.
Murder!
On 11 July 1935 Gareth Jones ventured north from Bejing into Inner
Mongolia on a trip arranged with the help of two locally based
Westerners, Adam Purpis and Herbert Muller. Muller was
the North China & Mongolia correspondent of the official German
news agency whilst Purpis was local director of 'WOSTWAG', a
German trading company, whose firm supplied the two pressmen with a
vehicle and Russian driver, Anatoli Petrewschtschew, for their long
journey along a route arranged by Muller.
On 25 July they met up with Purpis at a Mongolian trading post where (according to a report Muller despatched to his press agency), 'We were to be the guests of Mr Purpis, a Latvian, “the King of Kalgan” who is the chief trader in inner Mongolia'.
After enjoying Purpis’ hospitality Jones and Muller continued on their quest until sometime before the end of July they were captured by 'bandits' about eighty-three miles north east of Kalgan, near Paochang. After that, reliable evidence is hard to come by but curiously after a couple of days captivity Muller and the driver were both released, allegedly so they could raise a ransom for Jones’ return, however when a ransom was offered it was refused. On 16 August Jones’s discarded corpse was discovered by Chinese troops, he’d died from two bullet wounds to the torso and another in the back of the head, the classic assassin’s coup de grace.
On 25 July they met up with Purpis at a Mongolian trading post where (according to a report Muller despatched to his press agency), 'We were to be the guests of Mr Purpis, a Latvian, “the King of Kalgan” who is the chief trader in inner Mongolia'.
After enjoying Purpis’ hospitality Jones and Muller continued on their quest until sometime before the end of July they were captured by 'bandits' about eighty-three miles north east of Kalgan, near Paochang. After that, reliable evidence is hard to come by but curiously after a couple of days captivity Muller and the driver were both released, allegedly so they could raise a ransom for Jones’ return, however when a ransom was offered it was refused. On 16 August Jones’s discarded corpse was discovered by Chinese troops, he’d died from two bullet wounds to the torso and another in the back of the head, the classic assassin’s coup de grace.
The Homodor’s Final Victim?
Newspapers speculated on the reasons for Gareth’s killing but
recently released British intelligence files indicate a sinister
truth. Jones’ associates were not as they appeared, both Herbert
Muller and Adam Purpis were identified by MI5 as Russian agents and
WOSTWAG was a Red Army trading vehicle organised to obtain hard
currency for the purchase of armaments and also provide cover for
Soviet secret agents. It is not difficult to detect Stalin’s
murderous hand in Gareth Jones’ execution but for the sake of
balance I would like to conclude by noting that “The
Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” have
recently published their own review of the Agnieszka Holland’s film 'Mr Jones' and arrived at rather different conclusions;
“Far from exposing the crimes of Stalin and
the USSR, the new film Mr Jones exposes the utter bankruptcy of
modern western cinema and the thoughtless, prejudiced, virulently
anticommunist propagandists who fill positions at the Guardian and
other such institutions. These real falsifiers of history need to be
exposed and confronted for the barefaced liars that they are.”
Gareth died but Stalin lives on!
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Posts
2 comments:
Not all historians share Mr Draper's view that Stalin deliberately imposed force starvation on the Ukrainian population. One such historian is Professor Stephen kotkin from Princeton. I recently read his book 'Stalin Volume 2: Waiting for Hitler'. He argues that Stalin's policies caused the famine but the famine deaths were unintentional This is what he wrote about the famine.
"We have an unbelievable number of documents showing Stalin committing intentional murder, with the Great Terror, as you alluded to earlier, and with other episodes. [....] However, there is no documentation showing that he intended to starve Ukraine, or that he intended to starve the peasants. On the contrary, the documents that we do have on the famine show him reluctantly, belatedly releasing emergency food aid for the countryside, including Ukraine. Eight times during the period from 1931 to 1933, Stalin reduced the quotas of the amount of grain that Ukrainian peasants had to deliver, and/or supplied emergency need. [....] These are the decisions that, once again, were made grudgingly, and they were insufficient—the emergency aid wasn’t enough. Many more people could have been saved, but Stalin refused to allow the famine to be publicly acknowledged. Had he not lied and forced everyone else to lie, denying the existence of a famine, they could have had international aid, which is what they got under Lenin, during their first famine in 1921-23. Stalin’s culpability here is clear, but the intentionality question is completely undermined by the documents on the record."
Draper also fails to mention the famine in Kazakhstan 1932-33 known as "The Forgotten Famine", where it is said around 42% of the entire Kazakh population died of starvation.
In contrast to what Derek Pattison says here, Marco Carynnyk took a different view in an essay "Deliberate," "diabolical" "starvation" [The Ukrainian Weekly, May 29, 1983, No. 22, Vol. LI] & he wrote:
"The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering," Malcolm Muggeridge said. He was talking about the genocidal famine that swept Ukraine and the adjacent North Caucasus, two of the most abundant lands in all of Europe, in the winter of 1932 and the spring and summer of 1933.
"The harvest of 1932 had been a fair one, no worse than the average during the previous decade, when life had seemed a bit easier again after three years of world war and five years of revolution and famine. But then, as the Ukrainian peasants were bringing in their wheat and rye, an army of men advanced like locusts into every barn and shed, and swept away all the grain. The few stores that the peasants managed to put away were soon gone, and they began eating leaves, bark, corn husks, dogs, cats and rodents.
"When that food was gone and the people had puffed up with watery edema, they shuffled off to the cities, begging for bits of bread and dying like flies in the streets. In the spring of 1933, when the previous year's supplies were gone and before the new vegetation brought some relief, the peasants were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, or 17 a minute. (In World War II, by comparison, about 6,000 people were killed every day.) Corpses could be seen in every country lane and city street, and mass graves were hastily dug in remote areas. By the time the famine tapered off in the autumn of 1933, some 6 million men, women and children had starved to death."
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