Starving Ukraine: The Holodomor and Canada's Response by Serge Cipko (review)

This book by Serge Cipko is an invaluable addition to the historiography of the Ukrainian Holodomor – the famine of 1931-34. It differs from most works on the Holodomor by having its focus on what was known about the Holodomor at the time, both within and outside the Soviet Union, how differing political ideologies chose to interpret information about this tragic event, and how social organizations and governments responded to it. This is a particularly relevant approach today, when partisan populist demagogues routinely dismiss the mainstream media as purveyors of "fake news," and opinion is increasingly polarized according to political orientation.

In 1931, the Soviet Union under Stalin launched a five-year plan to drag the nation into the industrial age by launching massive projects and reforming society. A key element of this plan was to modernize what was still a largely peasant-based agricultural system through collectivization, abolishing private ownership of land and pooling resources in collective farms. There, it was reasoned, mechanization would result in greater efficiency, increased productivity and the creation of a surplus for export. The foreign exchange from agricultural exports would fuel the industrialization of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, many peasants opposed collectivization and were reluctant to turn over their farms and crops to the state. Soviet authorities seized grain, shipped thousands who opposed their policies off to the gulag and reduced the peasantry to starvation. The result was a famine of horrible proportions. Millions died, although the exact numbers will probably never be known with absolute certainty. From hindsight, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, this all seems very clear but as Cipko points out, at the time, facts were few and the truth was in short supply.

So, what did the outside world know about the famine as it was occurring? In the 1930s the Soviet Union was a tightly controlled society in all aspects. Movement within the country was controlled and the countryside of Ukraine remained inaccessible to foreign visitors. Most Ukrainians in Canada were from Polish-controlled western Ukraine, which was not affected by famine. The picture was clouded further because information coming out of the Soviet Union was contradictory and reports of famine were generally dismissed as counter-revolutionary lies propagated by left-oriented organizations in North America and Europe. The Soviet Union refused offers of international aid, claiming there was no famine and its continuance of grain exports suggested that this was so. There was a reluctance to believe that a government would knowingly let its people starve. Its defenders pointed to Lenin's acceptance of international aid during the famine of 1921, reasoning that Stalin would do the same if a crisis really existed.

Remarkably even-handed, this book reviews an impressive array of published and archival sources, including some 94 different newspapers and periodicals of the time, drawn from half a dozen countries, with an emphasis on Canadian English-language and Ukrainian-language newspapers. Cipko shows how conflicting reports and opinions confused even impartial observers. Some of the attitudes of Soviet apologists strike one as appalling, justifying mass starvation in the name of a political ideology: "What are 1,000,000 in a population of 162,000,000?" Then, as now, attention was deflected from the issue at hand by the "what about …?" ploy, in this case deflecting attention from famine in Ukraine by pointing to the poor economic conditions then rampant in western Canada.

Urban populations in Ukraine, though affected by food shortages, generally did not experience famine conditions. Significantly, those journalists who were able to visit Ukraine were usually confined to the major cities. It was difficult to traverse the countryside and see first-hand the conditions of the peasantry. Even those who suspected that things were desperate in rural areas were reluctant to publish their suspicions, knowing that to do so would inevitably result in a cancellation of their visas.

The famine in Ukraine affected all rural...