Was the Holodomer a "Nazi propaganda piece" so they can promote National Socialism and "justify the Holocaust"?

[NatSoc420]

I came across this book by a Holodomer Denier named Douglas Tottle, titled "Fraud, Famine, and Fascism the Ukrainian Genocide Myth From Hitler to Harvard". It basically says:

1. National Socialist Germany worked with Ukrainian Nationalists to promote the Holodomer and divert the attention from the "mass war murders" of Jews to the Soviet Union.

2. Ukrainian Nationalist Fascists wanted to keep on "exterminating Jews" by using the Holodomer as a propaganda piece to stop people from supporting the USSR.

Is there any truth in this?

Books PDF: https://averdade.org.br/novo/wp-content ... SCISMO.pdf

[Otium]

The book by virtue of its age, is useless. This is because it was released before the fall of the USSR and before the Russian archives were opened for research purposes. Also, if you check the sources much of the material looks to be newspaper articles which can hardly substitute documents found in archives that would shed light on the internal workings of what occurred.

Of course, the conclusions of the book are bandied about uncritically by Marxists even today. The idea that the Kulaks were really to blame for their own demise, because they "hoarded" grain obviously malicious, and wrong the moment you pick up any book on the famine written in the past 20 years.

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Tottle's book was in-fact supported by the Soviet state itself, and they worked with him to falsify history in their own favour:

The Institute of Party History in both Moscow and Kyiv contributed to Tottle’s manuscript; unsigned versions were sent back and forth between their offices and those of the two party Central Committees for corrections and commentary. Soviet diplomats followed the book’s publication and progress, and they promoted it where they could.

Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (London: Allen Lane, 2017), Pp. 345.

It's not exactly "news" to point out that the Soviet Union had an interest in not only denying the famine ever occurred, but to then mitigate the responsibility of Soviet policies when they did admit it:

Between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place. The Soviet state destroyed local archives, made sure that death records did not allude to starvation, even altered publicly available census data in order to conceal what had happened. As long as the USSR existed, it was not possible to write a fully documented history of the famine and the accompanying repression.

Ibid., p. xxvi.

Even before Tottle's book was released (1987), it's conclusions had already been definitely refuted by a commission set up to investigate the famine in 1985. It's conclusions presented in 1988 - a year after Tottle's book was released - completely annulled the attempts at apologia on behalf of the Soviet government and their leftist lackeys looking to minimise the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union:

In 1985 the United States Congress set up a bipartisan commission to investigate the Ukrainian famine, appointing Mace as chief investigator. Its purpose was ‘to conduct a study of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine in order to expand the world’s knowledge of the famine and provide the American public with a better understanding of the Soviet system by revealing the Soviet role’ in it. The commission took three years to compile its report, a collection of oral and written testimony from survivors in the diaspora, which remains one of the largest ever published in English. When the commission presented its work in 1988, the conclusion was in direct contradiction to the Soviet line: ‘There is no doubt,’ the commission concluded, that ‘large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukraine SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932–33, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities’.

In addition, the commission found that ‘Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage”, upon which all difficulties were blamed during the Famine, are false’; that the ‘Famine was not, as alleged, related to drought’; and that ‘attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available’. The commission concluded that ‘the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was caused by the extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population’ and not, in other words, by ‘bad weather’ or ‘kulak sabotage’.

Ibid., p. 346, 453ff.

Of course, the debate still goes on. Whether the famine was "intentional" or whether it was "genocide". In any case the responsibility lies with the actions of the Soviet government and of Stalin himself, that much is not disputed by any serious historians.

What's interesting about all of this, is that for all the boasting of leftists about adhering to the line of the establishment historians regarding the Holocaust, they completely do a 180 and start questioning the motives of these same people when it comes to atrocities they wish to mitigate. One could then ask, am I, as a revisionist of the Holocaust not doing the same thing? Am I not simply acquiescing to the historical establishment I otherwise deride when it's convenient for me to do so? I don't think so.

There is, if anything a leftist bias in regards to Soviet atrocities. They're not given the same moral sanctity that the Holocaust is given, and the mainstream don't ever question the Holocaust narrative or "evidence" is any way whatsoever. These are people with a strong bias in one direction, against what they perceive to be the political "right wing". Anne Applebaum is actually a good example of this, in her history of the Gulag she goes to great lengths to avoid any comparison with the concentration camps, and stresses how "unique" the Holocaust is, albeit unconvincingly. This stems from her bias against the "right" not any animosity against the left. This is the case with all mainstream historians who research the crimes of the Soviet Union, they're not in any way "right wing" but if anything politically orientated as apologists, in some sense or another, of Soviet atrocities because they actually have the freedom of movement to study that topic almost without restraint. The only political taboo in that field, is over emphasising Soviet atrocities so as to not appear to mitigate the sanctity of the Holocaust myth.

---

Other quotes:

There is enough evidence − if not overwhelming evidence — to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.

Norman Naimark, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), Pp. 134-5.

There was a famine (widespread health-impairing food shortage) 1932–33 caused by two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932 attributable partly to collectivization and partly to weather (although Kondrashin and Penner contest the explanation), but it didn’t cause the killings. Grain supplies were sufficient to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly of terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.

Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (Routledge, 2010), Pp. 259, note 12.

[borjastick]

Here's another interesting angle though I admit I have never found much about it on the internet.

The Ukraine was known as the bread basket of Europe. It was world class at grain production and fed the rest of the USSR with its output. In the same period of the Holodomor the US was going through its own famine called the Dust Bowl Famine. Largely it was man made but nevertheless it caused a mass shortage of food in the central plain states and killed many many people. Those who remained left the region subsequently for the California area.

It was a massive issue for Rooselvelt to try to solve. So here's the theory; Roosevelt knew that Russia had millions of tons of grain produced in the Ukraine so he bartered gold and other desirable goods for it. Ships were sent and came back with the grain. Stalin then used the gold to fund his armaments plan which ultimately just a few years later led to the war.

As for the Holodomor I have read a bit on it over the years and conclude that Stalin deliberately caused this tragedy by punishing the people and taking all their crops. This was done because they would not conform as ordered with the collectivisation plan and behave as proper Russians should in the true communist fashion.

[EtienneSC]

There is still revisionist scholarship on the Stalin era, some from a Marxist, but some also from a Russian patriotic standpoint.

More generally, I wonder if there should be a thread on other genocides on which doubt has been cast as to scale and motivation. You could include Noam Chomsky and others' work on Cambodia in the 1970s, for example. And then in 2014 there was a BBC documentary, Rwanda: The Untold Story, by reporter Jane Corbin:

With “Rwanda: The Untold Story,” the BBC became the first media outlet of its size and influence to radically challenge the received history of the Rwandan Genocide, which has become such a centerpiece of US and NATO interventionist policies.

The BBC programme Rwanda, The Untold Story, includes interviews with US-based researchers who say most of those killed may have been Hutus, killed by members of the then-rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which has been in power since 1994.

The programme also included interviews with former aides of RPF leader President Paul Kagame, accusing him of plotting to shoot down the presidential plane - the act seen as triggering the slaughter.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-29762713
Here is the documentary:
https://vimeo.com/107867605
As this is likely to be a casualty of the modern wave of censorship, you may in future be able to find a version by searching for "Rwanda The Untold Story BBC documentary" or the like. In fact, holocaust campaigners are already siding with Paul Kagame's supporters and attempting to have the documentary labelled as "denial". This contrasts with the BBC's usual slavish espousal of mainstream Holocaustianity.