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Conquest's fascist sources
The title of the crucial part --- Chapter 12 --- of Harvest of Sorrow is `The Famine Rages'. It contains an impressive list of 237 references. A more careful look shows that more than half of the these references come from extreme-right-wing Ukrainian émigrés. The Ukrainian fascist book Black Deeds of the Kremlin is cited 55 times! No wonder that Conquest uses the version of history provided by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and the U.S. secret services.
In the same chapter, Conquest cites 18 times the book The Ninth Circle by Olexa Woropay, published in 1953 by the youth movement of Stepan Bandera's fascist organization. The author presents a detailed biography for the thirties, but does not mention what he did during the Nazi occupation! A barely concealed admission of his Nazi past. He took up his biography again in 1948, in Muenster, where many Ukrainian fascists took refuge. It is there that he interviewed Ukrainians about the famine-genocide of 1932--1933. None of the `witnesses' is identified, which makes the book worthless from a scientific point of view. Given that he said nothing about what he did during the war, it is probable that those who `revealed the truth about Stalin' were Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who had fled.
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Ibid. , pp. 58--59.
Beal, who wrote for Hearst's pro-Nazi 1930's press, and later collaborated with the Cold War McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities, was cited five times.
Kravchenko, the anti-Communist émigré, is a source ten times; Lev Kopelev, another Russian émigré, five times.
Among the included `scientific' references is Vasily Grossman's novel, referenced by Conquest fifteen times!
Then, Conquest cites interviews from Harvard's Refugee Interview Project, which was financed by the CIA. He cites the McCarthy-era Congressional Commission on Communist Aggression as well as Ewald Ammende's 1935 Nazi book. Conquest also refers five times to Eugene Lyons and to William Chamberlin, two men who, following World War II, were on the Board of Trustees of Radio Liberty, the CIA Central European radio network.
On page 244, Conquest wrote: `One American, in a village twenty miles south of Kiev, found ... they were cooking a mess that defied analysis'. The reference given is the New York Evening Journal, February 28, 1933. In fact, it is a Thomas Walker article in Hearst's press, published in 1935! Conquest deliberately ante-dated the newspaper to make it correspond to the 1933 famine. Conquest did not name the American: he was afraid that some might recall that Thomas Walker was a fake who never set foot in Ukraine. Conquest is a forgerer.
To justify the use of émigré books recording rumors, Conquest claimed `truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay' and that `basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor'.
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J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933--1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5.
This statement gives fascist slanders, disinformation and lies academic respectability.
Next: The causes of Up: Collectivization and the Previous: Harvest of Sorrow:
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995