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ACTION UKRAINE HISTORY REPORT (AUHR)
Washington, D.C., Sunday, April 19, 2009
TO: HOLODOMOR WORKING GROUP
Ukraine: Holodomor, Genocide, Crimes of Communism
DATE: Sunday, April 19, 2009
FIVE ARTICLES -- ERRONEOUS HOLODOMOR PHOTOGRAPHS
Washington, D.C. - Several years ago a group of us started working to stop the widespread use of real photographs taken by a number of international relief organizations in Russia during the Russian famine of 1921-1922 to show the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933. Most of the real photographs used in books, pamphlets, journals, documentaries, etc. over the past 60 years published in the U.S., Canada, UK and elsewhere, about the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-1933, were not actually taken in Ukraine during 1932-1933.
Despite the major effort to stop the use of photographs not taken in Ukraine in 1932-1933 the practice continues. Many works for the 75th Commemoration of the Holodomor published in 2008 still used these well-known, widely distributed Russian photographs from 1922-1923. Most of the time the publications indicated the photographs were taken in Ukraine during 1932-1933.
These Russian photographs from 1922-1923 can also still be found today on various Ukrainian related websites in the U.S., Canada, and Ukraine that provide Holodomor information. We urge everyone to carefully check any real photographs you are using related to the Holodomor 1932-1933 to make sure the photographs can actually be fully and accurately documented to have been taken in 1932-1933. [Morgan Williams]
1. UKRAINE: ERRONEOUS FAMINE PHOTOS SPARK FOUL CRIES
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
2. RUSSIAN PUNDIT ACCUSES UKRAINE OF "FALSIFYING" HISTORY
THROUGH FALSIFICATION OF MATERIAL SUCH AS PHOTOGRAPHS
Rossiya TV, Moscow, Russia, in Russian, 10 Mar 09
BBC Monitoring Service, UK, in English, Tuesday, March 10, 2009
3. REWRITING UKRAINIAN HISTORY: TRUTH OR FALSIFICATION?
The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives across the Soviet Union.
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Friday, 03 April, 2009
4. GENOCIDE DENIERS AGAIN USING THE ISSUE OF PHOTOS AGAINST US
From: Russ Chelak, Moyehoist@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 6:25 PM
Subject: Check out The New Russian Forum #10261.1
5. RUSSIAN FAMINE PHOTOGRAPHS INFORMATION
ArtUkraine.com website, Morgan Williams, Publisher, Kyiv, Ukraine
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1. UKRAINE: ERRONEOUS FAMINE PHOTOS SPARK FOUL CRIES
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
MOSCOW - In the city of Sevastopol the Ukrainian Security Service opened a photo exhibition on Holodomor, the 1930’s famine in the USSR, but local politicians have noticed that some of the pictures have nothing to do with it.
“We established that some photos were taken from a U.S. photo blog on the Great Depression of 1929-1930s. One of them made in 1935 in Arkansas, shot by Benjamin Shahn. Another one was taken in Oklahoma. Four out of six photos presented at the exhibition have nothing to do with Ukraine,” said city council deputy Andrey Merkulov.
Historians and politicians in Russia and Ukraine are at odds about both the reasons and the death toll of the disastrous famine of the 1930s. Kiev believes the death toll was up to nine million in Ukraine alone and claims it was genocide against Ukrainians.
Moscow is firm in its view that it was caused by disastrous agricultural policies of the soviet government and the death toll was half of Kiev's estimates.
QUEST FOR NATIONAL TRAGEDY
After being elected, President Yushchenko went on a massive campaign to have the events recognized as a crime against humanity. “We recently published 19 books about the famine. We created the first ever name-by-name death toll list. And without Yushchenko this would have never happened,” said Vasiliy Marochko, Ukrainian historian.
Last November these efforts ended in monuments to the famine being erected all over the country. Some lashed out at the president for what they describe as excessive attention to things in the past, when it’s the present which requires serious attention.
“He spent millions on that. That’s in the times when our doctors, teachers, workers are struggling to make ends meet. It is Yushchenko, who’s orchestrating a modern day famine in Ukraine,” said Leonid Grach, Ukrainian opposition MP.
The scandal in Sevastopol is nothing new. Russian historians previously accused a similar exhibition in Kiev for displaying pictures from Russia rather than from Ukraine. With new details and twists in the famine story emerging every year, it appears the tragedy of the 1930s will be making headlines for years to come.
LINK: http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-03-10/Erroneous_famine_photos_spark_foul_cries.html
LINK: One criticized U.S. photograph shown at: http://www.shorpy.com/node/2911
LINK: Another criticized U.S. photograph shown at: http://www.shorpy.com/node/901
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2. RUSSIAN PUNDIT ACCUSES UKRAINE OF "FALSIFYING" HISTORY
THROUGH FALSIFICATION OF MATERIAL SUCH AS PHOTOGRAPHS
Rossiya TV, Moscow, Russia, in Russian, 10 Mar 09
BBC Monitoring Service, UK, in English, Tuesday, March 10, 2009
MOSCOW - [Presenter] A row over an exhibition on the so-called Holodomor [1932-33 famine] is flaring up in Ukraine. It opened in Sevastopol. Local deputies have uncovered an evident falsification of the materials: instead of pictures from starving Ukrainian villages, pictures taken in the USA during the Great Depression were displayed. [Passage omitted]
We asked the director of the Institute for Political Studies, Sergey Markov, for a comment on the pictures. Here is what he told us. [Markov] It is known that the organizers of the campaign to mark the Holodomor anniversary in Ukraine are actively using a lot of falsified sources. The desire to flare up Russophobia and anti-Semitism is the root of attempts to falsify history because without falsifying history it would be impossible to do this.
Besides, the promotion of the Holodomor campaign is being carried out by the [Ukrainian] Institute of [National] Memory, [Ukrainian President] Viktor Yushchenko personally and many others. It is they who are committing a comprehensive falsification of Ukraine's history during World War II.
Their aim is not to show some historical facts but to simply create a maximally propagandistic illusion of falsifying history. And we can assume that they will probably use pictures from Nazi camps, when the Nazis, so to say, used this campaign.
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3. REWRITING UKRAINIAN HISTORY: TRUTH OR FALSIFICATION?
The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives across the Soviet Union.
Russia Today, Moscow, Russia, Friday, 03 April, 2009
MOSCOW- The 1930s Holodomor famine claimed millions of lives across the Soviet Union. Ukraine has continuously stressed that it was a genocide inflicted by the Communist government in Moscow to wipe out its people. Now, attempts are being made to rewrite history to back up its claims.
Andrey Merkulov is a deputy at Sevastopol’s city council. He describes how he found evidence that special services in his town were falsifying historical facts.
“Here’s a photo by Dorothy Lang, shot in 1936 in Oklahoma. And here’s a photo by Fritof Nansen made in Russia’s Povolzhe region in 1921. But both of those pictures and other falsified photos were displayed at Sevastopol’s exhibition on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933,” Merkulov says, demonstrating aged photographs.
Kiev claims that Holodomor was artificially directed against Ukrainians – something denied by Moscow. Russia and Ukraine are also at odds over the famine's official death toll.
Andrey says that such contradictions are not limited to Sevastopol. What he and some media describe as a campaign to rewrite history has been present in Ukraine for several years now. Its goal, Merkulov says, is to accuse the Kremlin of wrongdoing backed by the highest echelons of power.
“We go to the Ukrainian president’s official website. Click on the photo gallery. Click on public events. And we see this picture – Yushchenko looking at pictures of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930’s. But the picture he’s looking at is this one, also shot by Nansen in Russia’s Povolzhie region. It is written here: Famine in Russia.”
Merkulov’s claims were backed by Ukraine’s national archive. “We have declassified all documents on the famine in Ukraine and there are only two genuine pictures from that time. The rest are very much distantly related and are not necessarily shot in Ukraine,” Olga Ginzburg the head of Ukraine’s State Archive told RT.
FORMAL APOLOGY BY THE SBU
This confession led to a formal apology by the SBU, Ukraine’s security service. “These pictures are not a part of our archive and were used by accident. There were four pictures which got there by accident,” Vladimir Vyatrovich from SBU archive explained.
In January 2009, the SBU, following Yushchenko’s decree, urged the national archives to declassify all documents related to repressions in Soviet times, but its head said that there was nothing to make public.
Olga Ginzburg points out that the gesture was rather superfluous to begin with: “We have already declassified all documents long time ago. They have been studied for years.”
The SBU lashed out at the archives for not doing their job, but some politicians see it as anger for failing to find evidence for an attack against Moscow.
“There are no documents, proving that there was something like Kremlin’s genocide against Ukrainians. Simply because there was no genocide. And because there is a wish to portray Russia as Ukraine’s enemy. History is for scientists, but when special services try to deal with it, it leads to bad results,” says Vadim Kolesnichenko from the Party of Regions.
PRESSING ISSUES
The disastrous famine of the 1930s is only one of several historic issues sending shockwaves across Ukraine. The historic role of the insurgent army, the UPA, is another. It is believed that during the Nazi invasion these nationalist troops fought the Germans, but later they allied with their enemy and turned arms against the Soviet forces.
Many in Ukraine and Russia believe the troops aided the Nazis and literally shot their own people. Not long ago, some of its members were made heroes of Ukraine by Yushchenko, sparking even more confusion among members of the public, who now do not know what to believe.
Revealing the truth or falsifying historical facts – both historians and society have yet to understand what this governmental campaign is all about. Regardless, the events of the past will be making headlines in Ukraine for years to come.
DENYING CLAIMS
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has publicly cleared Russia from all responsibility for the Holodomor.In a live interview for Russian radio station ‘Echo Moskvy’ on Wednesday, Yushchenko noted that the Holodomor famine “is not the responsibility of Russia or the Russian people.”
He noted that the government, as well as the ideology and the composition of the state responsible for what he still refers to as a crime directed against the Ukrainian people, was different from that of modern Russia.
However, the Ukrainian president reaffirmed that he is saddened by the fact that the modern Russian society as well as its government refuses to give what he calls an adequate evaluation of the USSR’s actions during the Holodomor.
This is not the first time that Viktor Yushchenko has clarified his stance on the issue, depicting a line which separates modern Russia from its Soviet past.
LINK: http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-04-03/Rewriting_Ukrainian_history__truth_or_falsification.html
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4. GENOCIDE DENIERS AGAIN USING THE ISSUE OF PHOTOS AGAINST US
From: Russ Chelak, Moyehoist@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 6:25 PM
Subject: Check out The New Russian Forum #10261.1
NEW JERSEY - This issue [use of Russian photographs] has come up in the past and as discussed, the genocide deniers are again using the issue of photos against us. The images are very effective to let the uninitiated learn of the horrors of the Holodmor but when photos actually taken in Russia in 1921 [& 1922] are used, it gives the deniers another arrow in their quiver to argue against the genocide argument.
Here [see link below] you can see that they actually discredit several widely known Holodomor sites and publications because they do not use authentic photos (which are limited pretty much to the Kharkov photos)
We should all commit to using only the Kharkov [Ukraine] photos - Gareth Jones was sent into obscurity when Hearst [newspapers] used these same photos in 1935 - The deniers were very successful in making these series of true articles a laughing stock and it was the last time that the Holod made the front page. RC
NOTE: CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK TO SEE THE RECENT EXHIBITION IN
SEVASTOPOL AND OTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE U.S. AND RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHS:
The New Russian Forum #10261.1; http://forums.delphiforums.com:80/motherrus/messages
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5. RUSSIAN FAMINE PHOTOGRAPHS INFORMATION
ArtUkraine.com website, Morgan Williams, Publisher, Kyiv, Ukraine
Click On: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/brothers_distr.htm
Click On: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine10.htm
Click On: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine_stamp6.htm
Click On: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine_stamp2.htm
Click On: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine_stamp12.htm