Anti-Semitic Tracts
The following section looks at some selected articles that are anti-Semitic in tone. Their inclusion does not denote such items as typical or representative of a prevailing view.
However, they have been frequent enough to merit attention, and through institutions such as MAUP, publications and conferences in Ukraine sometimes contain a mixture of academic and virulently extremist articles that tend to target Jews.65 The most notable example with regard to the Famine was a collection issued by MAUP from a conference on the Famine-Genocide, which included two overtly anti-Semitic articles within a generally scholarly and objective collection.66 These papers were also issued as individual publications and distributed in bookstores in Ukraine's major cities at the time of the 70th anniversary of the Famine. MAUP depicts itself as one of Ukraine's largest higher educational institutions, but has hosted such extremist luminaries as the US activist David Duke, who was teaching in Kyiv at the time of writing. Thus, although peripheral, the anti-Semitic trend in the writing of Ukrainian history cannot be omitted altogether. Among antiSemitic writings, those on the Famine are probably the most notable in that they attempt to assemble a theory that Jews, as a group, were behind the Famine, which they used as an instrument to undermine and eliminate Ukrainians. Here we will cite several examples, most of which emanate from the former L'viv newspaper, Za vil’nu Ukrainu, one of the more outspoken nationalist sources of the 1990s, although there are other isolated articles that appeared elsewhere as well.An article by Vasyl Mazorchuk on genocide in the black-earth regions is ostensibly about the motives behind the maltreatment of Ukrainians, but it also has a strong political component. He believes there was a serious danger that Ukrainian lands would be sold off to foreigners, leaving Ukrainians without a native land.
He lists 13 decrees of the CC CPU and the Ukrainian government that determined the course of genocide. Often he misuses quotations to offer meanings that seem to have no basis in reality; for example, his interpretation of a comment of Ukraine's Minister of Agriculture, that the population growth would result in a surplus of 5 million people of working age to mean that these people had been singled out for destruction. As for the perpetrators of the Famine, Mazorchuk singles out people from Stalin's ruling circle, as well as President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the USA, a man who was a mason since 1911, adds the author. The US president failed to provide economic assistance to the starving. The concluding section of the article discusses the ways in which Ukrainians are being oppressed in their own country by “cosmopolitans” (a familiar euphemism for Jews used in the Stalin period) and foreigners. He maintains that the section indicating “nationality” was removed from Ukrainian passports in order to conceal the foreign takeover of key posts in the government and local administration of the country.67Even more inflammatory in tone is an article by Pavlo Chemerys from September 1993, which overtly lays the blame for the 1932-33 Famine on Jews. He concludes by stating that in 1932-33, Jews occupied 80-100% of the leading positions in the USSR and ruled the country “despotically.” He cites the books of US Senator Jack Finney, which purport to show that Zionist billionaires made an agreement with the Soviet government to deport Ukrainians from their native land and populate it with Jews. Since the mass shootings, arrests, and deportations of Ukrainians to Siberia were proceeding too slowly, these same people advised the regime to organize a famine that killed 12 [!] million people. The Jewish claims to Ukraine, Chemerys continues, date back 1,000 years. Persecuted in Byzantium in the 8th century, they moved to Crimea. From 1917 this migration accelerated, and a special “joint agro” committee was established for the colonization of Crimea and Southern Ukraine headed by Lewis Marshall, Meier London, and Felix Warburg. He also maintains that after the Second World War, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee demanded from Stalin Southern Ukraine and Crimea for Jewish settlement.
The political problems in Crimea at the time Chemerys wrote the article are also attributed to Jewish agitation.68 Though it seems unnecessary to analyze or discount the comments in this far-fetched article, it is worth reiterating that in the southern regions of Ukraine, as already noted by other authors, Jews suffered from the Famine on a substantial scale.Chemerys returned to this same theme three years later in an article that begins with quotations from the Tora, Talmud, and the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which plans for world domination are elaborated by “Judeo- Zionists.” He outlines the onset of death and famine in many parts of the Soviet Union, and asks a rhetorical question: “Why did they take all the grain? Did enemies threaten us? No. On the contrary capitalism was going through the most severe crisis in its history.” Bread requisitions turned into a war with the peasantry in the Soviet Union. The explanation, says the author, is simple. Having attained absolute power in the disguise of Bolshevism, the Judeo-Zionists started to implement their Tora-Talmudic program for the total destruction of alien people. In his postscript, Chemerys accuses Judeo-Zionists of organizing revolutions, two world wars, terror, and the Famine.69 The same newspaper also cited extensively an article in the Canadian newspaper, the Edmonton Sun, in 1999 on the Famine as genocide, even though that article never suggested in any way that Jews were responsible for this event. Author Erik Margolis had also dwelled on the massive reprisals in the Baltic States, deportation of Germans, and persecution of Muslims in the USSR as well as the Famine, blaming the concealment of the latter on the predominance of left-wing public opinion in the wake of German aggression in Europe. Margolis, Chemery editorializes, “is himself a Jew... and Jewish authors themselves cannot deny the truth of history.”70
What is this “truth of history” as defined by this former L’viv newspaper? It is that the Jews had penetrated the higher echelons of the Communist Party and the NKVD.
For publishing such statements, says one of the editors in this same issue of the newspaper, they were categorized unambiguously as antiSemitic and periodically harassed by complaints from below and calls to the office of the Prosecutor-General.71 The same theme is also to be found in a quasi-academic article by a “Professor” Pavlo Skochii, who also presents the Famine as artificial and the article begins with a Preface, which declares that the aim of the genocide was to free the land of Ukraine for a future state, the New Jerusalem, for which world Jewry had amassed a sum of $139 million by 1929. Having made these comments, the remainder of the article is a straightforward account of the Famine from the genocide-theory perspective, which leads to the suspicion that the Preface was written by another author—possibly Chemerys—that was simply tacked on to the account by Skochii.72 Like the widely circulated newspaper Sil’s’ki visti in 2004, which was suspended after a series of anti-Semitic articles, Za vil'nu Ukrainu was eventually closed down, ostensibly in part because of its degeneration into a nationalist and anti-Semitic pamphlet that pandered to the most extreme views. One could dismiss these views as peripheral to the analysis of the Famine but for the fact that they appear with some regularity, and works by authors propagating such views can still be found quite easily in major bookstores in cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv. The quest to find culprits for the Famine has sometimes resulted in simplistic and deeply wounding accusations against the Jews, a small minority group in contemporary Ukraine, but one with a lengthy history.