A year on from the debate in the Welsh Parliament on whether to deem the Ukrainian famine a genocide Philip Colley reflects on the use, and misuse, of his great uncle’s Soviet famine testimony.
Philip Colley’s damning critique of the Welsh Parliament's controversial 2023 ‘Holodomor as genocide’ debate asks whether the Senedd pandered to the cause of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and misused his great uncle Gareth Jones’ famine testimony in the process. His opinion piece, originally commissioned by the Nation.Cymru news website, was pulled from publication at the last minute after its editors caved into pressure from the very politicians the article criticizes.
25th October 2024
One year ago today the Senedd passed a motion declaring the 1932/33 ‘Holodomor’ famine in Ukraine to be a genocide. It claimed that my great uncle Gareth Jones’ witness account was a crucial part of the “overwhelming” evidence to back that declaration up.
The clear implication in the debate was that Russia was to blame and that the famine was part of “a pattern of behaviour where Russia has tried to simply wipe out Ukraine as a nation”. But Gareth Jones’ actual testimony implies nothing of the sort.
In the Financial News of 13th April 1933 Jones wrote, “the main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation”. Elsewhere he described the disastrous effects of peasant resistance to it.
He also pointed to excessive grain appropriations and the “export of foodstuffs” by Soviet authorities as a cause but that it was “not so much the Soviet Government as the world crisis, which is to blame.”
Gareth wrote how he had “visited villages in the Moscow district, in the Black Earth district, and in North Ukraine, parts, which are far from being the most badly hit in Russia” and how “even twenty miles away from Moscow there was no bread."
"They're killing us." Russian peasant on the outskirts of Moscow talking about the Bolsheviks.
He described how he had “collected evidence from peasants and foreign observers and residents concerning the Ukraine, Crimea, North Caucasia, Nijni-Novgorod district, West Siberia, Kazakhstan, Tashkent area, the German Volga and Ukrain[e] colonists, and all the evidence proves that there is a general famine.”
In ‘Mr Jones’, a film part-funded by émigré Ukrainian nationalists, the eponymous Welsh reporter only witnesses famine affecting Ukrainians in Ukraine. The real Mr Jones reported on famine in all the grain-growing regions of the USSR, affecting multiple ethnicities.
Listening to the Senedd Members (MSs) that day one might think they had based their knowledge not on Jones’ extensive writings but instead on a 90 minute, highly fictionalised film. They appeared to have drunk the ‘Mr Jones’ Kool Aid.
Misuse of Jones’s legacy has regularly featured in the flurry of ‘Holodomor as genocide’ resolutions in Europe since Russia’s invasion. His quotes have even been doctored in Parliament to remove references to non-Ukrainian areas.
Questions also need to be asked about Alun Davies’ opening statement. It is almost word for word the same as that delivered by Conservative MP Pauline Latham in a similar Westminster debate on 7th March 2023. Did they share the same researcher or were they simply reading out, without scrutiny, what had been presented to them by Ukrainian lobbyists?
Mr Davies opens the debate by stating:
“The Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that means to inflict death by hunger. Today, we use it to mean the entire Stalinist campaign to eliminate the Ukrainian nation, which culminated in the forced famine of 1932 and 1933... it's estimated that 7 million, and may be as many as 10 million, people died in Ukraine, with many more deaths in the neighbouring Soviet states.”
The shared provenance of what both said is deeply concerning but so too is its accuracy. That between 7-10 million Ukrainians died in the famine has long been discredited by independent scholars as politically inflated.
The true figure is now accepted to be between 2.6-3.9 million, a still horrific number, but one with academic credibility. The figure presented in the Senedd was arrived at in the 1980’s by ultra-nationalist activists keen to present the famine as more devastating than the Holocaust.
Why ‘Holodomor’ activists would want to compete so is complex. It relates to the role of Stepan Bandera’s fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) who collaborated with the Nazis to eliminate most of Ukraine’s Jews during the War.
The OUN-B has been accused of instrumentalising the ‘Holodomor’ to deflect from that involvement. Politicians allowing themselves to be unquestioning mouthpieces for foreign lobbyists should be a matter of concern.
The charge of genocide is a serious one. On whether the famine in Soviet Ukraine was genocide the jury remains out. Leading famine scholars Robert Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft, Lynne Viola, Michel Ellman, Mark Tauger, and even ‘Harvest of Sorrow’ author Robert Conquest, reject the genocide thesis.
Conquest is clear, “it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people... there are guilty people, but they aren't the Russian nation.” Wheatcroft, co-author of “the Years of Hunger” wrote, “...nothing is gained by exaggerating the levels of deaths, by claiming that this was genocide, or that it was inflicted on Ukraine deliberately.”
In 2003 my late mother and brother began rescuing Gareth from obscurity. Soon after they were contacted by émigré Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who began funding their work and travel. They allowed themselves to become uncritical foot-soldiers using Gareth in a campaign to have the ‘Holodomor’ recognized as a genocide in parliaments across the world.
They were copied in on emails that included leading members of the OUN-B and, unwittingly, found themselves connected to Ukrainians implicated in the Holocaust such as the Nazi death camp guard and former Chief of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB), Dr Swiatomyr Fostun.
For them the goal was to bring Gareth the recognition he deserved. At the time I don’t believe they had any awareness of the bigger political or historical picture. A clue to the tactics of that campaign, and what occurred in the Senedd, is in an email copied to my mother by Peter Borisow, a ‘Holodomor’ activist and “a personal advisor to multiple Ukrainian prime ministers” on 23rd June 2004. He wrote,
“If we're to get genocide resolutions for... the Holodomor, we need to banish the word "famine" from our vocabulary and train ourselves and our friends and supporters to use only the words "genocide" and "Holodomor". This is not an issue of politics or history or facts...This is communication, mass media marketing, advertising and promotion, selling our story -- pure and simple. Words are our tools to shape our future by defining our past. We need to choose and use the right tools for the right job. That's why this is so important. 1933. Genocide. Holodomor. 10 Million. Repeat it to all, again and again. Until everyone recognizes it instantly.”
Does this explain why “history” and “facts” were so lacking in the Senedd debate? The words genocide and holodomor were indeed repeated “again and again”, both appearing 24 times. The words industrialisation, collectivisation and Bolshevik, the words Gareth used to describe the causes of the famine, never appear once. Russia appears 11 times, and Putin nine times, even more than the word Stalin.
Why? Was the point of the Senedd debate to understand history and remember those who tragically died in unimaginable horror? Or was it an exercise in weaponising their deaths, and the Welsh hero and pacifist Gareth Jones, to demonise Russia and bolster the war effort?
A parliament should be a place for debate. But no debate took place that day and no historical facts were discussed. There was no scrutiny by other MSs or the Press and the outcome of the ‘debate’ appears to have been decided before the proceedings began. On the extremely grave matter of accusing Russia of genocide, it seems the Senedd just rubber-stamped what was presented to them by Ukrainian lobbyists.
The one MS who one might expect to have been better informed, and who spoke at length in the debate, was Mick Antoniw, born in England to a Danish mother and Ukrainian father. It is hard to imagine he wouldn’t have known, for example, that the figure of 10 million was a calumny but said nothing to challenge it. He brings in Gareth Jones and states correctly that he “reported on the famine in Ukraine and its causes” but declines to mention that the causes he outlined go against the charge of ethnic genocide being levelled by the Senedd.
Instead Antoniw leans heavily on the words of the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, the person who originally coined the term ‘genocide’. In 1953, Lemkin stated that the famine was a 'classic example of Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation'.
This is a powerful statement, much relied upon by ‘Holodomor as genocide’ advocates, and coming from such a towering figure in the world of genocide legislation it commands attention. But, unlike Jones, Lemkin was not a witness and was speaking at a time when no academic research had yet been undertaken on the famine. In fact, respected Ukrainian historian Professor John-Paul Himka disputes the very impartiality of Lemkin’s position.
Himka wrote, “The invention of the concept of genocide did not automatically give Lemkin the historical knowledge necessary to determine whether any particular case fit his definition or not... His thinking about Ukraine came later in the Cold War... at which time Lemkin was both marginalized and impoverished. He was, in fact, at that time dependent on the Baltic and Ukrainian communities for material support... Lemkin did not himself study the Ukrainian situation independently, but relied on information he obtained directly from émigré nationalists.”
Mick Antoniw is himself the descendant of an émigré ultra-nationalist. His father, Mychajlo Pavlovich, was a member of the fascist OUN-B in Zolochiv, scene of the notorious OUN-B and Nazi-orchestrated Zolochiv pogrom, one of the first acts of the Holocaust in July 1941. Due to that association his father was unable to return home after the war and arrived in the UK at the same time that thousands of Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis were seeking sanctuary in the West to escape Soviet retribution.
Mick Antoniw has never publicly elaborated on his father’s precise role in the war, as far as I am aware, but himself has been pictured holding the red and black ‘blood and soil’ flag associated with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This is not an innocent flag. It belonged to the notorious armed wing of the OUN-B, an outfit heavily implicated in the Holocaust and the mass murder of as many as 100,000 Poles in Volhynia. According to Marvin Rotrand, national director of the League for Human Rights at B'nai Brith Canada, “the flag is consistently recognized as a fascist emblem and a hate symbol throughout the international community."
When Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland, granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, was photographed in 2022 displaying the same red and black colours of the UPA she was attacked by many in the Canadian media with one conservative website saying she had been “caught holding [a] pro-Nazi banner” that was “promoting a far-right Ukrainian Nationalist movement linked to Neo-Nazis and extremism.” She deleted the image and was forced to issue a statement, "We condemn all Far Right and extremist views and organizations”.
Gareth Jones’ untimely death was an incalculable loss to the world and a devastating tragedy to our family, the pain of which we still bear today. His murder silenced a voice that had fearlessly spoken up for Stalin’s voiceless victims who included Russians, German colonists, Kazakhs as well as Ukrainians.
In recent years he has been recognised as a Welsh hero, a man of truth and integrity who warned against the folly of nationalism and who spent his life in the service of peace. That he should have his story falsified on the floor of the Welsh Parliament for ultra-nationalist political purposes is a matter of great regret. And tragically, a year on from this debate, with anti-Russian sentiments enflamed, we are no nearer to seeing the end of a conflict that has claimed thousands of lives on both sides.
end
This piece was due to be published as an opinion piece on the Nation.Cymru news website on the 25th October 2024. Nation.Cymru pulled it from publication at the last minute due to pressure from the politicians it criticizes.
