The Original Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory

It has become a meme of late that every ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ is revealed as verifiable truth within months of its first circulation, sometimes weeks. However, this leftist smear tactic is not a creature of the internet era and its origins date back to Europe’s greatest socialist tragedy: The Holodomor.

The Holodomor is widely accepted as the deadliest famine in European history. At least three million people in the Ukraine perished. As part of The Soviet Union’s ‘Five-Year Plan’, farm collectivisation had begun in earnest. Just as quickly, that collectivisation began to fail, leading to a series of famines in the east of Russia and the Eastern soviet states.

Because major economies refused to accept Russian Rubles for payment due to the new Bolshevik government's failure to honour the debts of the previous Tsarist regime, the Soviets required a valuable and plentiful commodity to fund their plans for industrialization: grain. Apart from longstanding Tsarist cultural attitudes of Russians considering Ukraine ‘belonging’ to their empire, it was - and remains - ‘The Breadbasket of Europe’. It is a huge stretch of incredibly fertile and topographically suitable land for farming. Thus, it was crucial to The Five-Year Plan that collectivized state farms seized Ukrainian land, and that the smallholders who remained resistant to collectivisation were set strict and exacting targets for grain requisitioned by the state.

When the failures began, Stalin’s government invented a scapegoat class. Known as ‘Kulaks’, these were predominantly landowners who resisted collectivisation, but this broadened into a smear against anyone who opposed the soviet agenda in Ukraine. They were accused of ‘grain-hoarding,’ burning crops, and sabotaging industrial equipment to stifle the socialist utopia. It was all a lie. However, in the ensuing process of ‘Dekulakisation’, well over a million Ukrainians were sent to gulags, and hundreds of thousands died.

Thus, when the Holodomor began, there was no one plausibly left to blame. Stalin was made aware of the famine by his officials in Ukraine and was told that the harsh requisitions of grain and excessive targets were the cause. His response was to threaten the officials, blame the Ukrainians, and close the borders, preventing them from fleeing the famine. He used the resulting mass deaths to crush dissent from the Ukrainian Nationalist movement and anti-Soviets more generally.

The facts are now well-established by the historical record: at least three million, and possibly as many as five million Ukrainians were deliberately exterminated by Stalin’s USSR. So, why is the famine so little known and so little lamented in the West relative to the crimes of Hitler and the Holocaust of the 1940s? Quite simply, decades of propaganda from the Soviets, suppression of information within the USSR, and a broad unspoken consensus of left-wing sympathisers and useful idiots in government, media, and academia in the West. By the time the whole truth came out after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was little appetite for outrage, and few were left to be outraged.

The first efforts to report on the tragedy in the West were typical. Malcolm Muggeridge, a Manchester Guardian journalist based in Moscow, travelled to Ukraine to investigate rumours of famine without permission from Soviet officials. Appalled at what he saw, he had his report smuggled back to the UK. To protect his safety and the paper’s privileges in Moscow, it was published anonymously and in highly redacted form in March 1933.

The first person to name the famine for what it truly was was a Welshman named Gareth Jones. A journalist, adviser to Labour Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the first British journalist to Interview Adolf Hitler, he made several trips to Russia and Ukraine without permission from the Soviets and filed several anonymous reports for The Times, each increasingly graphic in their nature.

Upon returning to Berlin, he penned a press release with graphic depictions of the starvation and death he had witnessed upon his travels, which achieved the first real media outcry in the West about food shortages in the Soviet Union, republished by major publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Muggeridge’s Guardian and The New York Evening Post.

​​The backlash was immediate and, as depicted in the 2019 film, Mr Jones, scathing. This was particularly pronounced in the most effusive Soviet apologists, including, most significantly, Moscow-based Anglo-American journalist Walter Duranty. Of Jones’s report, Duranty wrote in The New York Times, “It appeared that he had made a forty-mile walk through villages in the neighbourhood of Kharkov and had found conditions sad. I suggested that that was a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country, but nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.”

Duranty was far from the only villain among Western journalists, particularly the Moscow press corps, who routinely accepted the Soviet line to retain their media privileges. However, he is unique both in the level of his duplicity – he knew about the Holodomor and its causes and routinely joked about it with Western colleagues in private – and in his status as a Pulitzer Prize winner. He had accepted the award one year prior, and to much adulation from his colleagues. Why? For his reporting on the ‘successes’ of farm collectivisation in the USSR.

Other ‘useful idiots’ parroted similar lines. The playwright George Bernard Shaw visited the USSR and denounced allegations of famine as ‘slanderous’ in a letter to The Manchester Guardian. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, founders of The Fabian Society and the London School of Economics, returned encouraged by a two-month expedition to Russia, declaring, ‘the early difficulties of collectivisation had been overcome.’

These myths of the cultural elite persisted in some left-wing circles and, in some cases, beyond the fall of the USSR. Those who repudiated them were either ignored or denigrated – particularly after WWII – as ‘fascists’, ‘Nazis’, and ‘Hitlerites’. The tactics of the leftist elite remain strikingly similar to this day, but a relatively free internet means that, for now at least, they no longer take six decades to debunk.