aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] Is Kyiv Post getting on the anti-genocide wagon?

[Roman Serbyn <serbyn.roman@videotron.ca>]

On 30 July 2008, Kyiv Post reprinted an op-ed piece by Simon Sebag
Montefiore published in the Mail Online (Daily Mail - UK) on 26 July.

The text is idential except for the title and the photo and caption undr the
photo. 

The Mail title read:
"Holodomor by hunger: The truth behind Stalin's Great Famine".
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1038774/Holocaust-hunge
r-The-truth-Stalins-Great-Famine.html

Kyiv Post title was:
"Holocaust by hunger: An act of genocide?"
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/29329/print/

The Mail had a photo from the famine of 1921-1923 of 9 starving children
from Hulai Pole, with no caption.
Kyiv Post replaced it with an unlabeled photo from the Zheleznyak collection
and added the caption: "Villagers of Udachne, in the Donets region, near an
earth house in 1934. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin engineered a famine so
horrendous that people resorted to cannibalism."

Let me pose two questions that come to mind.
1) Why reprint the article which has many errors of fact and biased
interpretations?
2) Why change the title and sharpen the issue of the genocide, especially
for readers in Ukraine?

It is telling of Mail's attitude to the Holodomor question, when we see that
they did not accept any comments on their site.

I tried a second time to make a comment (first did not appear) in the online
space provided for comments. To fit it in the alloted space I shortened it
in the following way:


"Many small errors. But 3 main misconceptions must be addressed. 1) There
was no Cossack nationality. Cossack were Russian (on the Don) or Ukrainian
(in the Kuban). The Ukrainian background of Kuban Cossack played an
important role in their destruction. Russian nationalist politicians and
historians ignore this fact, but there is no reason for Montefiore to do so.
2) 22 Jan. 1933, before the passports were introduced, Ukraine and Kuban
(62% ethnic Ukrainian) were barricaded from the rest of the USSR. Peasants
were prevented from leaving their starving villages and those who managed to
make their way to Belarus or RSFSR were hunted down and sent back to starve
or punished in other ways. 3) When Stalin complained of the danger of losing
Ukraine, he did not have peasants in mind but to the whole Ukrainian nation
(over 30 million then). The author ignores parallel destruction of Ukrainian
national elites. To deny the national factor is just bad history."

If you look up the story online you will see next to COMMENTS - 0.

RS