Next month the National Day of Remembrance for the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor is approaching, and Russian media outlets are pushing a story about one of its researchers finding a ‘Holodomor’ in the USA at same time as it was happening in Ukraine! The article is full of US criticism:
While America lectures Russia on the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, Russian historian Boris Borisov asks what became of over seven million American citizens who is appeared from US population records in the 1930s.
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The U.S. Congress added fuel to the fire by adopting resolutions nearly every year blaming the Soviet government for alleged staged famine in the 1930s in Ukraine. The first resolution came in 1988, 50 years after the events described. The current members of Congress wonder about the following, and I quote, “people in the government were aware of what was going on, but did not do anything to help the starvingâ€.
The article offers little to counter these claims – the only flimsy counter arguments are made second-hand through the researcher himself. Not surprisingly he can counter them! Few explanations are given for his methods, but attacks on American values dominate the article and another one it links to.
There are some major flaws in this research. Boris is making his facts, comparing 1990’s Russia with 1930’s USA:
As I was doing comparative research of the American Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Great Depression of the 1990s in Russia, I grew interested in the social dimension of the tragedy.
Let me quote some figures, if you don’t mind – demonstrating how other countries reacted to the similar situation. If you believe that four or six million people is a terrible number, let me quote this: male mortality rate in Russia: 810,000 in 1984; 1,226,000 in 1994 – whereas the population is the same. In other words, as compared with 1984, the year 1996 had an additional number of 416,000 dead males. You have to add females and children to that figure.
Nothing in the article says he’s taken into account the medical and technological advances that have occurred in the 60 years separating the two. Also noticeably absent is any set of credentials, besides ‘Russian historian’. Could he be just an actor? Has this tactic ever been used by Russians before?
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