The point of view:american holodomor 32/33

Where did America’s missing millions go? Holodomor Lessons

U.S. history contains a serious crime against its own people – the Great American Holodomor of 1932/33, which cost the lives of millions. Historian Boris Borisov suggests the U.S. should not lecture Russia on Holodomor in Ukraine, but take a closer look at the lessons from its own past.

"Golodomor ad usum externum"*

The United States of America constantly try to teach us the “Holodomor lessons”.

"A special commission, created by the US Congress in 1988, came to the conclusion that during the Holodomor period 25 per cent of the Ukrainian population – millions of people - were intentionally annihilated by the Soviet government through genocide, and did not just die as a result of famine."

"On October 20, 2003 the House of Representative of the US Congress accepted a resolution on the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, stating that this was an act of terror and mass murder, aimed at the Ukrainian people."

"In November 2005 the House of Representatives of the US Congress accepted a resolution which allowed the Ukrainian authorities to build a monument commemorating Holodomor victims and recognised it."

"This year (2008) the US Congress may consider a new resolution on the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine"

These news lines make headlines. They are repeated by the press before making their way on to TV and into legal structures. In this way they are forced on millions of people around the world.

But a question comes up when we hear such news – why does the US Congress pay so much attention to things that happened 75 years ago in a far-away country? Why didn’t well-informed Americans protest back then, in 1932-33?
Is it just a political interest in Russia’s influence on the post-Soviet territory, or an attempt to split Russians and Ukrainians forever, that tempts Americans again and again to repeat the fascist propaganda of Goebbels in the 30s: that “millions of Ukrainians were intentionally annihilated by the Soviet government”?

The ultimate compassion and justice felt by American congressmen is hardly believable – just try to find at least one Congress resolution (one, not three), where genocide of Native Americans would honestly be called genocide, or at least “mass annihilation”. Even though most of the peoples inhabiting the territory of the USA were wiped out completely and their total number was radically reduced.

American history records another crime against its own people – the Great American Holodomor, also in 1932-33, when the USA lost millions of citizens.

You will not find any critical resolutions on that, just like you won’t find anything on the genocide of the indigenous people. American politicians don’t give passionate speeches on the subject, no “memorials” are built to mark the anniversary of mass annihilation. The memory of this is hidden in fake statistical reports, in archives, cleared of all evidence of the crime, attributed to the “invisible hand of the market”, glossed over by songs of praise to the genius of President Roosevelt, and the joy of community work, organised by him – not that different in essence from the GULAGs or the construction of the Baltic Sea Canal.

Of course, according to the American version of history “millions of men, women and children became the victims the criminal and cruel totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union”. American history cannot be described in these terms.

Let’s disprove this myth, using American sources.

Where are seven million people?

An attempt to get access to demographic statistics is followed by many surprises right away: statistics from 1932 were destroyed – or hidden very well.

This is a fragment of a screenshot showing a US government statistics site.

They just don’t exist. No explanation is given. Yes, they appear later, in statistical reports as retrospective charts. A diligent researcher will also be surprised studying these charts.
Farm Security Administration

First, if you believe American statistics, in the 10 years from 1931 to 1940, 8,553,000 people were lost. And what is interesting is that the numbers of increase in population change at one point by 2 times - exactly at the border betwee 1930/31. They fall and freeze at this level for 10 years. And just as suddenly, a decade later, they climb back up. No explanation for this is found in the extensive report of the US Department of commerce’s “Statistical Abstract of the United States”. Even thought it is full of comments on other less significant issues.

The issue is just avoided. There is no issue.

Any responsible demographer not dependent on the US State Department or Mossad will tell you that an immediate double change in the population dynamics in a country with a population of one hundred million people is only possible in case of mass mortality.

It’s possible that people moved, migrated, escaped from the awful conditions of the Great Depression. Let’s use accurate and detailed data on immigration to/from the USA and population migration – which can be easily checked by cross-comparison with the data of other countries, and thus is worth trusting. Unfortunately, the immigration statistics cannot prove this version. In the height of the Great Depression, more people left the country than entered it – probably, for the first time in the history of the USA. In the 1930s, 93,309 more people left the country than entered it; while 10 years previously the number of people entering the country exceeded the number leaving by 2,960,782. After correction, the demographic loss in the USA during the 1930s is 3,054,000***.

However, if we consider all the reasons, including migration, we should add a further 11.3% to the decline of population in the 1930s because of the population increase in the 1920s and the demographic base growth.

According to the calculations, in 1940, the US population should have amounted to at least 141,856,000 people, given that the previous demographic tendency was preserved. But in reality in 1940 the population was 131,409,00, 3,054,000 of which can be explained by the change in the migration dynamics.

Thus, 7,394,000 persons as of the year 1940 are actually absent. There is no official explanation of this fact. And I suppose that it will never be given. But even if they appear, the situation with the destruction of the statistical data for 1932 and visible traces of forgery of the latest reports for that period do not give the government of the USA the right to comment of the issue.

However Americans are not alone in their desire to systematically destroy the damaging information and hide the population losses of hunger. This is a hereditary quality of the Anglo-Saxon policy which proceeds from the British empire. In 1943 British government did not prevent starvation in Bengal, as a result of which over 3.5 million people died, and before that they quite successfully starved Ireland.

The organization of mass starvation in India was the response of the British government to the 1942 riot and the population’s support of the “Indian National Army”. But you won’t find such information in British sources for those years. Only after India gained independence did it become possible to collect and publish these materials. Otherwise the monstrous British holodomor of 1943 would have never come to light. All the facts and proofs would have been hidden or destroyed, as happened to the materials on the victims of the Great Depression. Actually all colonial powers have similar skeletons in the cupboard.

Only when the USA collapses will we be able to learn many interesting facts about the crimes of the US government against its own people, including the genocide of the continent’s local population. And it is possible that the well-informed reader will be surprised at how the wise Roosevelt is compared with evil Stalin – just as we are surprised now at how one governor from cruel and ancient times is praised at the expense of another, when we know all of them had blood on their hands.

But we live today, when the monstrous Stalin who starved whole nations is faced by a glorious and shining Angel of Good with the label ‘Made in the USA’, which is desperately crying out about the millions of deliberately starved in Ukraine. How does the Congress count the number of the holodomor victims? It’s not an easy matter. The holodomor researchers often complain about the lack of statistic data, its being incomplete, and that the number of the starved should be calculated using the system we have applied here. **** Based on these calculations, the US Congress and its followers regularly accept new resolutions blaming the USSR, Russia and communism for creating millions of victims.

The essence of the calculations stated above provides a challenge for the USA to apply the same principles to its own history. And the citadel of democracy and human rights fails to take it up.

So, ladies and gentlemen:

Where are the 7,394,000 people who disappeared from the statistics reports of the 1930s?

Anyway, we know the answer.

The background of the Great Holodomor

The beginning of the 1930s was a real humanitarian catastrophe in the USA. In 1932, the number of unemployed reached 12.5 million people. The total population of the USA including children and the old was 125 million. The peak of unemployment came in 1933 when the number of jobless reached 17 million; when you add that figure to the family members of those without work, it rivaled the number of unemployed in Britain and France together!

When in the 1930s a Soviet company ‘Amtorg’ advertised vacancies in the USSR with a small soviet salary, more than 100,000 (!) applications from America were received. It looks like every second American citizen (among those who read the ‘Amtorg’ notice) submitted an application.

During the peak of the economic crisis every third person was fired. Partial unemployment became a real disaster. According to the American Federation of Labor, in 1932 only 10% of the workers were fully employed. The law on old age and unemployment insurance was accepted only in 1935, five years after the beginning of the crisis, when the major part of those who ‘did not fit the market’ had already starved.

However the insurance did not protect the interests of farmers or other categories of employment.

Looking back there was no insurance system in the country in the height of the crisis – which means that people could only rely on themselves. Help for the unemployed started in the middle of 1933. The administration had had no federal program against unemployment and the problems of the unemployed were left for state authorities and city municipalities to solve. However almost all the cities had become bankrupts by then.

The tramps, the poor, including homeless children, became the symbol of the period. Deserted cities and ghost towns appeared as people left in search of food and work. About 2.5 million people lost their homes and were thrown onto the streets.

The famine started in the cities. Even in the prosperous and the richest part of the country, New York, there was mass starvation. City authorities began giving out free soup to the homeless.

Here are a child’s memories from those times:


‘We changed our habitual favorite food to more available … instead of cabbage we used bushes’ leaves, we ate frogs… within a month’s time both my mother and elder sister died.’ (Jack Griffin)

However not all the states could afford free soup for everybody.

It’s strange to see the photographs of those long lines for the field kitchens: respectable faces, decent clothes, not shabby yet – typically middle class. It looked as if they’d lost their job only yesterday and got onto the sidewalk. I have nothing to compare it with, except maybe photographs from the Berlin freed by the Red army, where ‘Russian occupants’ fed the peaceful citizens who survived. But the eyes in these pictures are different: in them there is hope that the worst is over. ‘Ravaged Germany’ – this is something.

Mechanism of Deceit

Infant mortality stands out in the demographic loss. Because there was no internal passport system or residential registration, it was easy to conceal infant mortality simply by not registering it. Even nowadays not all is good with the USA infant mortality rates (for example it’s higher than in Cuba), and in the prosperous year of 1960, 26 out of every 1,000 babies died during the first year of life. Furthermore, the death rate of Afro-American children reached 60 in every 1,000 in the most prosperous time.

It’s interesting to note that the official American statistical data (mind you, in retrospect) does not show the increase, but decrease (!) in population in 1932-1933. This is made clear in the background of more than 5 million refugees, 2.5 million who lost their homes, and 17 million unemployed – which definitely proves the fake character of official USA statistics for the period. Those who falsified American statistics in the period overdid it to such an extent that in the peak crisis years of 1932-1933, they showed mortality rates lower than in the prosperous year of 1928.

The mortality records in the states are more impressive: Washington D.C. shows 15.1 deaths for every 1,000 people in 1932, confirming that mortality had grown. The calculation was done for the capital and that’s why the data looks authentic.

But mortality in North Dakota in the crisis year of 1932 is allegedly 7.5 persons out of 1,000 – twice as low as in the capital, and lower than in North Dakota in the prosperous year of 1925! South Carolina undoubtedly becomes the deceit champion: for the three years of 1929-1932 it made up figures of the death rate changed from 14.1 to 11.1 for every 1,000 persons.

According to the report the infant mortality situation in the country at the height of the depression had improved sufficiently in comparison with the prosperous years. From these reports we gather the impression that infant mortality rates in 1932-1933 proved to be the lowest in the whole history of statistics in the USA from 1880-1934.

Do you still believe in these figures?

How many children have died?

Where are the 5,570,000 thousand people?

American statistics for 1940 contain data on the age distribution of the surviving children. And, if in 1940 the number of people born in the 1920s was 24,080,000, the same demographic trend should have continued in the 1930s and reached at least 26,800,000 children. But in the 30s there’s a glaring lack of 5,573,000, no less! Maybe there was a drop in the birth rate. But even in the 1940s, during WW2, in spite of all the losses and the millions drafted, the birth rate got back to almost the same level. The giant population losses of the 1930s cannot be explained by any ‘birth rate decrease’. It was the result of many additional deaths, the scars left by the millions of lost lives, the black mark of the Great American Holodomor.

We can also use these figures to estimate the overall effect which hunger had on the American population as the difference between the decrease in the number of people born in the 1930s and the overall population reduction. The adult population surely couldn’t just ‘fail to be born’! We can definitely say that there were at least 2 million dead people over 10 years of age, and about half of the 2.5 million child deaths can be divided between mortality and a natural drop in the birth rate. *****

Thus, we can surely say there were around 5 million victims of the Holodomor of 1932/33 in the United States.

An extremely high mortality rate was registered among the US ethnic minorities. They have never received much care in the States, but what happened during the Great Depression borders on genocide. Whereas after the first genocide of the native population, which had lasted almost until the early 20th century, in the 1920s the population of ethnic minorities and natives increased by 40 per cent. It then dropped drastically from 1930 to 1940. This can mean only one thing: in the early 1930s the ethnic minorities lost a considerable proportion of their original population.

If that’s not genocide, then what is?

Dispossession American-style: From ‘kulaks’ to the claws of the American Beriya

Almost everyone in Russia, thanks to TV anchor and political commentator, Nikolay Svanidze, knows about the two million ‘kulaks’ - rich Russian farmers dispossessed and displaced by the communists (who called them ‘special migrants’). In fact, the ‘kulaks’ got either land or work in the areas where they were sent. But few people know about the five million American farmers (around one million families), who at the same time were driven from their land by banks reclaiming debts. They did not get anything from the US government – no land, no work, no social benefits, no pensions – nothing.

This is dispossession American-style – even if ‘justified by the necessity to strengthen agriculture’ – and it can truly be compared to the banishments which happened in the USSR at exactly the same time, on the same scale and even to counter the same economic challenges, like the need to develop and mechanise agriculture, and increase its productivity during the pre-war period. One in every six American farmers became a victim of the Holodomor steamroller. People were going nowhere, robbed of their land, money, their homes and property. All that lay ahead was an uncertainty plagued by mass unemployment, hunger and crime.

This vast, redundant population became a catalyst for Roosevelt’s New Deal policy. During 1933-1939, at any one given time more than 3.3 million people were taking part in public works, such as the construction of canals, roads and bridges in uninhabited and swampy areas. They were organized by the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA). All in all, more than 8.5 million people – apart from convicts – took part in the American GULAG.

The work conditions and mortality figures are yet to be studied carefully.

Praising the wisdom of Mr. Roosevelt, who started the public works, is roughly the same as praising the wisdom of Mr. Stalin, who launched the construction of the Moscow channel and other grand projects of the communist era. In fact, the systematic similarity between the two leaders was noted by the Republicans back in the 1940s: then they criticized Roosevelt for his ‘communist’ approach.
Farm Security Administration

There is another thing which explains the almost demonic likeness between PWA and GULAG. The administration was headed by none other than the ‘American Beriya’, Secretary of Interior Affairs Harold Ickes ******, who, starting from 1932, sent more than two million people (!) to youth unemployment camps. Their monthly salary was $30, out of which they were obliged to pay $25 to the state.

Five dollars for a month of back-breaking labour in a malaria-infested swamp. A worthy reward for the free citizens of a free country.

State destroys food: benefit for the market, more slave labour for the hungry



The US government has also been accused of systematically destroying large amounts of state food supplies to suit the interests of the agricultural business lobby, and all that was happening against the background of mass hunger and deaths of an ‘excessive’ population. Of course, the government only used ‘market methods’. Food was destroyed in a number of ways and on a grand scale: the grain was burned and dumped into the ocean. For instance, 6.5 million pig heads were destroyed, and 10 million hectares of ripe crops were ploughed in.
The goal was not kept a secret. It was to double the food prices, in the interests of the agricultural capital. Of course, it fully suited the interests of the major capitalists in agriculture and stock holders, but it wasn’t very popular with the hungry masses. The ‘hunger marches’ during Hoover’s term in office became a part of everyday life even in America’s largest cities. But what Roosevelt’s New Deal brought about was more profit for the capitalists, and GULAG public works for the hungry. To each his own.

Still, the US government was never really worried about its population dying from starvation – unlike the victims of other ‘holodomors’, or famines, which could be used to attain political goals.

‘I have no fears for the future of our country. It is bright with hope’, said President Hoover on the eve of the Great Depression. And we have no fears for the past of the United States – according to the US-made version – just as Caesar’s wife, it’s always above suspicion.
Farm Security Administration

It’s important to note that until 1988, when a committee for investigating the ‘Ukrainian holodomor’ was created in the US Congress, America did not try to create much publicity around this issue, just as other issues from the ‘Goebbels golden collection’, such as Katyn or ‘war-ravaged Germany’. The States knew that they have their own starved-to-death skeleton in the closet, and the ideological counterstrike from the Soviet Union would be quick and precise, and this would be a battle America will never win. The depth of the 1930s demographic pit in the USSR and the USA was perfectly comparable. Their mutual silence on this slippery issue was a part of the tacit Cold War code. Washington only started making the Ukrainian holodomor story public in 1988, after it got itself a group of high-ranking agents in the Kremlin led by Mikhail Gorbachev, with a liberal-minded Yakovlev who replaced the ‘iron man’ Suslov as the ideological counterpart, and knowing that the Soviets would not strike back. That was perfect timing.

We cannot expect that the U.S. will reveal all the facts about their own holodomor, and publish archive documents and confessions, like those initiated – and, probably, fabricated – in the 1980s by Gorbachev’s team under the slogan of ‘restoring the historical truth’. There is no hope that justice will be restored before the Western Evil Empire collapses. Hiding the truth about the Great American Holodomor is a policy of the American political elite, both the Democrats and the Republicans. Both the Hoover and the Roosevelt administrations share equal blame for the mass deaths of the 1930s. Each is responsible for millions of deaths caused by their merciless policy. That’s why the US political system is unified in its denial of the American Holodomor and the many millions of deaths which it brought about. The fifth column of human rights activists will also deny it furiously, the activists which are in the payroll of the US Department of State and are part of the system. But the historical truth will out – sooner our later.

In fact, the U.S. should stop barking at Russia, which they usually do, and sniff their own butt instead.

Boris Borisov, April 4, 2008.

OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND NOT NECESSARILY OF RT.____

* «Holodomor, applied externally» (latin)

*** In fact, I have yet to come across research of the holodomor which makes a serious account for the migration (mass departure) of population from the hunger-hit areas. All the population losses are written off as ‘victims of communism’. But we know it for a fact that 700,000 of these 2.5 million ‘special migrants’ just left their villages quietly, without encountering any resistance.

**** Here is an example of how death-rate changes under conditions similar to the Great Depression, the economic crisis of 1991-1994 in Russia (here, there’s no doubt in the reliability of these figures). The number of deaths among men in Russia: 1991 – 894,000 people, 1994 – 1,226,400 people (this is a 37% increase). (Figures according to Anatoly Vishnevsky and Vladimir Shkolnikov, ‘MORTALITY IN RUSSIA’, Moscow, 1997)

***** I can envisage a question about the proportion of dividing the proven population loss between mortality and the lower birth rate. Owing to the fact that the U.S. information is not reliable, we are forced to resort to the method of analogy (international comparisons). Population loss in other countries under the conditions similar to the Great Depression (including Russia in the 1990s) divides equally (with a large gap of the ratio from one to two to two to one) between the population decrease and mortality increase. It is this proportion – halving is accepted as basic, to which necessary reasonable adjustments can be made. Anyway, with any adjustments we get a number of several million people dead.

****** Yes, it really is Ickes, Harold LeClair, 1874–1952, the counterpart of the ill-famous Soviet head of the GULAT, Lavrentiy Beriya (He can be called the head of the US GULAT, so to speak), Secretary of the Interior (1933-1946) with the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman administrations. He’s the person who later, bravely and quickly, with the help of the US Army, interned US ethnic Japanese in concentration camps (1941/42). The first stage of the operation took a mere 72 hours. A real professional, worthy of his Soviet counterparts Yezhov, Beriya and Abakumov.

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