On the spectrum of human enormity, the Holodomor, Stalin’s genocidal campaign to starve Ukraine to the brink of extinction, ranks somewhere near the Cambodian Killing Fields, just below the National Socialist Holocaust. Yet, many in the West never knew it was happening.
The prime culprit of Stalin’s disinformation campaign was the compromised journalist Walter Duranty. The New York Times no longer stands by his reports but the Pulitzer organization refuses to rescind the prize they awarded for his denial of Stalin’s crimes against humanity.
On one level, George Mendelok’s English language “Bitter Harvest” functions as a historical romance, but it is also a timely reminder of what happens when journalists chose to serve as propagandists. Truth is a victim along with upwards of 7.5 million Ukrainians in Mendeluk’s “Harvest,” which opens this Friday, Feb. 24, in New York.
There was no love for the Czar amongst Ukraine’s sturdy peasantry, so they initially welcomed the revolution as an opportunity to finally declare independence. Unfortunately, Lenin soon reconquered the republic, expressly so its grain could fuel the Soviet regime. After his death, Stalin pursued a more exploitative and intentionally brutal policy. All land was nationalized and collectivized. Harvests were almost entirely exported back to Moscow, leaving insufficient stocks for even subsistence living and the borders were sealed, with full knowledge mass starvation would result.
Like so many Ukrainians, Yuri comes from Kulak stock, the so-called “rich land-owning” peasants, a term that only makes sense to a Marxist-Leninist theorist. His childhood sweetheart Natalka grew up in even meaner conditions, but her family will still suffer and starve at the hands of the brutal commissar quartered in their village.
