David, you want "a single fact alleged by Conquest where you believe the
competing evidence is more compelling and shows Conquest was wrong."
Okay. Robert Conquest, in Harvest of Sorrow, stated that a famine in
1932-33 in the Ukraine and neighboring areas "was intentionally
organised and maintained by Stalin as a conscious act of genocide
against the Ukrainian people." --review by J. Arch Getty, London Review
of Books, 22 January 1987 (
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n02/j-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine )
Was the famine a conscious act of genocide? From an investigative report
on Conquest's story in the Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1988:
In 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute approached Conquest with a
major project: a book on the 1932-33 famine. The pot was sweetened by an
$80,000 subsidy from the Ukrainian National Association, a New
Jersey-based group with a venerable, hard-right tradition; the UNA's
newspaper, Swoboda, was banned by Canada during World War II for its
pro-German sympathies. The grant was earmarked for Conquest's research
expenses.
(The result was The Harvest of Sorrow. What do scholars of the field
say? This:)
"There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians,"
said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology.
"That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no
sense."
"This is crap, rubbish," said Moshe Lewin of the University of
Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground
in social history.
"I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first
US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on
collectivization. "Why in god's name would this paranoid government
consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with
Germany]?"
They challenge Conquest's contention that Ukrainian priests and
intelligentsia -- two major counterrevolutionary camps -- were repressed
more ruthlessly than anywhere else in the country. They point out that
the 1932-33 famine was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached
deep into the Black Earth region of central Russia. They note that
Stalin had far less control over collectivization than is widely
assumed, and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they
went along.
Excerpted from the Village Voice article posted at
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/vv.html
If we may wind up, it is a sober lesson that the NY Times gave a man who
paraded lurid lies as scholarly history, a man whom the profession knows
is a charlatan, a glowing obituary with unalloyed praise for his fables.
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