‘Every rotten slander’: Holodomor denial and the origins of the American popular front
As reports of mass starvation in Ukraine first reached the West in the spring of 1933, the CPUSA found itself burdened with the task of defending disastrous Soviet policies. ‘It must be increasingly explained that … the collective farm system was necessary and superior, that collectivization took pl...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
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| In: |
Politics, religion & ideology
Year: 2025, Volume: 26, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-19 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | As reports of mass starvation in Ukraine first reached the West in the spring of 1933, the CPUSA found itself burdened with the task of defending disastrous Soviet policies. ‘It must be increasingly explained that … the collective farm system was necessary and superior, that collectivization took place voluntarily’, the Comintern would tell the American leadership that May. In response, the party’s newspaper, Daily Worker, engaged in a comprehensive campaign of famine denial. ‘The truth about the famine is that there was no famine’, the outlet’s editors definitively concluded, but still detractors ‘go on repeating their Nazi-inspired lies’. Among those accused of spreading fascist fictions was the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. ‘The Forward was mouthing every rotten slander about ‘famine’ in the Ukraine’, the Daily Worker’s staff complained, ‘repeating every lie … out of the publicity machines of the Hitler government’. This article explores how American Communists, under pressure from the Comintern, and some sympathetic Leftist parties came together in defense of the USSR during the mid-1930s through a campaign against Forward editor Harry Lang. In doing so, it will locate Holodomor denial within the contested origins of the broader political and cultural phenomenon of the ‘Popular Front’ movement in an American context. |
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| ISSN: | 2156-7697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Politics, religion & ideology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2025.2470722 |