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B-movies
The `famine-genocide' campaign that the Nazis started in 1933 reached its apogee half a century later, in 1983, with the film Harvest of Despair, for the masses, and in 1986, with the book Harvest of Sorrow, by Robert Conquest, for the intelligentsia.
The films Harvest of Despair, about the Ukrainian `genocide', and The Killing Fields, about the Kampuchean `genocide', were the two most important works created by Reagan's entourage to instill in people's minds that Communism is synonymous with genocide.
Harvest of Despair won a Gold Medal and the Grand Trophy Award Bowl at the 28th International Film and TV Festival in New York in 1985.
The most important eyewitness accounts about the `genocide' appearing in the film are made by German Nazis and their fomer collaborators.
Stepan Skrypnyk was the editor-in-chief of the Nazi journal Volyn during the German occupation. In three weeks, with the blessing of the Hitlerite authorities, he was promoted from simple layman to bishop in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and in the name of `Christian morality', put forward vicious propaganda for Die Neue Ordnung, the Hitlerite New Order. Fleeing the Red Army, he sought refuge in the U.S.
The German Hans von Herwath, another eyewitness, worked in the Soviet Union in the service that recruited, among the Soviet prisoners, mercenaries for General Vlasov's Russian Nazi army.
His compatriot Andor Henke, also appearing in the film, was a Nazi diplomat.
To illustrate the `famine-genocide' of 1932--1933, the authors used sequences from pre-1917 news films, bits of the films Czar Hunger (1921--1922) and Arsenal (1929), then sequences from Siege of Leningrad, filmed during the Second World War.
When the film's producers were publicly attacked by Tottle in 1986, Marco Carinnik, who was behind the film and had done most of the research, made a public declaration, quoted in the Toronto Star:
`Carynnik said that none of the archival footage is of the Ukrainian famine and that very few photos from `32-33' appear that can be traced as authentic. A dramatic shot at the film's end of an emaciated girl, which has also been used in the film's promotional material, is not from the 1932--1933 famine, Carynnik said.
` ``I made the point that this sort of inaccuracy cannot be allowed,'' he said in an interview. ``I was ignored.'' '
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Ibid. , p. 79.
Next: Harvest of Sorrow: Up: Collectivization and the Previous: `Scientific' calculations
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995