Professor Synder vividly describes the heart-wrenching story of how up-to-4,000,000 Ukrainians were starved to death to seize their wheat to pay for the importation of industrial goods for the Five Year Industrial Plan.
This was portrayed in the documentary HARVEST OF DESPAIR: THE UNKNOWN HOLOCAUST (Canada, 1984).
Before diplomatic relations were established with the Soviet Union in 1933, Washington depended heavily on journalist reports from Moscow. Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow, won the Pulitzer Prize award in 1932 for his reporting.
Later it was revealed that Duranty had totally ignored the Ukrainian famine (although he did acknowledge to a British diplomat that he was aware of this dreadful calumny). Years later there was an effort to revoke his Pulitzer Prize. (Duranty’s false reporting was described in excruciating detail in S. J. Taylor’s STALIN’S APOLOGIST). The NYT reviewed the facts and ultimately decided not to request a revocation of Duranty’s false reporting.
This is an extraordinary example of how Washington’s over dependence on daily journalist reporting can have a dreadful impact on our understanding of foreign situations.
As a Foreign Service Officer, during the Congo crisis of 1964, one of my responsibilities was to provide The Secretary and others with a ‘factual correction’ of stories that they read in the New York Times and Washington Post, as they came in limos to their offices.
On occasion, my ‘corrections’ were minor. At times they were major. Young journalists were reporting from Congo. Often their judgment and knowledge were scanty.
I applaud the few journalists who, in Vietnam and elsewhere, got their boots muddy as they ferreted out insights as to what really was happening. This seldom occurred in Africa in the 1960s.
Regarding Vietnam, anyone who read Bernard Fall’s and Robert Shaplen’s books knew that there was no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ and that nationalism was the dominant aspect in this war. As a Foreign Service Officer with a distinguished record for my ‘rambunctious’ activities in the Congo, at times with a M 16 and .45, I was a prime candidate for LBJ’s Vietnam War.
Twice, in 1965 and 1967, our ambassador in Saigon ‘asked’ me two join him. Twice I refused.
Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I surmise that some ‘boots on the ground’ journalists witnessed early that we were on a ‘fool’s errand.’ Only in retrospect did this become obvious to folks in Washington and elsewhere.
I urge caution when we read journalist reports on foreign affairs. Professor Snyder and other experts provide timely insights that often are ignored in daily reporting (from journalists and from our embassies). Solid information is available if one seeks it from ‘boots on the ground’ reporters and from scholars/practitioners who understand the soul and substance of their areas of expertise.
Interesting comment Keith Wheelock. So, "this kind of a system" (stalinist SU) has the same malfunction as the US, but SU from the party member situation, and the US from 'free' journalism?
As someone who lived through the Vietnam War in Australia, I can say no one needed to read any books to know a lot of accurate detail about it. For it was the fact of conscription which served to alert everyone—the entire population insofar as a potential conscript was always someone's son, grandson, brother, father, cousin, best friend, college mate, co-worker, guy over the road, etc.—to the fact that something very serious was afoot which was going to affect you and yours in a firsthand way. And against this background where everyone knew, those who accepted the draft mostly agreed with the ideological message from the US; and the vast numbers who, overtly or covertly, disagreed, were motivated to take action.
I stood with 100,000 others in central Melbourne to protest the war, the largest protest march we'd known in this country. I participated with deeply concerned volunteers in the creation of underground networks to give shelter to those trying to evade the draft. I witnessed the hurt and injured coming into the hall where help had been set up to treat those beaten and bashed by the local special police. I lived through an era where security services were unable to comprehend such a thing as a rightwing threat to security, focussing solely on the threat from the supposed "commie left". I experienced my photo being taken by plainclothes security agents, and suspect to this day I had/have an ASIO file, meaning that was quite possibly the reason why I was turned down for service in the diplomatic corps for which I was otherwise well qualified. I watched as other activists had their careers destroyed for years into the future because of those files. I stood on Guam watching the B52s take off laden with agent Orange to spray over Vietnamese forests, committing war crimes that would maim a population with deformities lasting until the present day. And I saw that photo of the napalmed little girl running naked in terror down the road.
And that was just me. Our whole population was touched by that war in one way or another, it formed an entire generation, and we had some truly excellent journalists, brave people, heroic men and women, both at home and on the front, who recorded, analysed it and kept us all well informed. Of course, there was also the rightwing press, of the "all the way with LBJ" type. My protest placards, referring to their two main rags at the time, read: THE SUN NEVER RISES and THE HERALD: BETTER DEAD THAN READ.
It's interesting, in retrospect, to recall that during that entire time of the strongest anti-American feeling with regard to the politics and ideology driving the war, I never lost sight of the fact that our resistance was paralleled by that in the US itself. In that regard, I experienced a sense of great comradeship. Important to note, I think, is that some of the US media, employing outstanding journalists, contributed not a little to keeping us informed.
Very generous. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the psychic/soul difference I have felt between us postwar Australians, formed by primarily by Vietnam, and the Brits, formed for the most part somewhat later by Iraq. I am actually English-born and raised to age eight, then Australian teens and early adulthood, followed by spells living in both countries through later times, dual citizen. I have never been to the States, yet I feel closer in my soul to Americans than residents of the country of my birth. I have often wondered whether, as with music, the scars one receives during teenage/early adulthood mark one's preferences, sense of Mitgefühl, for life?
Penelope You raise some profound questions to which I have no answers. My mother was British (raised mostly in Egypt, born in Glasgow.) My British grandfather was born in Baghdad and was Director of Customs in the British-Egyptian Protectorate (until 1922).
For me WW II started in September, 1939. A British uncle with the 7th Hussars was captured on reconnaissance at El Alemain. When I published NASSER’S NEW EGYPT: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS (1960, NY & London) my other British uncle openly questioned why I wanted to waste my time with ‘those wogs.’
Personally I have seen scant evidence that Brits of my era ever had any sympathy for ‘those folks’ in the British empire. I experienced this in Africa, when I visited the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954.
As for Americans, our history in the Philippines has been dreadful. Indeed, if you read soldiers’ letters at the time of the 1898 war and its aftermath, vestiges of Vietnam abound. Ditto with our military occupation of various Latin American countries.
In Vietnam the military slang for Vietnamese often was ‘gooks.’
I wonder whether one can characterize any country with a single response towards another people. For me the exception was WW II when I was taught to hate the Nazis and Japanese, but not to be overly concerned about Italians.
Of course the scimitar of national hate goes back and forth. Japan and Germany currently are America’s stalwart allies. I recall, in WW II, that Madam Chang Kai Chek (a Wellesley graduate) was a symbol of our Chinese allies (who were barred from immigration to the US until 1943, when we permitted 100 yearly).
I’m sorry if this upsets anyone here, but I prefer reading to listening to podcasts and audio files. The last time I made a comment like this I was told by admiring fans of Mr. Snyder that he is such a busy man. I’m truly glad he is busy and I look forward to his next book, which will probably be on Ukraine, judging by what he’s been presenting here for the past year+. But I didn’t pay two years of subscription in order to wait to read the next book. I’m sorry for my negativism and I’m sure I’ll be hushed by one or more admirers, but I really, really do prefer to read. I’m just expressing myself and my frustration, sorry.
Kostas I consider your comments spot on.I have great admiration for Professor Snyder and have read two of his books and various opinion pieces, I was delighted to subscribe to his Substack. As a former history professor (age 58 to 80) I did not expect to listen to his Yale class lectures. Rather, I was expecting the essence of his thoughts rather than a slog through a college course on Ukraine.
Also, I would appreciate him taking the time to comment on some of the comments posted on his blog. I have the feeling that he is lecturing to us rather than talking with us. By contrast, James Fallows posts and comments on Substack.
This is a truly helpful lecture for me. I'm now at the very end of my 3rd year of reading history, and can now isolate 3 distinct phases:
1. confusion. The problem here is an inability to incorporate facts I read into a wider context because at this early stage, there is no context, so there is no place to put the facts.
2. gradually learning more facts, meaning slowly being able to put facts I learned earlier into a context. The more you read, the wider the context, the better you understand.
3. starting to ask questions about one of my main interests, foreign policy. I'm now about 2/3 of the way through H.A. Winker's "The Age of Catastrophe," and something you said in this lecture beginning at 33:32 is exactly what I've been struggling with lately (with Winkler's book in mind): "It's not everyday reality which drives policies, right? It's, and this is true in any system, it's the elite interpretation that's going to drive policies." On the one hand, this is glaringly obvious. But on the other, it is precisely what makes foreign policy so complicated. During the late '20s and '30s all of the powers involved had their own interests. They all had domestic problems, most of which were the result of the seemingly unmanageable consequences of the 1929 stock market crash. If we concentrate on Germany alone, we miss all of the complex interrelationships between the foreign and domestic problems and policies of all the powers involved, including the way domestic problems and policies--the internal--spill over into foreign relations--the external (to borrow from Jörn Leonhard).
And so lately my questions have been, "How much did elites in these governments know about the policies of other governments?" "How limited was their knowledge?" (I do know there were intelligence operations.) There were so many different details that had to be taken into consideration before making decisions, oftentimes in chaos, with people shouting at each other in disagreement while sometimes trying to destroy the reputations of enemies. This all seems exceedingly complex to me. At this stage in my reading I simply can't understand how historians are able to sort it out.
‘Red Famine’ Stalin’s war on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum 📖 a masterpiece of scholarship, a ground-breaking history, and a heart-wrenching story—turns to the horrors of Soviet policy in Ukraine, specifically Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. Such was the famine’s devastation that Ukrainian émigré publications coined a new word to describe its barbarity: “Holodomor,” a combination of the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). #ProtectDemocracy 🌻
Professor Synder vividly describes the heart-wrenching story of how up-to-4,000,000 Ukrainians were starved to death to seize their wheat to pay for the importation of industrial goods for the Five Year Industrial Plan.
This was portrayed in the documentary HARVEST OF DESPAIR: THE UNKNOWN HOLOCAUST (Canada, 1984).
Before diplomatic relations were established with the Soviet Union in 1933, Washington depended heavily on journalist reports from Moscow. Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow, won the Pulitzer Prize award in 1932 for his reporting.
Later it was revealed that Duranty had totally ignored the Ukrainian famine (although he did acknowledge to a British diplomat that he was aware of this dreadful calumny). Years later there was an effort to revoke his Pulitzer Prize. (Duranty’s false reporting was described in excruciating detail in S. J. Taylor’s STALIN’S APOLOGIST). The NYT reviewed the facts and ultimately decided not to request a revocation of Duranty’s false reporting.
This is an extraordinary example of how Washington’s over dependence on daily journalist reporting can have a dreadful impact on our understanding of foreign situations.
As a Foreign Service Officer, during the Congo crisis of 1964, one of my responsibilities was to provide The Secretary and others with a ‘factual correction’ of stories that they read in the New York Times and Washington Post, as they came in limos to their offices.
On occasion, my ‘corrections’ were minor. At times they were major. Young journalists were reporting from Congo. Often their judgment and knowledge were scanty.
I applaud the few journalists who, in Vietnam and elsewhere, got their boots muddy as they ferreted out insights as to what really was happening. This seldom occurred in Africa in the 1960s.
Regarding Vietnam, anyone who read Bernard Fall’s and Robert Shaplen’s books knew that there was no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ and that nationalism was the dominant aspect in this war. As a Foreign Service Officer with a distinguished record for my ‘rambunctious’ activities in the Congo, at times with a M 16 and .45, I was a prime candidate for LBJ’s Vietnam War.
Twice, in 1965 and 1967, our ambassador in Saigon ‘asked’ me two join him. Twice I refused.
Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I surmise that some ‘boots on the ground’ journalists witnessed early that we were on a ‘fool’s errand.’ Only in retrospect did this become obvious to folks in Washington and elsewhere.
I urge caution when we read journalist reports on foreign affairs. Professor Snyder and other experts provide timely insights that often are ignored in daily reporting (from journalists and from our embassies). Solid information is available if one seeks it from ‘boots on the ground’ reporters and from scholars/practitioners who understand the soul and substance of their areas of expertise.
Interesting comment Keith Wheelock. So, "this kind of a system" (stalinist SU) has the same malfunction as the US, but SU from the party member situation, and the US from 'free' journalism?
As someone who lived through the Vietnam War in Australia, I can say no one needed to read any books to know a lot of accurate detail about it. For it was the fact of conscription which served to alert everyone—the entire population insofar as a potential conscript was always someone's son, grandson, brother, father, cousin, best friend, college mate, co-worker, guy over the road, etc.—to the fact that something very serious was afoot which was going to affect you and yours in a firsthand way. And against this background where everyone knew, those who accepted the draft mostly agreed with the ideological message from the US; and the vast numbers who, overtly or covertly, disagreed, were motivated to take action.
I stood with 100,000 others in central Melbourne to protest the war, the largest protest march we'd known in this country. I participated with deeply concerned volunteers in the creation of underground networks to give shelter to those trying to evade the draft. I witnessed the hurt and injured coming into the hall where help had been set up to treat those beaten and bashed by the local special police. I lived through an era where security services were unable to comprehend such a thing as a rightwing threat to security, focussing solely on the threat from the supposed "commie left". I experienced my photo being taken by plainclothes security agents, and suspect to this day I had/have an ASIO file, meaning that was quite possibly the reason why I was turned down for service in the diplomatic corps for which I was otherwise well qualified. I watched as other activists had their careers destroyed for years into the future because of those files. I stood on Guam watching the B52s take off laden with agent Orange to spray over Vietnamese forests, committing war crimes that would maim a population with deformities lasting until the present day. And I saw that photo of the napalmed little girl running naked in terror down the road.
And that was just me. Our whole population was touched by that war in one way or another, it formed an entire generation, and we had some truly excellent journalists, brave people, heroic men and women, both at home and on the front, who recorded, analysed it and kept us all well informed. Of course, there was also the rightwing press, of the "all the way with LBJ" type. My protest placards, referring to their two main rags at the time, read: THE SUN NEVER RISES and THE HERALD: BETTER DEAD THAN READ.
It's interesting, in retrospect, to recall that during that entire time of the strongest anti-American feeling with regard to the politics and ideology driving the war, I never lost sight of the fact that our resistance was paralleled by that in the US itself. In that regard, I experienced a sense of great comradeship. Important to note, I think, is that some of the US media, employing outstanding journalists, contributed not a little to keeping us informed.
Penelope With brave warriors such as you the soul of democracy will be preserved. As Churchill expressed it: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, GIVE UP!
Very generous. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the psychic/soul difference I have felt between us postwar Australians, formed by primarily by Vietnam, and the Brits, formed for the most part somewhat later by Iraq. I am actually English-born and raised to age eight, then Australian teens and early adulthood, followed by spells living in both countries through later times, dual citizen. I have never been to the States, yet I feel closer in my soul to Americans than residents of the country of my birth. I have often wondered whether, as with music, the scars one receives during teenage/early adulthood mark one's preferences, sense of Mitgefühl, for life?
Penelope You raise some profound questions to which I have no answers. My mother was British (raised mostly in Egypt, born in Glasgow.) My British grandfather was born in Baghdad and was Director of Customs in the British-Egyptian Protectorate (until 1922).
For me WW II started in September, 1939. A British uncle with the 7th Hussars was captured on reconnaissance at El Alemain. When I published NASSER’S NEW EGYPT: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS (1960, NY & London) my other British uncle openly questioned why I wanted to waste my time with ‘those wogs.’
Personally I have seen scant evidence that Brits of my era ever had any sympathy for ‘those folks’ in the British empire. I experienced this in Africa, when I visited the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1954.
As for Americans, our history in the Philippines has been dreadful. Indeed, if you read soldiers’ letters at the time of the 1898 war and its aftermath, vestiges of Vietnam abound. Ditto with our military occupation of various Latin American countries.
In Vietnam the military slang for Vietnamese often was ‘gooks.’
I wonder whether one can characterize any country with a single response towards another people. For me the exception was WW II when I was taught to hate the Nazis and Japanese, but not to be overly concerned about Italians.
Of course the scimitar of national hate goes back and forth. Japan and Germany currently are America’s stalwart allies. I recall, in WW II, that Madam Chang Kai Chek (a Wellesley graduate) was a symbol of our Chinese allies (who were barred from immigration to the US until 1943, when we permitted 100 yearly).
Is a puzzlement.
I’m sorry if this upsets anyone here, but I prefer reading to listening to podcasts and audio files. The last time I made a comment like this I was told by admiring fans of Mr. Snyder that he is such a busy man. I’m truly glad he is busy and I look forward to his next book, which will probably be on Ukraine, judging by what he’s been presenting here for the past year+. But I didn’t pay two years of subscription in order to wait to read the next book. I’m sorry for my negativism and I’m sure I’ll be hushed by one or more admirers, but I really, really do prefer to read. I’m just expressing myself and my frustration, sorry.
Kostas I consider your comments spot on.I have great admiration for Professor Snyder and have read two of his books and various opinion pieces, I was delighted to subscribe to his Substack. As a former history professor (age 58 to 80) I did not expect to listen to his Yale class lectures. Rather, I was expecting the essence of his thoughts rather than a slog through a college course on Ukraine.
Also, I would appreciate him taking the time to comment on some of the comments posted on his blog. I have the feeling that he is lecturing to us rather than talking with us. By contrast, James Fallows posts and comments on Substack.
Today, I am finally starting on "Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine" by Anne Applebaum.
By the way, I like to listen to books, but I like to read articles like this.
I am less inclined to listen to podcast - who knows why, because I love my audio books.
Thank you for all your work, I appreciate your expertise, activism and generosity.
This is a truly helpful lecture for me. I'm now at the very end of my 3rd year of reading history, and can now isolate 3 distinct phases:
1. confusion. The problem here is an inability to incorporate facts I read into a wider context because at this early stage, there is no context, so there is no place to put the facts.
2. gradually learning more facts, meaning slowly being able to put facts I learned earlier into a context. The more you read, the wider the context, the better you understand.
3. starting to ask questions about one of my main interests, foreign policy. I'm now about 2/3 of the way through H.A. Winker's "The Age of Catastrophe," and something you said in this lecture beginning at 33:32 is exactly what I've been struggling with lately (with Winkler's book in mind): "It's not everyday reality which drives policies, right? It's, and this is true in any system, it's the elite interpretation that's going to drive policies." On the one hand, this is glaringly obvious. But on the other, it is precisely what makes foreign policy so complicated. During the late '20s and '30s all of the powers involved had their own interests. They all had domestic problems, most of which were the result of the seemingly unmanageable consequences of the 1929 stock market crash. If we concentrate on Germany alone, we miss all of the complex interrelationships between the foreign and domestic problems and policies of all the powers involved, including the way domestic problems and policies--the internal--spill over into foreign relations--the external (to borrow from Jörn Leonhard).
And so lately my questions have been, "How much did elites in these governments know about the policies of other governments?" "How limited was their knowledge?" (I do know there were intelligence operations.) There were so many different details that had to be taken into consideration before making decisions, oftentimes in chaos, with people shouting at each other in disagreement while sometimes trying to destroy the reputations of enemies. This all seems exceedingly complex to me. At this stage in my reading I simply can't understand how historians are able to sort it out.
‘Red Famine’ Stalin’s war on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum 📖 a masterpiece of scholarship, a ground-breaking history, and a heart-wrenching story—turns to the horrors of Soviet policy in Ukraine, specifically Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. Such was the famine’s devastation that Ukrainian émigré publications coined a new word to describe its barbarity: “Holodomor,” a combination of the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). #ProtectDemocracy 🌻
I highly recommend Anne Applebaum's Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine.
I highly recommend Anne Applebaum's book, Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine.