Denial of The Holodomor

Denial of the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Заперечення Голодомору, Russian: Отрицание Голодомора) is the assertion that the 1932-1933 Holodomor, an artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine, recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament (due to this controversial assertion the U.N. has refused to visit the matter), did not occur. The Quebec National Assembly; the Government of Ukraine; the United States House of Representatives; the United States Senate; the Parliament of Canada; the Senate of Canada; the Canadian provincial governments of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan; UNESCO; the United Nations; and over 40 other jurisdictions around the world have officially condemned the Holodomor or recognized it as genocide.

This denial and suppression was made in official Soviet propaganda from the very beginning until the 1980s. It was supported by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. Stalin "had achieved the impossible: he had silenced all the talk of hunger... Millions were dying, but the nation hymned the praises of collectivization", said historian and writer Edvard Radzinsky.

According to Robert Conquest, that was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting the Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion, to be followed by similar campaigns over the Moscow Trials and denial of the Gulag labor camp system.

The famine's existence is still disputed by some, despite a general consensus. The causes, nature, and extent of the Holodomor remain topics of controversy and active scholarship.