Soviet and Western Denial
Holodomor denials are the assertions that the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine either did not occur or did occur but was not a premidated act. Denying the existence of the famine was the Soviet state's position, and reflected in both Soviet propaganda and the work of some Western journalists and intellectuals including Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. Denial of the famine by Soviet authorities was immediate and continued well into the 1980s. The denial of the famine was a well orchestrated and highly successful 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", wrote Edvard Radzinsky. This was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting Hitler's Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion according to Robert Conquest.
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Famous quotes containing the words soviet, western and/or denial:
“They were right. The Soviet régime is not the embodiment of evil as you think in the West. They have laws and I broke them. I hate tea and they love tea. Who is wrong?”
—Alexander Zinoviev (b. 1922)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)