Authors
Henry H. Prown1; 1 Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada Discussion
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, which catered to New York’s vibrant Eastern European Jewish diaspora. “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 essay will examine the efforts of the Forward, under its labor editor Harry Lang, to expose the unfolding Holodomor – and the counter-efforts of Soviet media against what the Comintern internally termed “the largest Jewish daily in the world.” In doing so, it will contextualize contemporary Russian propaganda within a longer history, and explore the role played by American immigrants in broader domestic debates over Stalinism. 
