<i>‘</i> Every rotten slander’: Holodomor denial and the origins of the American popular front
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. ‘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 article explores how American Communists, under pressure from the Comintern, and some sympathetic Leftist parties came together in defense of the USSR during the mid-1930s through a campaign against Forward editor Harry Lang. In doing so, it will locate Holodomor denial within the contested origins of the broader political and cultural phenomenon of the ‘Popular Front’ movement in an American context.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".