As February 24 marks the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, Guillaume Ribot looks back on the famine orchestrated by the Soviet dictator in the early 1930s, which killed around 4.5 million Ukrainians.
It is a genocide that remained unknown for decades, on which a documentary returns, entitled Bloody harvests 1933, famine in Ukraine. The film, which received the Grand Prize at Biarritz International Documentary Film Festival (Fipadoc), is available in replay on france.tv since Sunday, February 19. Between 1931 and 1933, about seven million Soviets, including 4.5 million in Ukraine and 1.5 million in Kazakhstan, died of starvation.
This famine was planned by Joseph Stalin. The master of the USSR seized the crops and seeds of the Ukrainian peasants. Director Guillaume Ribot returns to the Holodomor (Ukrainian term meaning “extermination by starvation”) which sheds a disturbing light on the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
franceinfo : How did you become interested in the Holodomor?
Guillaume Ribot : Twenty years ago, I was working on the genocide of the Jews of Ukraine during the Second World War. We went from village to village with historians to interview people on the subject. One day, an old lady confided to us, off camera, that 10 years before that, people had died of starvation in her village. I didn’t understand what she was saying, because in a country so rich in cereals, how could Ukrainians have starved to death? “We had wheat, everything we needed, but the Communists took everything from us. It was Stalin who took us killed,” she told us.
It was a total surprise. Armed with our knowledge of the Second World War, we thought we knew a lot, and there we discovered an unknown part of the history of this country. We were able to consult the secret archives of the USSR, opened in 1991, in order to understand the violence that these Ukrainians had suffered. We started the film in 2020, without imagining that the war would break out two years later.
Your common thread is Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who witnessed this genocide…
Absolutely. I had already heard of Gareth Jones, who smuggled the Ukrainian countryside during this terrible famine [à partir de mars 1933], but I knew very little about him. With Antoine Germa, my co-screenwriter, we tried to embody the film, because we had no images of this tragedy; without a voice, it was even more perilous to make the film. While researching, I discovered that the Welsh National Archives have, thanks to a Ukrainian foundation, digitized the dozens of Gareth Jones’ notebooks.
On the Holodomor, I found five of his notebooks, of absolute wealth. I thus discovered the entire journey of this journalist, aged 27 at the time, through his writings. I found myself closest to his thoughts. This convinced me that he had to be the common thread of the film. He was not in the pay of the Bolsheviks, unlike other Western journalists who were stationed in Moscow and discredited his word at the time.
There were no images of this famine?
It’s quite incredible, but it’s a genocide of 4.5 million people, in Ukraine alone, and there are only 26 photographs attested by historians. So I had very little material at my disposal, which was the film’s greatest difficulty.
It was really Gareth Jones’ notebooks that allowed me to find the tools to make the film. In his writings, the journalist evokes a famine which had taken place in Ukraine in 1921 and which had been less deadly than the Holodomor. This famine of 1921 had been extensively documented, photographed and filmed. So I used these images for my film, specifying their source. I wanted the images to be used more to understand what happened, rather than to illustrate. To show the degree of horror in which Stalin intentionally plunged Ukraine, because people ended up eating each other.
You also mention cases of cannibalism during this period…
Yes, I had in hand the reports of the Soviet secret police, the ancestor of the KGB and the FSB, which relate these terrible facts. I made a point of showing these documents in a rather cool way in the film, because when the executioners recognize their crimes, that is strong proof for me.
You also use images from propaganda films to illustrate your documentary. For what ?
I used three sources, including Soviet fiction. Not for what they were, namely propaganda films, but for the reality they show. I left aside their scenarios which were only lies and I drew their documentary strength from it. I went looking for a form of reality in the fiction of these propagandist films. The images of the poor peasants really show poor peasants of that time.
By wanting to denounce through films the resistance of these populations who were fighting against the dispossession of their property by the Communists, the Soviets finally brought a form of reality into their propaganda. These images have a force of incarnation which makes it possible to better understand the words which are said as well as the unfolding of the story. In addition, we were at the time of the silent, which gives a very expressive cinema. They are propaganda films, but everything in the documentary is true and attested by historians.
Your film was screened in the European Parliament which recently recognized this genocide…
Initially, the European Parliament had recognized this tragedy as a crime against humanity, but last December the intentional notion of starving, and therefore killing, the Ukrainian people was retained. MEPs requalified the Holodomor as a genocide, two weeks after the Germans. It was therefore important to show the film in this Parliament and it was very moving.
Incidentally, the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Agriculture, who was on a videoconference, intervened after the film and said “What can we say after this movie ? Si is: ‘Never again’.“Then he explained to us what is currently happening in Ukraine with wheat.”The Russians mine the wheat fields so that we cannot cultivate them. The Russians are stealing our wheat and exporting it in whole cargoes. They are using the weapon of hunger.” History repeats itself tragically, but unlike 1933, there are images.