Product Details

• Directors: Slavko Nowytski, Yurij Luhovy
• Producers: Slavko Nowytski, Yurij Luhovy
• Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: International Historic Films, Inc.
• DVD Release Date: November 15, 2004
• Run Time: 55 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0009T2JJW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,476 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be in Libraries Worldwide and part of History Curriculums--Russia continues to deny what this DVD authenticates!, June 21, 2008

By 

Yaroslava Benko "Mandrivnyk" (Arlington Heights, IL - USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust (DVD)

Recipient of numerous international awards (including an Academy Award nomination), `Harvest of Despair, The Unknown Holocaust--The Great Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933' has been featured on William F. Buckley's `Firing Line' on PBS, and is a documentary film by Ukrainian-American award-winning co-director/producer Slavko Nowytski (himself, a recipient of numerous international film prizes) and Ukrainian-Canadian Yurij Luhovy, award-winning Montreal producer/director, filmmaker, and accomplished film editor, who has worked in the private industry for over 35 years. He is a member of the Academy of Canadian Cinema. Yurij has worked in features with Paul Almond, MGM and many co-productions; French, Italian and Yugoslavian. As an award-winning filmmaker, he has worked on documentaries for CBC and the National Film Board of Canada and many independent productions. Besides co-directing the award-winning documentary film "Harvest of Despair," Yurij Luhovy has produced another historic feature-length documentary film on Ukraine's 1932-33 Holodomor entitled, "Okradena Zemlya" (Genocide Revealed). Mr. Luhovy has received the Presidential Order of Ukraine for his accomplishments.

Following are awards and honors that the film `Harvest of Despair' has won:

1. Houston International Film Festival - April 1985 - Houston, Texas

2. Strasburg International Film Festival - April 1985

3. Festival Des Filmes Du Monde - August 1985 - Montreal, Quebec

4. New York Film Festival - September 1985 - New York City

5. Columbus International Film Festival - November 1985 - Columbus, Ohio

6. Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival - October 1985

7. International Film and TV. Festival of New York - November 1985

Reference sources include: Archival Footage and Photographs from Thorn Emi Elstree Studios, London; Cinematheque Gaumont, Paris; Visnews Limited, London; National Archives and Records Service, Washington; Library of Congress Motion Picture Archives, Washington; Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries, NY; The New York Times, NY; Canadian Broadcasting Service, Toronto; Lypynsky East European Research Institute, Philadelphia; Ukrainian Orthodox Museum, South Bound Brook; Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, Winnipeg; Foundation to Commemorate the 1933 Ukraine Famine, Montreal; Historical Advisor and Author, Professor Orest Subtelny; Ukrainian Canadian Committee, Winnipeg; World Congress of Free Ukrainians, Toronto; St. Vladimir Institute, Toronto; Ukrainian Institute of America, NY; Prolog Research & Publishing, NY; Ukrainian Free University, Munich; and, numerous other sources shown at the end of the film.

Among those interviewed are: Harvard University Author, Historian, and Professor, James E. Mace, Ph.D.; Toledo University, Robert S. Sullivant; British Correspondent, Malcolm Muggeridge; Former German Attaché in Moscow, Johann Von Herwarth; former Village Midwife, Motria Dutka; Student during Famine years, Lubov Drashevska; former Professor of Journalism in Soviet Ukraine, Ivan Majstrenko; former Soviet General Petro Grigorenko; Survivor from Poltava, Reverend Alexander Bykovetz; and, many others.

This documentary is a rich reservoir of archival film, rare photographic evidence, and interviews (in English) with survivors and scholars (including foreign press). History is recorded on this DVD and presented in an engrossing, extremely informative presentation--it documents how the Soviet Government resorted to starving the populace by the millions, while simultaneously presenting a deliberately deceptive depiction to the world.

In his works, Dr. Mace, Harvard University Professor and Director of the US Commission into the study of the Ukrainian Famine, argued that during the early 1930s, the famine in Soviet Ukraine was an act of genocide on the part of Soviet leader Stalin. Mace stated, in 1982, at an international conference on the Holocaust and genocide that the Ukrainian peasant, the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian intellectuals needed to be destroyed, in order to centralize the power in the hands of Stalin. All that was precalculated, it was no accident.

Even today, 75 years later, the Ukrainian famine is still doubted and denied by some because of the denials of the Soviet leadership and people like New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for falsifying the reality in Ukraine and lying instead that there was an abundant harvest. Recently, for example, former Soviet dissident and Russian historian (who won the Nobel prize for revealing the horrors of the Soviet Gulag) Alexander Solzhenitsyn, attacked those who maintain that Ukraine endured a genocide in 1932-1933 contending that it's a `fairy tale' that was recently invented by anti-Russian forces to discredit the Russians. Watch this DVD, and see who's inventing a fairy tale. Some of the countries that have acknowledged Holodomor are: Australia, Argentina, Georgia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Lithuania, Poland, USA, and Hungary.

That films (including `Harvest of Despair'), photos, witnesses, and survivors document reality is evident, as the reader witnesses firsthand the horror and atrocities of a man-made famine; that the Russian Federation continues to deny that Holodomor (as the genocide-famine is called in Ukrainian) is an ethnic genocide, is still a harsh reality in 2008.

On April 2, 2008, the Russian resolution declared that the 1930s famine which was mainly in Soviet Ukraine and killed millions of peasants, shouldn't be considered genocide. This resolution was passed by the Russian Federation Duma by a vote of 370 to 56 and was supported by Solzhenitsyn, who stated that historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines was lacking. Watch this DVD and look at all of the `historical proof' for yourself. Then, you, the reader, decide for yourself.

Regarding Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Yuriy Lukanov, a freelance journalist and writer, wrote in the August 14, 2008 issue of Kyiv Post that regarding the Gulag Archipelago, the importance for Ukrainians was the description of fighters of UPA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army)--for years, the Soviet propaganda machine had portrayed it as a nationalistic gang serving Hitler. To this day, there are Ukrainians who continue repeating the communist stereotypes that were forced on them about the army that fought during World War II for an independent Ukraine, against both the Soviets and the Germans. The truth is that Ukrainian partisans were sent straight to GULAG from forests where they had been caught.

At the time, Solzhenitsyn's positive description of the Ukrainian rebels (he wrote that the imprisoned UPA fighters were horrified by the slavery that reigned in the camps--and, that Ukrainians inspired and organized a series of revolts in the camps) was an inconceivable sin from the point of view of Soviet ideologists. Just before the collapse of the USSR, after his return there, Solzhenitsyn stopped being a consistent critic of the Soviet system and suddenly started speaking against the dismantling of the Soviet Union.

Levko Lukianenko, a prisoner who had spent 26 years in camps, later said that Solzhenitsyn had been recruited by the secret services, and one of his reports foiled a rebellion planned by Ukrainian inmates.

Recently, Solzhenitsyn stated that the 1932-33 famine was not an act of genocide against Ukrainians--he was then accused of chauvinism. Earlier, in his Gulag Archipelago, he truthfully described many horrors of that famine; now, he was changing his rhetoric.

2008 marks the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor in Ukraine. As part of the commemoration, in Kyiv, Ukraine, after first being lit by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, the International Holodomor Remembrance Torch will start its journey. It will travel through 33 countries throughout 2008...and, will visit Washington DC, the last leg of the Torch's tour of 23 U.S. cities, before reaching Ukraine in November 2008, where it will be part of the official state commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Ukraine's Genocide of 1932-1933.

Addendum--in the October 9, 2008 issue of News Blaze, in an article by Leah Dow about the Ukrainian Famine Exhibit, he stated that U. S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, David Kramer, on September 16, 2008, at the opening ceremony of the exhibit stated that the Holodomor was man-made. He informed the public that President Bush, two years ago, signed legislation authorizing a Holodomor memorial to be built on federally owned land near the U.S. Capitol in Washington. The National Capital Planning Commission approved the site on October 2, 2008.

According to the October 12, 2008 issue of The Ukrainian Weekly, the location of the Genocide Memorial in Washington, D. C. will be at the intersection of North Capitol Street, Massachusetts Avenue and F Street, in the NW quadrant of the District of Columbia--five blocks north of the U.S. Capitol. The site is near Washington's Union Station and within walking distance of the Supreme Court, the U. S. Capitol, and the National Mall.

That same issue of The Ukrainian Weekly stated that the DVD `Harvest of Despair,' which came out over twenty years ago, is still considered the most authoritative documentary on the Famine. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its Consulate General in Toronto, has funded the production of 1,200 copies of a trilingual DVD of the film for the purpose of making it available to the delegations meeting for the 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations that began on September 16, 2008. This will be the first time that the three language versions will be on one disc. Hopefully, Amazon will soon be selling this... Read more ›

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust, December 27, 2008

By 

Dorothy M. Kelly (Clifton, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust (DVD)

This is a superb documentary of what happened in the Ukraine in 1932-33. Done to them by the Russians because of the greed and the cruelty of the Russians. Everyone should know this history of the Ukraine.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harvest of Despair - A must for all schools, August 31, 2008

By 

S. De Laughter "Change the World" (Hohenfels, Germany) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harvest of Despair: The Unknown Holocaust (DVD)

I found this video in the library at Taegu American Highschool in South Korea. At that time I was teaching government and US History. I found it very beneficial in both classes and it made my students stop and think about how fortunate we really are in America.