In the spring of 1933, an Austrian engineer was ambling through the outskirts of Soviet Ukraine’s capital city when he stumbled upon a horrific scene: a mass grave, and its gravedigger, who appeared to be smiling.

Such scenes were not necessarily all that unusual in the Ukrainian countryside that year, as millions died from a forced famine now widely known as the Holodomor engineered by the Stalinist regime.

What was unusual about this scene is that it was captured on film. This particular image, along with about 100 others, had to be secretly secretly smuggled out through the Austrian embassy’s diplomatic pouch.

The Soviet government had banned foreign journalists from Ukraine in early 1933 as it instituted a military blockade. This prevented starving peasants from leaving, even as state security forces rampaged through the countryside stealing or destroying much of whatever food remained.

The result was both massive death and destruction and its concurrent and subsequent dismissal and denial by authorities.

Today, destruction and denial continue to go hand in hand. For example, invading Russian forces have systematically destroyed Holodomor memorials in occupied Ukraine.

They have done this while denying that this tragedy and crime even occurred at all — while reportedly starving Ukrainian civilians in cities like Oleshky.

As a historian who specializes in media and mass atrocity, this intersection between what I call “ecosystems of destruction” and “ecosystems of denial” is key to understanding the history of modern famine.

It is also a prominent subject in my new book, Communist Propaganda in Pre-Cold War America.

My research digging through declassified Soviet archives and long-defunct newspaper issues revealed that Stalinist-controlled press outlets in the United........

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