a076  0801  22 Sep 86
PM-TV Extra-Ukrainian Film, Adv 24,0491
$Adv24
For Release Wed PMs, Sept. 24
Buckley's 'Firing Line' Screens Controversial Film on Soviet Famine
By ROBERT BARR
Associated Press Writer
    NEW YORK (AP) - Since his magazine helped stir the controversy, it's
fitting that William F. Buckley Jr. is showcasing an angry film about
the Ukrainian famine in the Soviet Union half a century ago.
    Tonight's special ''Firing Line'' broadcast of ''Harvest of
Despair,'' framed by an hour of conversation, is a model for
presenting difficult issues. Buckley proves that balance isn't simply
finding someone to say, ''It isn't so.''
    ''Harvest of Despair'' contends that 7 million people died in the
Ukraine in 1932-33 because of Josef Stalin's decision to starve
peasants into submission. The Soviet government insists that nothing
of the sort happened.
    In an article earlier this year in Buckley's ''National Review,''
Peter Paluch, a member of the Ukrainian Studies Fund of Harvard
University, charged that large sectors of the news media have
acquiesced in a Soviet cover-up of the famine. He also accused public
broadcasting of ''spiking,'' or rejecting, the film.
    ''Harvest of Despair'' combines eyewitness testimony and grainy
black-and-white pictures, both movies and stills, to recount how as
many as 25,000 people a day starved to death in the richest
agricultural region in Europe. 
    ''That's about as harrowing an hour as one could spend, this side of
Dachau,'' Buckley says after the film is shown.
    For the two-hour ''Firing Line'' special, Buckley invited three
panelists: Harrison E. Salisbury, Pulitzer Prize-winning
correspondent for the New York Times; columnist Christopher Hitchens
of ''The Nation,'' and Robert Conquest, senior research fellow at the
Hoover Institution and author of ''The Harvest of Sorrow,'' a newly
published book on the famine.
    There is no Soviet spokesman to make a ritual denial, and the
panelists endorse the historical accuracy of the film.
    So why, Buckley asks, did the Soviet version prevail?
    ''It didn't,'' Salisbury says, citing reports at the time in
American, British and German papers.
    The glaring exception to that reporting was in the New York Times,
whose correspondent Walter Duranty reported that ''all talk of famine
is ridiculous.''
    Duranty, who left the Times by 1934, was ''a totally cynical man,''
Salisbury says. ''Why the Times put up with him I simply don't
know.''
    The panelists agree that far from being covered up, the deaths of
Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens in the collectivization
campaigns are part of the historical record, even if they get less
attention than the victims of the Nazi holocaust.
    Buckley notes that the film mentions relief campaigns mounted in
several countries, which could not have happened if the tragedy had
been successfully suppressed.
    The panelists part company on the most troubling question: Was the
famine a Stalinist excess or is it in the nature of Marxist-Leninist
government? 
    End Adv for Wed PMs, Sept. 24
    
AP-NY-09-22-86 1057EDT
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