Press Council Ruling Made on WWII Losses

TORONTO–The Globe and Mail, responding to a complaint before the Ontario Press Council (OPC) lodged by Myroslaw Prytulak of Windsor, conceded that referring to the people of the former Soviet Union simply as Russians is inaccurate.

Prytulak complained that a Globe and Mail story published on May 10 erred in saying 27 or 28 million Russians died during the Second World War, when in fact the figure included millions of non-Russian citizens of the Soviet Union.  He said he was “unable to unravel the motives behind the Globe and Mail’s decision to airbrush the enormous losses by other East European countries, especially since their losses were very much greater than those in Russia.”

Russia’s losses were 5.8 million, Prytulak maintained, including 1.8 million military and 4.0 civilians; while Ukraine’s losses were 8.0 million, including 2.5 million military and 5.5 million civilians.

The highest estimate of Soviet (not just Russian) losses that Prytulak had found was on the website of the Guinness World Records, which said: “The Soviet Union lost an estimate 26.6 million of its citizens.”

In its defence, the Globe and Mail said that before the war, the terms “Soviet citizens” and “Russians” were synonymous in everyday usage and that the reporter probably saw them as interchangeable. “It was an imprecise description, but the writer was not trying to mislead or misinform.”

The newspaper’s representative at the OPC hearing said “our reporter slipped and we didn’t correct him” and offered to publish a correction now.  He also said that the he resented the suggestion that the newspaper “arrogantly refused to redress” the dispute without involving the press council.

In its final adjudication, the OPC upheld Prytulak’s complaint regarding the inaccuracy, while at the same rejecting his assertion that the newspaper had attempted to "airbrush" the enormous losses suffered by other Eastern European countries and sought to “discredit and intimidate” the complainant.

Prytulak had previously, along with writer Marsha Skrypuch, lodged a complaint to the OPA regarding stories published between 2000-2002 in the Windsor Star and Globe and Mail in relation to the newspapers' references to suspected war criminals as Ukrainians.

In its final ruling on these complaints, the OPC said was not prepared to fault newspapers for describing as Ukrainian-born a person whose birthplace is within the borders of Ukraine.