In 2003, Kalturnyk published an essay in "Modern Communism" arguing that the Holodomor was a hoax perpetrated by right-wing American newspapers and sustained by anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. The article posited that Ukraine was caught up in a "virtual civil war" between Kulaks (rich peasants) and the Soviet system in 1933-34, and argued that food shortages only occurred in the limited areas where peasants took up the Kulak call for an "agricultural strike". This article has been the source of some controversy.