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On February 12 (2003) the Verkhovna Rada held special hearings commemorating
the Manmade Famine of 1932-33, here called the Holodomor. This year, marking
the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy, the Ukrainian public remembers
millions of fellow citizens that fell prey to a premeditated genocidal
policy by Stalin's Kremlin and carried out by the Communist leadership of
the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The parliamentary hearings are intended to spur international bodies,
primarily the United Nations, to recognize the Holodomor as an act of
genocide. This time The Day presents an article written by one who stood by
the
cradle of modern studies of the Holodomor.
In the late 1980s, Prof. James Mace
was executive director of the US commission that collected evidence and
eyewitness accounts from survivors, who survived the Golgotha of Soviet
Ukraine
in the 1930s.
Article By James Mace
The Day
Kyiv, Ukraine
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
The original appeared in The Day in Ukrainian
and Russian on Wednesday, February 12, 2003
In 1981, as I embarked on studies of the Great Famine in Ukraine, there were
still many unpublished Party documents. After studying national communism
within the context of the Ukrainian history of the period, along with
documents, speeches, and editorials carried literally every day by the
official press of Soviet Ukraine, the main features of the Soviet official
policy toward Ukraine became completely clear to me.
At this point a digression is in order. Why should I, a born and bred
American, take up such a topic? What did I need it for? I have been asked
this question very often and I have often been tempted to ask in turn: Why
should millions of Russians, Jews, Armenians, and Ukrainians travel across
the ocean to that faraway godforsaken country, my America?
I did it because Ukrainian Americans required such research, and fate
decreed
that the victims chose me. Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without
becoming half Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become
at
least half Ukrainian. I have spent too many years for Ukraine not to have
become the greater part of my life. After all, Martin Luther said, "Here I
stand,
I can do no other."
The perpetrators' motive was simple, and all the documents and later
research have not changed the overall portrait of the events I first
presented in 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in
Tel Aviv.
I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized
power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second
largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian
peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as
understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as
such.
The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore,
no separate country, and thus no problem. Such a policy is GENOCIDE in the
classic sense of the word.
Until the end of war communism in 1921, the Bolsheviks cultivated an almost
pathological hatred what they called bourgeois nationalism. The essence of
Lenin's formula, "rapprochement and merger of nations," can itself be
interpreted as progenocidal, since imposing a single national pattern was
proclaimed "historically progressive."
During the first Soviet occupation of
Kyiv, Bolshevik forces shot anyone they found in the streets speaking
Ukrainian. The famine of 1921-23, killing millions in Ukraine, was obviously
exacerbated by Moscow's economic policy with regard to Ukraine. Food was
pumped out of that country in an openly discriminatory manner.
In 1919 the head of the second Soviet Ukrainian government, Khristian
Rakovsky,
in 1919 formally branded Ukrainian a counterrevolutionary language. In 1921,
the
Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist
Republic (RFSSR) asked for help only for the starving populace in Volga
Basin and the New Economic Policy (NEP) that ended the forced seizure of
foodstuffs delayed in Ukraine six months to prolong the prodrazverstka
campaign of requisitioning farm produce.
It was only with the start of NEP
in 1921 that an attempt was made to have Soviet power coexist with
non-Russian languages and cultures (resolution On the National Question of
the Tenth RKP{b} Congress).
In the course of Ukrainization (or
"indigenization" proclaimed by the Twelfth Party Congress), in 1923-32,
Communists in Ukraine attempted to gain control of the Ukrainian national
cultural process by directly participating in it. Halting this policy during
the Holodomor of 1932-33 had all the hallmarks of genocide. To enforce his
direct rule in Ukraine, Stalin restored to terrible repression and, finally
to famine.
In late October 1932, the All-Union Communist Party (VKP{b}) took
the grain procurements campaign under its direct control through Vyacheslav
Molotov, Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars, who was
appointed chairman of the grain procurements commission in the Ukrainian
SSR. (Lazar Kaganovich headed an analogous commission in what was then the
South Caucasus Territory, including the heavily Ukrainian Kuban.) On
November 18 the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of
Ukraine (KP{b}U) , presided over by Molotov, instituted a system of fines
payable in kind.
This was actually a directive aimed at making collective
farmers return to the state grain received as advance payments on crops, and
confiscating other foodstuffs in the absence of grain. All this could only
be interpreted as a policy meant to cause a famine, the Holodomor.
The CC VKP(b) Politburo resolution of December 14, 1932, signed by Stalin
and Molotov, accusing the Ukrainian SSR government and leadership of the
North Caucasus Territory of Ukrainian nationalism, this being allegedly the
main reason for the unwillingness or inability of the local Communists to
comply with the procurements quotas for mythical grain, along with a January
24, 1933 VKP(b) reprimand of the entire KP(b)U, were graphic evidence that
the leadership in Moscow sought to end any independent activity by the
KP(b)U and Soviet Ukrainian government.
The mass terror unleashed against
Ukrainian culture in 1933 was additional evidence that Moscow wanted to
destroy Ukrainian national identity as the basis of such independent
activity. In 1988, the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, relying on such
evidence, determined that the Holodomor was an act of genocide. In 1990, an
international commission to study the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, set up
by the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, failed to arrive at an unequivocal
conclusion because certain members erroneously considered genocide a matter
of legislation (droit) rather than unchanging law (loi), contrary to the
basic international instruments.
The commission explained its decision,
saying the Manmade Famine in Ukraine was organized 15 years before the said
documents were adopted, and that an act of genocide could be claimed only
the then Soviet government; that none of the actual organizers of the
Holodomor were among the living, except Lazar Kaganovich. The nature and
scope of the Holodomor in Ukraine remain subject to dispute by foreign
experts.
We investigated the issue as best be could. It seems to me that the
documents we collected, including eyewitness accounts and our Report to
Congress, have played their role. The further work with this material we
leave to posterity. We simply could not endure the pain and horror. Stalin's
sociological scorched earth policy maimed Ukraine to such an extent that it
created a discontinuity in the normal development of the Ukrainian people,
producing a unique situation.
While in countries such as Poland, the Czech
Republic, Hungary, etc., the collapse of communism could and did result in
the restoration of independence lost by the previous states, in Ukraine,
except for its western territories, the Ukrainian nation - as a community
possessing a broad consensus regarding its identity, history, and cultural
values - has remained in a sense a national minority in its own country.
In other words, the people as such was so deformed that when Ukraine finally
became independent there was no broad consensus concerning its future. All
that remained was the surviving structures of Soviet Ukraine. In 1991, all
of us made a fundamental albeit unconscious error in assuming that the newly
independent states were new independent states.
Now it is clear that in fact
hitherto extant but dependent states merely became independent with the same
people remaining in basically the same positions, doing basically the same
things, and the course of events evolved from there.
Postcommunist Ukraine
already no longer just an independent Ukrainian SSR, but it is also not a
Ukrainian Ukraine, in the subjective sense - with people sharing the same
national values and understanding of their identity - in the sense in which
Poland is Polish and the Czech Republic is Czech.
All broad historical narratives are to some extent artificial, yet this is a
natural process of self-understanding for any given people. In the case of
the Soviet Union, there was the artificial incorporation of Ukrainian
history and those of other peoples, imposing a different national identity,
as seen fit by those in power at the time.
In 1950, the late Anna Pankratova
made a discovery in the nineteenth edition of her History of the USSR,
writing that the Cossack revolution, which began in 1649, was the "Ukrainian
war of national liberation war led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky."
The apparent
subtext was that for Ukrainians "national liberation" meant "reunification"
with the big brother, Russia; they were to distinguish between the "Great
Patriotic War" from World War II, meaning that they won that war as a
"little brother" under the big one's able guidance and not as a full-fledged
member of the United Nations taking part in a world struggle against Nazism.
Works in Russian by, say, Mikhail Bulgakov were generally available, but a
whole generation of Ukrainian literati known as the rozstriliane
vidrodzhennia, the renaissance that was executed, was "erased," although its
representatives were as talented as all those representing Russia's
coterminous silver age (Mykola Khvyliovy, Yury Yanovsky, young Sosiura and
Tychyna, along with Mykola Zerov's neoclassicist poetry and translations
from ancient literature).
The Soviet regime did its best to "root out and
destroy nationalism" (Bilshovyk Ukrayiny, 1933, No. 7) in the language
itself, purging the very vocabulary of the language as the intellectual
building blocks of the cultural development in any human community. What was
left remained too little to make Ukraine an equal member of the world
community of nations.
As I have often said, the late émigré Prof. Ivan L. Rudnytsky saw the roots
of what would grow as today's Ukraine as early as 1962: the republic
nomenklatura and those beginning to look for and sow the seeds of current
national values. Previously, I have referred to these forces as Ukraine's
territorial and the national elites.
The tragedy of independent Ukraine is
that the territorial, rather than the national elite became the dominant
force, its members retaining all the hallmarks of the traditional
nomenklatura (think one thing, say another, and do yet a third).
The actual
Ukrainian economic model remains triangular. This triangle was discernible
even in the 1970s: corrupt members of the nomenklatura ¬ illegal
entrepreneurs ¬ criminal organizations. Except that narrow professionals
were now the hitherto illegal entrepreneurs are being replaced by
"businessmen" who are more interested in politics than business, while the
other sides of the triangle could always be used to get the better of the
more productive competitors, causing the productivity of labor to remain low
and the people poor. In fact, the situation is the same in Russia.
So long
as this situation remains, all talk about Ukraine's European choice will
remain just so much empty talk, for the European Union is an above all an
economic organization, and this post-Soviet economic model is incompatible
with the European one, while all the fine phrases about zlahoda (harmony or
accord) actually serve to conceal the absence of any national convictions in
most of those who wield power in Ukraine.
Members of the territorial elite
will do provide everything asked of them in the national sphere, because
they themselves have nothing to lose here, no national values, nor do they
have any real state ones.
Much has been written about the inferiority and
lack of competitiveness among Ukrainian-language print and other media
outlets. Yet who wants to read a hundred times over how much we love
Ukraine - and this using slang rather than literary Ukrainian, when most
translations of foreign authors read better and are more interesting in
Russian?
Only the Ukrainians themselves can decide how they should speak and write.
Yet how can they decide this, not knowing the words once banned (again, see
Bilshovyk Ukrayiny, 1933, No 7!)? I wish that someday someone would sit, as
I have done, over the suppressed works from the 1920s of the Academy of
Sciences Institutes of Scientific Language and Living Language.
When will
the results of their work will be published, so that one all can examine
what was done by that lost generation and then be able to make the most
basic building blocks of the nation's thought?
The main thing is that Ukrainians will never become a full-fledged people
and an equal member of European civilization until power flows from the
state to a self-organized people able to force those in power to do what the
people want. This is precisely what makes us often fail to understand the
actual meaning of the concept, civil society.
It is not an ideal system, not
always completely democratic, but no one has discovered anything better thus
far. No state will ever make Ukraine Ukrainian. Only self-organized
Ukrainians can do this, and I am deeply convinced that they will.
The Day's Reference
Prof. James Mace, author of numerous scholarly works and one of the first
serious researchers of the 1933 Holodomor, was born February 18, 1952, in
Muskogee, Oklahoma. In 1973, he graduated from Oklahoma State University and
went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan,
in 1981defending his dissertation, "Communism and the Dilemmas of National
Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1919-33," later published
in book form (Harvard, 1983).
Upon completing his graduate studies Dr. Mace
was invited to join the famine project at the Harvard Ukrainian Research
Institute where he collected material for Robert Conquest's Harvest of
Despair.
In 1986-90, James Mace served as executive director of the US Ukraine Famine
Commission, a hybrid body subject to Congress and the president, supervising
its daily work and drafting its findings for approval by the full
commission. After 1990, he held fellowships at Columbia and Illinois
Universities.
In 1993, Prof. Mace moved to Ukraine, working first as a
supervisory research fellow at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute
of Ethnic and Political Studies, then teaching politics at the Kyiv-Mohyla
Academy National University and International Christian University. Since
1998, Prof. Mace has been consultant to our English digest, The Day.
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 18, 2003
http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2003/06/issue.htm
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