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Prof. James MACE , Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, September 28, 2003
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As our permanent readers likely remember, our newspaper has repeatedly
published articles on the Ukrainian people's greatest tragedy, the Holodomor
or Manmade Famine of 1932-1933. This year alone we have initiated two
actions of The Day dealing with various aspects of this problem. First was
the Candle in the Window action, when we called upon all Ukrainians to light
a candle in their window on the Day of Memory of the victims of the Manmade
Famine and Political Repressions (the fourth Saturday in November), thereby
expressing their sorrow for millions of their deceased compatriots. The Day
published this call in January 2003, and last week we reminded our readers
of this action.
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PROF. JAMES MACE
Photo By Mykola LAZARENKO, The Day
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Another was in support of the campaign to revoke the Pulitzer Prize of
Walter
Duranty, a New York Times journalist who in 1930s misled the world with
his mendacious articles on the situation in Ukraine, claiming that there
were no
famine there. On July 15 The Day carried an article by Professor James Mace,
one of the world's most prominent experts on Ukrainian Famine, with an
in-depth review of Duranty and his antipode Gareth Jones, a journalist who
told the West the truth about the Famine, and a cut-out postcard with which
our readers could contact the Pulitzer Committee to urge it to revoke
Duranty's
prize.
Simultaneously we sent an email to the Pulitzer Committee members and to
New York Times, calling on them to recall the prize. Unfortunately, we never
got any response from our addressees, nor much support from our colleagues,
Ukrainian journalists working for other publications. Was the Famine
genocide?
Who is to blame for what happened to Ukrainians? How can we overcome
the consequences of the tragedy, which are still felt? These are the
questions
Prof. Mace has attempted to answer in his new article, which we offer
readers
today.
FIRST BREAD TO THE STATE
A draft resolution introduced in the United States Senate commemorating the
Holodomor Famine of 1933 has encountered vigorous opposition from Russian
diplomats in Washington, reports Radio Liberty. The resolution introduced by
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, Co-Chairman, U.S. Helsinki
Commission, on July 28, 2003, among other things would put the Senate on
record as recognizing that the Manmade Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and
then the predominantly Ukrainian Kuban constituted an act of genocide as
defined by the United Nations Convention and support the efforts of the
government and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to gain greater recognition of this
tragedy. A separate resolution with different language but much to the same
effect has also been introduced in the US House of Representatives. Both
resolutions are attracting support in Congress, and the Ukrainian-American
community is actively lobbying for them.
The US Commission on the Ukraine Famine - a hybrid commission composed of
members of both Houses of Congress, representatives of the president, the
American public at large, and of which this writer was executive director -
earlier found that the Holodomor did indeed constitute an act of genocide,
but it did not put any other branch of the US government on record, although
there have been Congressional resolutions and presidential proclamations to
that effect.
According to the Radio Liberty report, the press secretary of the Russian
Embassy to the United States has taken a different sharply different view:
"The policy of collectivization in famine in Ukraine in the thirties in no
sense falls under the definition of genocide. The Russian side understands
one thing: we do not agree with this formulation that the situation in the
Soviet Union in the thirties, famine in Ukraine, and the processes that took
place in the period of collectivization and with the treatment of all these
events as genocide."
At the request of Radio Liberty, the press-secretary of the Russian Embassy
Yevhen Khoryshko said: "We categorically disagree with such an assessment of
the famine that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s. Many aspects of the
implementation of Soviet policies under Stalin's leadership in those years
were tragic for many peoples of the USSR, not only for Ukrainians, but also
for Russians, Estonians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, and many
others."
There is indeed a case to be made that the Baltic nations, Chechens, and
Crimean Tatars also were victims of genocide. What happened to Russians and
Kazakhs was a bit different, but their sufferings are also a matter of
record. Here the reader can be referred to an article, "Genocide in the
USSR" in the collection, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, edited
by Israel Charny and published in London in 1988. The author of that article
was I.
Now there are efforts to introduce something similar to the Campbell
resolution in the United Nations, and similar opposition from Russian
diplomats is only to be expected. This is unfortunate for both the
Ukrainians and the Russians, for if our Russian friends take upon themselves
the task of defending Stalin, who was not Russian but used things Russian
for his own purposes, they also inevitably take upon themselves blame for
the things of which he was demonstrably guilty. Ukrainians and Russians have
their own histories, even when they were associated in the same state, and
the best path to enduring friendship between them would seem to be an
attempt to analyze those similarities and differences.
Earlier, in a somewhat more measured statement, Russian Ambassador to
Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin stated that Russia would not apologize to
Ukraine for the famine but made no comment on whether it had or had not
constituted act of genocide by the Stalinist regime. While some Ukrainians,
especially in the emigration, have found his statement objectionable (and it
did betray a certain measure of insensitivity), nobody is asking for a
Russian apology, because the Soviet Union was not strictly speaking a
Russian state.
It was in the process of becoming more Russian, inter alia, by becoming less
Ukrainian, which is, as we shall see, what genocide is all about, but Russia
is not the Soviet Union, and all of us can only welcome the independence
of Russia from Ukraine and vice versa. What needs to be discussed here
is why Ambassador Chernomyrdin was right while his diplomatic colleagues
in the United States are wrong.
In order to settle the controversy over whether the Ukrainian Holodomor was
genocide, two questions must be addressed: What is the definition of
genocide? Does what happened in Ukraine fit this definition?
WHAT IS GENOCIDE?
The world came to adopt the idea of genocide as a crime against humanity
only when the character of Nazi German occupation policies became clear
during World War II. At the time, Winston Churchill called it a crime
without a name. However, there was a man who was ready to give it a name,
and he personally drafted both the international documents that defined
genocide as a crime that had always existed and that now became recognized
for what it is. His name was Raphael Lemkin, and in order to understand what
genocide is, the basic task is to determine what he had in mind and what he
persuaded the international community to adopt.
A Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin wrote and lobbied through the
United Nations two documents: UN General Security Resolution I:96 in 1946
and the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the
Crime of Genocide in 1948. The actual idea, however, is older: in 1933 he
proposed the idea that those who out of hatred for a group of people harmed
the members of that group be considered guilty of barbarism, that those who
destroyed the cultural treasures of such a group out of hatred for it be
considered guilty of vandalism, and that such persons be apprehended, tried,
and punished wherever they might be found.
The model of what he later called
genocide and what he persuaded the international community to agree to was
modeled on what Hitler did to the occupied peoples throughout Europe, to
cripple them so that the German nation would be relatively stronger and
those conquered by it would be relatively weaker regardless of how the war
turned out.
The idea of recognizing genocide as a crime against humanity
that had been committed from the beginning of recorded time was not modeled
on the Holocaust, although the destruction of European Jewry might be termed
the greatest and most terrible genocide of all time, but on something
broader, something designed to simplify humanity by ridding it of those who
were different and leaving in their place those who were the same. Since
Lemkin recognized that the greatest attainment of the human civilization
shared by all were made possible by contributions made possible through
participation in a cultural collectivity, he saw the destruction or forcible
diminishment of such a collectivity as thereby impoverishing humanity as a
whole.
When the international community discussed this concept after World
War II, the representatives of the various nations who came together in the
newly formed United Nations discussed mainly how they had themselves been
victims of genocide and how what had been done to them never be allowed to
happen again. Thus to determine if something is genocide, one must compare
an event not to the Holocaust, a unique blot upon the history of mankind,
but to what Hitler did to the occupied peoples as set out in the documents
defining genocide as a principle of eternal and unchanging universal law.
WHAT HAPPENED IN UKRAINE?
Genocide is basically understood as an attempt to destroy or permanently
cripple a human collectivity as such in order to criminally alter the
national character of a given area through means specified in the Genocide
Convention, such as killing people and deliberately creating conditions of
life calculated to make it impossible to live. There are other means
specified to achieve this goal but these are the most important in the
Ukrainian case.
Even in the 1980s, when all Western scholars had to work
with was the Soviet Ukrainian press and asking people who had fled Ukraine
what in particular they had run away from, it was clear that in 1932-33
there were in Ukraine simultaneous campaigns to starve people to death by
taking their food and to cripple their culture by banning its treasures and
suppressing those who bore and created them - the latter process being a
more extended one lasting from 1929 to 1939, from the suppression of the
Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and blows against the Ukrainian
intelligentsia to the mass slaughter of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine during the Great Terror.
The general scheme of this process was outlined on the basis of the official
Soviet press by the late Hryhory Kostiuk in 1960. The Holodomor clearly
fit into that scheme. For this reason, the US Commission of the Ukraine
Famine found that Ukrainians had been victims of genocide. This writer
drafted that finding and stands by it.
We now know much more than we could have then. Ukrainian historians in
Ukraine have had over a decade to work in the archives, and what remains
unknown is largely locked in closed archives in Moscow. Still, even those
archives are slowly opening, and our picture becomes more complete with each
new historical work. My friend and colleague, Stanislav Kulchytsky, deserves
perhaps the greatest credit for first cracking open the door when he, at the
time a loyal soldier of the Communist Party, persuaded the leadership of
what was still Soviet Ukraine that so much was becoming known that something
had to be said on the official level.
He persuaded then CPU First Secretary
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky to include in his address of December 25, 1987, an
admission that there had indeed been a famine in 1933 in some areas of
Ukraine. Stanislav Vladislavovych was ready with more articles, as cautious
as the times dictated, but the door began to open, at first a crack, and
then more.
Ukraine's writers entered the fray in force. I later learned that Ivan Drach
had first publicly uttered the word Holodomor at a writer's congress in
1986, but only on February 18, 1988 - it turned out to be my birthday -
could Oleksa Musiyenko publish the word in Literaturna Ukrayina (Literary
Ukraine). Then the trickle became a flood. The Writers Union established a
commission to study 1933, and Volodymyr Maniak was named to compile a people
's book of memory.
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Kulchytsky was commissioned to write the questions in
Silski visti (Village news) in a way intended to show how the Communist
Party had tried to save people and make the best of a bad situation, but the
address given for those to send their answers was Maniak's.
6000 people wrote letters, and the result was a book, '33 Famine: People's
Book of Memory, the literary editor of which, my wife, can say more.
Literaturna
Ukrayina announced the formation of an organizing committee for an
international symposium on the famine. The committee was first headed by
Oles Honchar, then by Ivan Drach. I was invited to Ukraine, took part in
organizing that symposium, and the efforts of those abroad were reinforced
and ultimately overshadowed by those here who began to take up the task
themselves.
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(Click on images to enlarge them)
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It turned out that the Central Committee had ordered the Party historians to
search the archives and was shocked by what it had found. I was invited to
be present and say something when on January 26, 1990, the Party admitted
that there had been a famine and that it had been a crime committed by
Stalin and his associates. They ordered the documents be published, and by
the end of 1990 the first collection appeared, albeit as an instant
bibliographic rarity, because certain members of the Central Committee
forced the official press run to be reduced from the officially announced
25,000 to a mere 1500. The symposium that Drach, Maniak, and I organized,
took place in September 1990.
Then came the documents from the state archives. Ukrainian historians began
to peruse caches of documents that had been closed for decades. Kulchytsky's
student, Vasyl Marochko, traveled to every oblast to seek documents. Yury
Shapoval began to pore through the KGB documents on repression and later
the personal archives of Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who
were personally commissioned to organize the horrors that were committed
in Ukraine and the Kuban. Ukrainian historians in Ukraine began to
reconstruct
their nation's history themselves.
On August 11, 1932, Stalin wrote a letter to Kaganovich that Ukraine could
be lost and had to be turned into the most inalienable Soviet republic.
There was obviously understood to be only one way to do this, to remove from
Soviet Ukraine the Ukrainian national content that the Communists had been
forced to allow into it in order to stabilize the situation a decade
earlier. On October 22, Molotov and Kaganovich were named to take direct
control of the grain seizures in Ukraine and the Kuban.
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The 2000 French Edition of the book "Famine-33"
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On November 18,
Molotov pushed through a resolution blacklisting collective farms (closing
down the store, taking everything away from it, and expelling the collective
farm leadership) along with fines in food of individual farmers who
"maliciously" did not have enough bread to take (seizing the potatoes,
beans, chickens, cow, etc.).
On December 14 Communist Party of Ukraine was
blamed for not finding grain that did not exist, because they had allegedly
been penetrated by nationalists and thus came under a reign of terror, and
the following day saw an order to end Ukrainization and close Ukrainian
institutions outside Ukraine wherever Ukrainians lived in other republics of
the Soviet Union. In January the denunciation of the Communist Party
(bolshevik) of Ukraine was made public, Pavel Postyshev was made Second
Secretary but de facto dictator, and a reign of terror against even the
Communist intelligentsia began.
Ukraine was de-Ukrainized by force, as the
peasantry, whom Stalin considered the basic reserve of the national
movement, was literally decimated. We can argue about precisely how many
millions died, but that millions died is beyond dispute. That they were
denied some of their most precious cultural values and the memory of their
creators for decades is also undeniable. In 1928, a survey of lending
libraries was published, finding that the most read Ukrainian authors after
Shevchenko, of course, were Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Mykola Khvyliovyi. In
1933 both were banned and the orthography in which they had written was
altered without asking those who had used it.
WHO IS TO BLAME?
There are from time to time irresponsible voices who want an apology or
reparations from the Russians. Stalin was not a Russian, but he was not very
nice to his Georgian kin either. He did use things Russian as a glue for an
empire he built under the name of Soviet patriotism, but Soviet patriotism
was not the same thing as Russian nationalism and the Soviet Union, although
it had a tendency to become more Russian over time, was never really a
Russian state. Those in Russia who point out that Russians also suffered are
quite right, although they suffered in order to build a Russocentric but by
no means truly Russian state.
Historians do not like to be judges, but they
are the inevitable instruments of their peoples' becoming aware of who were
their parents and what they would like their children to become. Ukraine has
suffered its own agonies as part of its own history. Those who recognize
this are Ukraine's friends, but those who deny this are simply denying
Ukraine its own history and will never enjoy mutual understanding with them.
This should be held in mind by those who seek to deny Ukraine's rightful
claim to the recognition of its suffering.
There were, of course, uncounted Ukrainian Communists who participated in
the campaigns that deliberately caused the death of uncounted millions of
Ukrainian peasants and the flower of those who helped give their nation
expression, if only because the choice became one of doing what one was told
or suffering the fate of those condemned by the force or orders that same
from Moscow.
Can a collaborator be blamed for choosing collaboration over
facing the firing squad himself and risking his family? We cannot blame the
Russians for the fact that Molotov was Russian any more than we can blame
the Jews for the fact that Kaganovich was Jewish or the Georgians for the
fact that Stalin was Georgian.
We can only blame the system that in its
various ways crippled many peoples of the former Soviet Union and attempt to
overcome all that is evil and debilitating in the legacy all of those born
here have been burdened with.
We can only try to help all who have been
damaged understand and recover, each community in its own way, from the evil
that will hopefully never be allowed to return to nations and individuals
well rid of it. Let the Soviet myth of the enforced friendship of peoples be
replaced by the truth of voluntary recovery from the Soviet evil in
friendship and mutual understanding.
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, September 28, 2003
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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