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A fact hard to grasp: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate)
is still in the thrall of Stalin's policy of silence
By Yevhen Sverstiuk, writer
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine
April 3, 2001
It appears that some begin to discover the truth about one of the twentieth
century's greatest tragedies only in the epoch of the informational
explosion, seventy years after the fact!
Discover is the right word because the 1933 manmade famine was long
suppressed in terms of information, from the world and the very people who
died a hungry death. The very word, famine, was banned.
The intelligence services of Western states, of course, had the information.
But the press was full of trumped-up false eyewitness reports. That was the
period of by far the most successful Soviet disinformation. If Stalin could
hush up a famine-induced genocide, what could prevent Hitler from making use
of this experience and to deny the genocide of the Jews?
Milena Rudnytska, the then Polish senator, wrote in The Fight for Truth
About the Great Famine about how difficult it was to put the question of
Ukrainian famine on the League of Nations agenda: the delegations of the
USSR and the so-called Ukrainian SSR denied everything.
In 2000, the struggle for truth continues.
France's Albain Michel Publishing House in 2000 in Paris issued a big book
of eyewitness accounts about the Ukrainian famine (490 pages), titled Le
noir, trente-troisieme. The original Ukrainian text '33: Famine, Book of
People's Memory, 1991, compiled by Lidiya Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak,
has been translated into French by Volodymyr Boichuk, Kalyna Huzar-Uhryn,
and Oleh Pliushch.
The print run was soon sold out. A reprint is in the making. However, there
is a problem with the preface written by Professor George Sokoloff whose
name was put on the cover. The point is that Stalin hushed up the famine by
all the possible means. This campaign of denial ran through the whole
Russian-language literature.
It only became possible to break through the information blockade after the
inquiry of an international commission into the 1933 genocide, the
publication of Vasyl Barka's novel The Yellow Prince, Vasily Grossman's
Forever Flowing, Robert Conquest's world-acclaimed Harvest of Sorrow,
and the production of some films.
But undisguised falsifiers are giving way to tendentious relativists who
still try, for some reason, to diminish the size of the disaster. Among them
is the preface's author.
Prominent French philosopher and Sovietologist Alain BesanÍon (who could
have written a more competent preface) said in 1983, "In addition to
praying, all we can do for many of those martyrs is remember."
But even praying was not allowed everywhere. Outside the Evil Empire, the
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic
Church performed, often jointly, annual Lenten liturgies in memory of the
famine martyrs.
There March became the month of mourning, for most people died precisely
in this month. Bound Brook, New Jersey (USA) had a church built to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy (the remains of
Patriarch Mstyslav now rest there).
And what about Ukraine? A fact hard to grasp: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
(Moscow Patriarchate) is still in the thrall of Stalin's policy of silence.
It is difficult to imaging that Ukraine's most numerous church should not
remember in its prayers and mourning liturgies the seven million Orthodox
peasants who died without confession or unction and were dumped in pits
without Christian funeral.
Or has the church forgotten? But the other Ukrainian churches -
Autocephalous, Kyiv Patriarchate, and the Greek Catholic - do remember and
commemorate this annually.
Does this loss of memory and scorn for our kindred martyred by the famine
not affect the moral condition of the current generation?
Prayer and memory. A nation that has lost memory cannot be reborn, the
Frenchman BesanHon reminds us.
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine
http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2001/11/den-pln/dp3.htm
For personal and academic use only
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