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Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 10, 2003
As I sat at the press conference at Kyiv Memorial between Yuri Shapoval and
Volodymyr Serhiychuk, two scholars who have done so much to document the
"Holodomor," what we in the West called the Great Manmade Famine of
1932-33, my mind slipped back over a decade and a half to myself sitting at
a computer in my Washington office, drafting the basic parts of the US
Commission on the Ukraine Famine's "Report to Congress," including its
findings.
I explained that I had not been a member of that commission, only its staff
director, the person who gathered the information and wrote the report for
the commission to adopt. Still it was often called the Mace Commission, and
in a sense it was.
Kyiv Memorial is the only place in Ukraine with a set of tapes containing
the original recordings of the interviews, from which the three-volume "Oral
History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine" were transcribed.
It is thus the only place one can go to hear those actual voices recorded in
the 1980s, the words of witnesses for the most part now dead. It also has a
copy of the documents from the US National Archives that we used to
determine what information the American government had about the famine
and when.
Thus I was surrounded by not only an exhibit on Ukraine's tragic
twentieth-century experience but also by memorabilia of the defining moment
of my own life. And I could not help thinking back to myself at the
keyboard, drafting those findings for the fifteen members of the commission
to adopt. What had we learned?
We had held hearings to listen to eyewitnesses, old ĪmigrĪs who could tell
them what had been done to them by others but not why it had been done. For
that we had to look into the minds of the perpetrators, primarily through
the official press of the time.
We had to look at Ukrainian history within the broader context of what the
late ĪmigrĪ scholar Hryhory Kostiuk called the decade of mass terror from
1929 to 1939, the crushing of the intelligentsia and such self-assertion as
Ukrainians in the Soviet Union had retained up to that time, culminating
with the wholesale slaughter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
(bolshevik) of Ukraine during the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
The "Holodomor" was simply the bloodiest episode in the process of Ukraine
itself being crushed. The newspapers allowed us to trace step by step the
measures by which the food was taken from those who had produced it, the
simultaneous reign of terror unleashed on those who were in charge of taking
that food, and the repression of those most associated with the policy of
Ukrainization that was killed along with the peasantry in the Postyshev
terror of 1933.
I had no choice but to call this an act of genocide, the deliberate partial
destruction, irreversible crippling of a nation as such. The members of the
Commission read the information that had been compiled and adopted the
findings I had drafted. There were - and still are - many who disagree.
Even as I sat at that computer, the wall of silence here was beginning to be
breached. On December 25, 1987, in a long speech to commemorate the
seventieth anniversary of the proclamation of the first Ukrainian Soviet
state by the rump First Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, CPU First Secretary
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky went beyond the usual formula that there had been
"food difficulties" in 1932-33 to add the phrase "and even famine in some
areas."
Stanislav Kulchytsky, whom I later learned had composed the memorandum to
Shcherbytsky persuading him to take such a step, was ready with an article
on the famine in "Ukrayinsky istorychny zhurnal" (Ukrainian Historical
Journal), newspaper articles, and even radio programs that were not terribly
forthcoming but said what it was possible to say at the time. Then the
writers began to speak out, and on February 18, 1988, for the first time in
print here the word "Holodomor" appeared in a statement by Oleksiy
Musiyenko.
It happened to be my thirty-sixth birthday, and I thought it a wonderful
present at the time. Soon the Writers Union anointed the late Volodymyr
Maniak to compile a book of memory. Kulchytsky wrote the questions in an
article in "Silski visti" (village news) with Maniak's address. The results
of the 6000 letters he received to compile a book, which Maniak compiled
with his late wife, Lidiya Kovalenko, edited by the lady who would later
become my wife.
The ferment continued, and on January 26, 1990, with the Soviet Union in its
death throes, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine
adopted a resolution, On the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and the
Publication of Archival Materials Connected With It. They had invited me to
Kyiv to be on hand to say what a good thing this was, and I got my first
taste of the land that would become my second Fatherland. The result by the
end of that year was a remarkable book, "Holod 1932-1933 rokiv na Ukrayini:
Ochyma istorykiv, movoiu dokumentiv."
The book itself had a press run of only one-tenth of what it was supposed to
be and immediately became a bibliographical rarity, and the articles by
historians, except for that by Mai Panchuk, which he could and should revise
as an introduction to an expanded second edition of these documents, were
not terribly interesting, but the book had its effect.
Leonid Kravchuk once said that reading it played a major role in his
transformation from a soldier of the Party into the president of independent
Ukraine, indeed of the transformation of the Ukrainian SSR into the state,
of which Leonid Makarovych became first president. As a monument of the
history of the moment when it was published it stands alone, and it could
well serve as the basis of a collection of what Ukrainian historians have
unearthed since that time.
Now Ukrainian historians have had well over a decade to go through the
archives. Led by Kulchytsky and Shapoval, the best researcher in hitherto
secret archives that Ukraine can claim as a national treasure, Volodymyr
Serhiychuk, Vasyl Marochko, and so many others too numerous to name
on the pages of one newspaper, Ukraine has through its dedicated historians
dug through those archives for over a decade, each unearthing and publishing
documents to make evermore precise our knowledge of the specifics of what
was done to their people.
I was relieved to pass on this burden but glad at heart that there were so
many to take the baton. After all, I did not start this process. I would say
that if any monuments to historians are to be built (and historians prefer
books to stone), it should be to Dmytro Solovei, who published the first
really serious study of the famine in 1953 in Winnipeg and reprinted forty
years later in Drohobych as "Holhota Ukrayini" (Golgotha of Ukraine) for
any of a number of others, of whom all did what they could when I was
either yet unborn or still in the cradle.
History as a discipline is a process of finding out more about what it is
important to learn, and the main thing is not to forget the steps that were
taken before. Others took their steps before me, I made my few steps, and
now others here are taking further steps. I felt pride that they would
continue what I did not start and cannot finish, but in which I also had a
hand.
Now I sat at the presentation of a collection of documents by Volodymyr
Serhiychuk, a collection of conference articles on the three famines of the
Soviet period, and a posthumous collection by the late Volodymyr-Yury
Daniliv, who had been one of the organizers of the moot court put together
by the World Congress of Free Ukrainians to look at the famine from a
juridical standpoint, which found that maybe the "Holodomor" was genocide
and maybe not.
That is another tale best left for the memoirs I always want to write so
that my son in America will know that his father was not as bad as some say
nor as good as some would like to think. Yury Shapoval was perhaps the first
to go though the recently released archives of Lazar Kaganovich, publish a
wealth of documents to refine our image of this whole horrible episode, and
add, as is his wont, a reference to a document published in a newspaper
("Nezavisimaya gazeta," November 30, 2000) I might otherwise not have seen,
a document that tells us what I could only infer.
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It is in "Komandyry velykoho holodu: Poyizdky V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha v
Ukrayinu ta na Pivnichny Kavkaz. 1932-1933 rr." (Commanders of the Great
Famine: The Sojourns of Molotov and Kaganovich to Ukraine and the North
Caucasus in 1932-1933), edited by Valery Vasylyev and Yury Shapoval (Kyiv,
Geneza, 2001), a personal letter from Stalin to his trusted lieutenant Lazar
Kaganovich, September 11, 1932 (Ukrainian text, pp. 160-161; Russian text,
pp. 174-175):
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"...The main thing is now Ukraine. Matters in Ukraine are now
extremely bad. Bad from the standpoint of the Party line. They say that
there are two oblasts of Ukraine (Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk, it seems)
where almost 50 raikomy {district Party committees} have come out
against the plan of grain procurements, considering them unrealistic.
In other raikomy, they confirm, the matter is no better. What does
this look like? This is no party, but a parliament, a caricature of a
parliament. Instead of directing the districts, Kosior is always
waffling between the directives of the CC VKP(b) and the demands
of the district Party committees and has waffled to the end. Lenin was
right, when he said that a person who lacks the courage at the needed
moment to go against the current cannot be a real Bolshevik leader.
Bad from the standpoint of the Soviet {state}line. Chubar is no
leader. Bad from the standpoint of the GPU. Redens lacks the energy
to direct the struggle with the counterrevolution in such a big and
unique republic as Ukraine.
"If we do not now correct the situation in Ukraine, we could lose
Ukraine.
"Consider that Pilsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine
are much stronger than Redens or Kosior imagine. Also consider that
within the Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha, ha)
there are not a few (yes, not a few!) rotten elements that are
conscious or unconscious Petliura adherents and in the final analysis
agents of Pilsudski. If the situation gets any worse, these elements
won't hesitate to open a front within (and outside) the Party, against
the Party. Worst of all, the Ukrainian leadership doesn't see these
dangers... Set yourself the task of turning Ukraine in the shortest
possible time into a fortress of the USSR, into the most inalienable
republic. Don't worry about money for this purpose."
That is what the great dictator had in mind only a little time before
ordering the seizure of the last potato from those he was starving to death.
We have yet another contribution to the healing process of Ukraine as a
nation and a state, a major contribution. Serhiychuk, Shapoval, Marochko,
Kulchytsky, and many others have all done their bit. Each is yet another
step on the road by which Ukraine makes progress from where it is to where
it wants and deserves to be.
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