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James E. Mace, Prof. of Political Science
Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University
Kyiv, Ukraine, May 21, 2002
The Great Famine-Genocide in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor)
UKRAINE FAMINE RESPONSE NUMBER NINETEEN
This response from James Mace, Kyiv, Ukraine, was NOT posted
on H-RUSSIA.
To: maaus-list@fas.harvard.edu
From: Robert De Lossa time@day.kiev.ua
I am disturbed at the nonsense you have been fed of late on the Ukrainian
(yes, Ukrainian) famine of 1933, administered after the end of October 1932
directly from Kharkiv and Rostov-na-Donu by Molotov and Kaganovich. The
latter was so proud of his efforts to combat "kulak sabotage of the grain
procurements in the Kuban" (Ukrainian Cossacks) by exiling whole stanitsas
lock, stock, and barrel that he even had a special pamphlet published. Was
it a famine harvest? I never really understood Prof. Tauger's baseless
statistical circumlocutions (since the figures themselves are garbage), as
well as with the problems involved with Stalin's systematic destruction of
any reliable statistics and replacing it with the biological yield do
problems. Was the harvest worse than officially acknowledged? Probably, as
probably were all the harvests calculated according to the biological yield.
However, it always seemed to me that one reasonable way to try to get some
idea of what was going on might be to go out and ask people who lived
through it. The practice is known as oral history, and anyone close to a
repository of government documents can consult my and Leonid Heretz's
3-volume Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine
published in 1990, in which each of the over 200 detailed life histories has
a brief summary in English. Of course, if one doubts the word of those who
fled the Stalinist paradise, there is now a tremendous number of similar
projects done without my participation in Ukraine, which are painstakingly
listed in Holodomor v Ukrayini 1932-1933 rr.: Bibliohrafychnyi pokazhchyk
(Odesa-Kyiv, 2001, 656 pp.) compiled jointly by Odesa's Gorky Scientific
Library, the Academy of Sciences Institute of the History of Ukraine, and
the Ukrainian Studies Foundation of Australia. Perhaps the most succinct
summary of it all was what I recall an old collective farmer telling me in a
village in the early 1990s, "Khlib buv, a selyanam ne dodaly" (There was
bread, but they didn't give it to the peasants). I, for one, out on the
(feudal collective) farm never heard anything different. There must be tens
of thousands of such accounts, and it seems strange that these "Cold
Warriors" all got together from over the world and across the Iron Curtain
to make up the same story. What an achievement!
Of course, I know that nobody reads government documents, but the 1988
Report to Congress of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine contains
basically everything we could find at the time, tracing official policies
through the official Soviet press, which in Ukraine contained a daily litany
of exhortations to take more grain or else. Now we know more from the
republic archives, and I hear that some work is being done in Moscow, but
the best single book, must reading for any even casual researcher of the
problem is Holod 1932-1933 rokiv na Ukrayini: ochyma istorykiv, movoiu
dokumentiv (Kyiv, 1990), with largely stupid articles (except for Mai
Panchuk's) but fundamental documents compiled from the CPU archive in
accordance with the CC CPU decree of January 26, 1990, "On the Famine of
1932-1933 in Ukraine and the Publication of Archival Materials Connected
With It." This one IS hard to find, because while the official press run was
25,000, certain hard-liners on the CC said it was done "behind the Party's
back," and the actual number of copies was secretly reduced from the
official number to 2500 with the excess paper being used for a potboiler
that undoubted aided the relevant intrepid saviors of the world proletariat
to continue their uncompromising struggle.
But let us consider this particular piece of "bourgeois falsification" made
to order for the Communist Party of Ukraine.
Was the famine intentional? Consider the decree of November 18, 1932 (pp.
250-260). Prof. Stanislav Kulchytsky, now Deputy Director of the Institute
of History and someone who has done some significant work on the topic,
points out that the session was personally presided over by then USSR Prime
Minister Molotov, and the fact that the text is in Russian at a time when
most Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine documents were in Ukrainian
leads one to suspect that Stalin's right-hand man might have brought it with
him from somewhere to the northeast. It calls for an immediate audit of all
bread resources in the collective and individual farms to be followed by the
seizure of all such resources except for a seed reserve (ordered seized on
December 24 - p. 296), the seizure of all advances extended members of
delinquent kolhosps, and - most interestingly to me - instituted a series of
fines in kind for those "maliciously" undermining the grain seizures
including a 150% supplement to one's annual meat quota (take the cow, pig,
and/or chickens!) and authorizing the seizure of other foodstuffs.
Subsequent reports on fulfillment of this monument of socialist legality
make clear included such commercially priceless crops as potatoes and beans.
Isn't it amazing that they would take from households without any bread
whatever else edible they could find but not intend that somebody might miss
a meal? Or could somebody have overlooked something?
On December 6, 1932, the Soviet Ukrainian press published a decree to put on
the chorna doshka (black board to denounce those who had underfulfilled) six
villages found to be maliciously undermining the grain procurements
(seizures actually, since the regime didn't pay), to be extended within a
week to 82 districts or about 20% of the republic. The local apparats of
such dens of iniquity were to be thoroughly purged (i.e., arrested), the
local stores closed with all goods removed from them, and the area itself
blockaded so that people could not go to seek victuals elsewhere. But, of
course, nobody, of course, actually INTENDED that they might occasionally
miss a meal.
-
One most interesting document could be published only in part in the
abovementioned collection of Party documents. The full Russian text can be
found (but I have faith in your immortal ILL librarians as I do in the
government documents ones) only in the journal Zoloti vorota, No. 1, 1991,
pp. 78-79. This is a December 14, 1932 decision of the Central Committee of
the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik) and Sovnarkom of the USSR of
December 14, 1932 on the grain procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus,
and the Western oblast, signed by I. Stalin and V. Molotov (Skriabin). Now,
this document has its own history, which would have done the Night Porter's
assailants proud. The system was that the republics would get an order,
which would then be carried out (lots of pages in the Ukrainian archives
read "Done -Shcherbytsky" - or whoever) and the original would be sent back
to whatever Darth Vader was commanding the immortal Center. However, some
foolish (or perhaps intrepid) Ukrainian archivist of the 1930s decided to
lose the document here, perhaps even in the hope of someone ultimately
figuring out what they were doing. First of all, the undoubtedly biased
reader of the 21st century is struck by the fact that our old friend from
the Smolensk archive (Western oblast), Rumiantsev, was basically just
present, told to fulfill his quotas, and go home. Sharper words were
reserved for Kharkiv's Stanislav Kosior and North Caucasus satrap
Sheboldaev. Keep in mind that this was a month and a half after Moscow had
taken over direct supervision of the grain seizures with the appointment of
commissions headed by Molotov in Ukraine and Kaganovich in the Kuban. This
particular document, however, is instructive in how UNINTENTIONALLY the then
supreme self-consecrated leaders of the world proletariat, Stalin and
Molotov, saw to the situation. Consider a few passages:
- "4. In view of the fact that as a result of exceedingly weak work and the
absence of vigilance in a series of local party organizations in Ukraine and
the North Caucasus, in a significant portion of their districts,
counterrevolutionary elements - kulaks, former officers, Petliurists,
adherents of the Kuban Rada, and others - were able to worm their way into
collective farms in the capacity of chairmen or influential members of the
administration, bookkeepers, storekeepers, brigadier leaders of the
threshing, etc., were able to worm their way into village Soviets, land
organs, cooperation, and strive to carry out the work of these organizations
against the interests of the proletarian state and party policy and strive
to organize a counterrevolutionary movement, sabotage the grain procurements
and sabotage the sowing - the CC VKP(b) and SNK USSR direct the CC CP(b)U,
North Caucasus Territorial Committee, SNK Ukraine, and Executive Committee
of the North Caucasus Territory to decisively root out these
counterrevolutionary elements by means of arrests, sending for long terms to
concentration camps, not hesitating before the highest measure of socialist
legality (i.e., ventilating the backs of their heads with small caliber
bullets -JM) for the most malicious of them...
"5. The CC and SNK tells party and Soviet organizations of the Soviet Union
that the malicious enemies of the party, working class, and collectivized
peasantry are saboteurs of the grain procurements with party cards in their
pockets... In relation to those turncoats and enemies of Soviet power and
the collective farms the CC and SNK commits itself to severe repression, to
sentencing them to 5-10 years in a concentration camp, and under known
conditions execution."
"In order to rout in the immediate future the opponents of the grain
procurements consisting of kulak elements and their "party" and nonparty
servitors, the CC and SNK of the Soviet Union decree: "a) Resettle in the
shortest time to the northern regions of the USSR from the stanitsa of
Poltavskaya (North Caucasus), as the most counterrevolutionary, all
inhabitants except for those who have worked only for Soviet power and not
participated in the sabotage of the grain procurements of the collective and
individual farmers and resettle this stanitsa with collective farmers and
Red Army men of good conscience who are working under conditions of little
land and on unfavorable lands in other areas, giving them all the land and
winter sowing, buildings, inventory, and livestock of those resettled.
"Responsibility for carrying out this decision (point "a") is given Comrades
Yagoda, Gamarnik (in place of Comrade Budily), Sheboldaev, and Yevdokimov.
"b) Arrest the traitors of the party in Ukraine as organizers of the
sabotage of the grain procurements, former district secretaries, former
executive committee secretaries, deputy secretaries, and former secretaries
of district unions of collective farms, namely: in Orekhivka district
Holovin, Palamarchuk, Ordelyan, and Lutsenko; in Balaklaisky district
Khoroshenko, Us, and Fishman; in Nosovsky district Yaremko; in Kobeliaky
district Liashchenko; in Bilshe Tomakivsky district Lensky, Kosachenko,
Dvornyk, Zyka, and Dolhov - bring them to trial and give them from five to
ten years confinement in a concentration camp."
I think I need not cite the specific passages condemning the "mechanistic"
conduct of Ukrainization in Ukraine or its artificial and impermissible
character in the Kuban, ordering its immediate end. Incidentally Poltavskaya
stanitsa had a Ukrainian teachers college, the personnel of which were
exiled along with the rest.
What a fit of lack of intent! Stalin and Molotov were themselves essentially
decreeing how many years some allegedly Ukrainian nationalist district
bookkeepers would get in the Gulag for not finding enough grain! Obviously,
they could not have INTENDED that someone might miss a meal after decreeing
the death penalty for those party activists who somehow could not find
enough bread to seize! This is not merely ludicrous. One needs to find a
stronger word.
Incidentally, the famine outside Ukraine, which started at different times
for different reasons and encountered different official reactions, is dealt
with in my Report to Congress, pp. 135-150.
On Walter Duranty, who found widespread malnutrition but no famine, there is
an excellent biography: Sally J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty:
The New York Times Man in Moscow (Oxford University Press, 1990). Still, I
find most revealing one document found in the US National Archives. The
usual Foreign Service diplomatic slave reported on the gentleman's statement
during his trip to Moscow to renew his visa as follows: "That 'in agreement
with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities', his dispatches always
reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own" (A.
W. Kliefoth, US Embassy Berlin, "Memorandum, June 4, 1931," p. 2;
861.5017-Living Conditions/268; T1249; Records of the Department of State -
and, yes, for a slight fee the National Archives will be happy to send a
photocopy). A true paragon of journalistic objectivity!
As for Bob Conquest, yes, there are some errors: I think he failed to take
the brief May reforms of 1932 seriously, and he did mess up a spring trial
in the district center of Drabivka, but I tried to correct these when I had
the chance. Although nobody may actually read them anytime soon, government
reports ARE forever.
I must confess some bitterness that the American profession blackballed me
and ignored my work for trying to do as good as I could for those without
language or tongue, while it rewarded those for whom so much human suffering
just happened unintentionally, documents and eyewitnesses be damned. That is
a matter for their collective and individual conscience. Sidney and Beatrice
Webb also got plaudits and Duranty a Pulitzer Prize, while those who tried
to tell what they actually saw (anybody remember Gareth Jones? Look at
Eugene Lyons' Assignment in Utopia) got the short end. But then I turn to
the prodigious efforts of my Hebraic friends. For those interested, in 1993
the American Jewish Committee published an excellent book that I often have
had cause to consult: Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial. The historical
context may differ but the moral one remains basically the same.
There seems to be still out there a reflex from one nineteenth century Count
Valuev that there never was, is not now, and can never be a Ukrainian
history separate from the Russian. This is, of course, labeled objectivity.
Anyone who tries to look at what was happening in Ukraine from the
standpoint of a distinct national history is labelled biased. Well, somehow
I suspect that what Ukrainian history consists of will in the long run be
decided here. I am now just trying to figure out how the Rube Goldberg
machine inherited by post-(putz)communism can be addressed today.
After all, my students will have to do so. But perhaps this is all
"post-Cold War rhetoric."
Falsifications about how the Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Democrats not
exactly wedded to Cold War rhetoric sponsored it, and Reagan opposed) was
formulated over a decade ago with spectacular incompetence by one Stepan
Merl from Germany, who did not even bother to look up the relevant US
Congressional hearings to find out the actual legislative history (one
again, facts and documents be damned!), can be addressed later. It was all
published long ago in German, but I never got the book.
Cheers to all from the trenches of Kyiv,
James E. Mace, Prof. of Political Science
Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University
To read all of the spring of 2002 H-RUSSIA discussion about the Ukrainian
Famine click on: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/hrussia1.htm
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