Another attack

I have met with a number of foreign scholars this year who specialize in Ukraine's Holodomor. We debated the issue, and the standpoint of those who refused to accept the definition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide became clearer to me. Therefore, I built my presentation during the latest meeting in Ireland (November 6-7) so as to view the issue through the opponent's eye. In the following article I would like to relate the main points of my presentation and hope to receive comments from The Day's readers. The whole issue is overloaded with arguments on the part of both proponents and opponents, so it cannot be possibly coped with by a single person; it requires concerted action on the part of a scholarly corporation, general public, and official quarters — otherwise the international community will never recognize the Holodomor for what it was, an act of genocide.

SCHOLARLY MEETING IN IRELAND

Ireland is a special kind of country that for many centuries remained Great Britain's inner colony. Today it has a modern and powerful economy that ranks fourth in the world in terms of average per capita income. Ireland has made headway in reviving its original language, although most people there keep using English. The tragic history of this country is manifested in the current placement of Irishmen across the world: less than three million in the home country, 36 million in the US, 14 million in the UK, over four million in Canada, and almost two million in Australia. In each country of residence, the Irish preserve their faith and cultural identity.

One can draw a number of striking parallels between Ukrainian and Irish history. We suffered our Holodomor and they did the Great Famine in the mid-19th century. The Ukrainian ambassador to Ireland, Borys Bazylevsky, thought it fitting to compare these tragic events and conveyed this proposal to the scholarly quarters.

His idea was supported by the National University of Ireland in the rural town of Manooth (hence the acronym NUIM), located near Dublin. Founded in 1795, this university currently ranks with Europe's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. In 2008, NUIM created the Centre for the Study of Wider Europe, currently headed by Dr. Christian Noack. The notion of Wider Europe was conceived after the emergence of the European Union and its existence within the current boundaries. The conference was held under the motto "Holodomor in Ukraine and Great Famine in Ireland: Histories, Representations, Memories." The main presenters were Dr. Jan Bruski (Krakow), Yevhen Zakharov (Kharkiv), Dr. Heorhii Kasianov (Kyiv), Serhii Kokin (deputy director, State Archives of the SBU State Security Service of Ukraine), the present author, Dr. David Marples (Edmonton, Canada), Dr. Maureen Murphy (NYC), Olesia Statsiuk (director, Ukraine-3000 Cultural Programs Foundation, Kyiv), and Dr. Jan Germen Janmaat (London, UK). A team of Irish experts offered their report on the Great Famine in Ireland.

NATIONALITY AS THE MAIN POINT

In the presence of all that multitude of data on the Holodomor, the main point is its interpretation. What was that famine that gripped the entire Soviet Union all about? Why did it happen on such a monstrous scale in Ukraine? Who is responsible for the death of millions of people?

The third question appears to have special importance. President Viktor Yushchenko told Larysa Ivshyna, the editor in chief of Den/The Day: "It would be a big mistake if, while trying to find out the truth, we pointed the finger at a people or country. This simply wouldn't be fair; this would lead us astray in our quest for the actual reasons." (Den, Nov. 24, 2007)

Yushchenko's position would seem to suffice to convince Ukraine's neighbor that Russia is not being blamed for anything, yet the Ukrainian president keeps being attacked by Russian politicians and public figures. The stand taken by those who know about historical problems can be understood, as in Mykola Siruk's interview with Yevgeniy Kozhokin, director of Russia's Institute of Strategic Studies, published in Den. Kozhokin said, "Any historian — and I'm a trained historian — knows that what happened was a tragedy that killed millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, etc. Any historian knows that it is possible to draw up lists of people who organized the Great Famine. This list will have Ukrainian and Russian names, as well as those of other ethnic groups. It was a sociopolitical tragedy. It wasn't an act aimed against any people in particular. Therefore, building this fact into a myth about some steps alleged to have been taken against a certain people undermines public trust in this fact." The Ukrainian journalist pointed out that no one in Ukraine had ever blamed the Russian people for the Holodomor. Kozhokin replied that there had been no statements made to the effect that the famine was equally aimed against the Kazakhs or Russians. (Den, Nov. 29, 2008)

One feels shocked, speechless, and profoundly sympathetic when looking at the apocalyptic picture of the Ukrainian countryside in the first half of 1933 (all this data was previously kept in special-access top-secret files, later transferred to publicly accessible documentary archives). Still, my opponents on the Russian side keep saying that the Ukrainians shouldn't single themselves out from among the other peoples that suffered from the Soviet regime. Can one trace the source of this paradoxical stand? Yes, it is ill-famed Soviet "Question No. 5," the "revealing question" about nationality.

This "Question No. 5" is firmly implanted in our memory, in conjunction with state-supported anti-Semitism that made itself especially manifested during the last years of Stalin's despotic regime. The state allowed its citizens to occupy important administrative posts after carefully checking every candidate's ethnic origin. Here I mean Soviet CVs, considering that "nationality" was "Question No. 4" in the Soviet national passport.

In all Soviet application forms and passports the nationality item had nothing to do with its concept in the West. It actually meant ethnic origin. We are just struggling to get closer to this understanding. When traveling abroad, a Ukrainian national produces his passport at a border checkpoint, in which this item reads hromadianstvo (literally, citizenship) in Ukrainian and nationality in English. Even though both definitions mean being a national of a certain country, Russians, Ukrainians, and their fellow countrymen now scattered across the world know deep inside that it actually means their ethnic origin.

Prior to the trip to Ireland, I thought Ukrainian ethnic integrity matched those of Armenians, Jews, and Chinese. Now I know that there is an equally solid Irish ethnic community at large. There are probably other matching ethnic communities elsewhere in the world. Some intellectuals are looking down at this phenomenon, saying no one needs another ghetto now that we have globalization. Personally, I think that such "ghettos" serve as proof of a given people's tremendous life-giving potential, developed in response to unfavorable historical living conditions.

What kind of impact is this natsionalnist/citizenship/nationality controversy is having on the interpretation of the Holodomor [man-made] famine? Apart from marginal politicians (all those who keep blaming Moscow — in other words, Russia and its people — for the genocidal famine), Ukraine's official standpoint is that the Kremlin, the Soviet political regime, is responsible. Let us then analyze the resulting situation.

The issue under study is Ukrainians, people that have a certain ethnic origin. There is the dynamics of statistics where certain people identified themselves as Ukrainians when filling in the "nationality" column during the all-USSR censuses of 1926, 1937, and 1939. Hence the inferences, including with regard to the number of the Holodomor victims. It follows that the Kremlin launched a hunt for Ukrainians, on a certain date, no sooner or later, aimed at physically destroying them. This concept sounds so incredible that the Russian side refuses to consider any arguments in its favor.

As mentioned previously, Kozhokin leaves out the lists of people and their ethnic background, who represented the regime or suffered from it. What is left is a "sociopolitical tragedy." He doesn't seem to bother to ponder that any individual may find him/herself in different kinds of human environs, in terms of gender, age, social status, occupation, ethnic origin, and so on. Is it possible to consider such an individual without any of these characteristics?

The noted Russian historian Yurii Afanasyev goes even further in rejecting the ethnic component of the Holodomor. When asked by Olha Reshetylova why a deliberate annihilation of millions of Ukrainians — rather than some abstract group of people — could not be referred to as an act of genocide, he replied: "The Stalinist regime was the cause of death of all those millions of Ukrainian victims of the famine. However, this is putting things in a very abstract manner, because there were concrete executioners. In this sense the problem becomes even more sophisticated.

“In the Soviet slaughterhouse, when millions died in the course of the so-called socialist construction process, it becomes even more difficult to identify those who did the murdering. What makes this difficult is the fact that executioners and their victims changed places a dozen times during Soviet history. The same individual could find himself acting in both capacities, repeatedly. What kind of population is this? If we were to identify all victims, we would come up with a fifty-fifty list. If we were to consider all those [NKVD] informers, those who signed the death sentences, and those who served as prison camp guards, we would learn that all of them were Soviet people." (Den, Dec. 11, 2008.)

In other words, Afanasyev sets apart those gray Soviet masses that were destroying themselves. Here is an example of a conclusion reached even by a noted scholar, with a great deal of scholarly experience, when having to answer an uncomfortable question.

UKRAINIAN HOLOCAUST

Russian scholars and politicians are outraged — while their counterparts in the West are amazed — to hear the Ukrainian side claim that, back in 1932-33, the Stalinist regime set the task of physically destroying millions of Ukrainians. This outrage and/or amazement is caused not only by their absolute, albeit ungrounded, conviction that Ukrainians were then perishing along with people who represented all the other ethnic groups during the Soviet Union's Great Famine. In Ukraine, we often hear about the Holodomor being identified with the Holocaust — in other words, with an ethnic purge — which is ungrounded.

In 1982-83, the Ukrainian Diaspora made a Herculean effort to prevent the Holodomor anniversary from passing unnoticed by the world community as was so often the case earlier. It was then the notion of Ukrainian Holocaust appeared.

The noted Holodomor researcher Wasyl Hryshko marked the 30th anniversary of the Holodomor by publishing his first book entitled Moscow Does not Believe in Tears (first published in Ukrainian in 1963, revised and expanded over the years and finally appearing in English in 1983 as The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933). In 1983, the Holocaust was used in reference to the Holodomor in an English language booklet entitled The Great Famine in Ukraine: the unknown holocaust: in solemn observance of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 (compiled and edited by the editors of the Ukrainian Weekly, Jersey City, N.J.: Ukrainian National Association, 1983). It was thus the notion of the Ukrainian Holocaust was adopted. It was no longer used with the quotation marks, understood as a phenomenon that was identified with genocide. Finally, the 16th conference of the World Anti-Communist League adopted a resolution entitled "Holocaust in Ukraine, 1933" (carried by the journal Vyzvolny Shlyakh — Path of Liberation — in 1983) asserted the notion of the Ukrainian Holocaust that was historically different from the Jewish Holocaust.

One can understand the Ukrainian diaspora's scholars and public figures who wanted to identify the Holocaust, something everyone knew about, with the Holodomor, something no one knew about. In fact, they were using a specific historical phenomenon (the Holocaust) as a legal qualification of the Holodomor (as an act of genocide). Over the past couple of years this word combination has become widespread in Ukraine. The most fundamental six-volume collection of documented proof of the Holodomor was compiled by Dr. Yurii Mytsyk, entitled "The Ukrainian Holocaust."

I have previously pointed to this approach as the wrong one. First, there did exist the Ukrainian Holocaust that cannot be used as a synonym of the Holodomor. Jews started settling in East Galicia, annexed to Poland by Casimir III the Great, in the second half of the 14th century. The Nazis carried out the Holocaust on all occupied territories, including Ukraine. The Holocaust, not emigration, is the main reason behind the dramatic decrease in the number of Jewish residents of Ukraine. The cumulative effect of the Holocaust and emigration reduced the number of Jewish residents in Odesa oblast from 250,000 to 13,000 (according to the 2001 census). As many as 360,000 Jews resided in Lviv oblast prior to WWII, while now there are less than a thousand. Less than 1,500 Jews are found in Chernivtsi oblast, compared to 102,000 before the war. Out of the six million Holocaust victims, more than 1.5 million died in Ukraine. Therefore, we have no moral right to say that the Holodomor is the Ukrainian Holocaust.