>> UKL Articles

Why did Stalin exterminate the Ukrainians?

by Stanislav Kulchytsky, Ph.D. (History)
The Day (Kyiv), 25 October, 8 November, 22 November 2005

[published in three parts; the URLs require registration]

[Stanislav Kulchytsky is Deputy Director of the Institute of History at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv -UKL]

This article could have a different title, one that reflects the scholarly, political, and legal dimension: "The Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine as genocide." Historians must provide scholarly evidence, while legal experts and government officials must come to the legal and political conclusion that the Holodomor was an act of genocide. We must all ensure that the international community officially recognizes the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 as an act that falls under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is our moral duty to the millions of our compatriots who perished as a result of terror by famine - they perished not as a result of famine but terror by famine.

Question At Issue

On Oct. 12, 2005, the Gramsci Institute in Rome hosted a scholarly seminar entitled "Stalin, the Soviet Famine of 1931-33, and the Ukrainian Holodomor." The institute's director, Professor Silvio Pons, and Professor Andrea Graziosi, dean of the University of Naples, proposed only one question for discussion by Italian scholars specializing in Russian and Ukrainian studies. How is the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33 different from the famine that was caused by the grain procurement campaign after the 1931 harvest, which encompassed all of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, and the famine that was caused by the grain procurement campaign after the 1932 harvest in all the Soviet republics except Ukraine? This wording of the question was meant to determine whether there are convincing scholarly arguments to justify studying the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation.

Few non-Italian scholars attended the seminar: I represented Ukraine and Oleg Khlevniuk represented Russia. Oleg Khlevniuk is better known in the West than in Russia or Ukraine, because his major monographs have been published only in English. Dr. Khlevniuk works at the State Archives of the Russian Federation and is rightly considered the preeminent authority on sources dealing with the Stalinist period of Soviet history.

We must thank those Western historians who have proven so responsive to a problem that concerns only us. On Nov. 10, 2003, a joint statement from 36 nations was published in connection with the 70th anniversary of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33, which was officially adopted during the 58th session of the UN General Assembly. This statement does not contain a definition of this Ukrainian tragedy as an act of genocide, even though the wording of the draft statement included the word "genocide." On Nov. 25, 2004, The Day published an interview with Ukraine's permanent UN representative, Valeriy Kuchynsky, who described how this document was drafted. But it does not provide an answer to the question, why so many diplomats made it clear to their Ukrainian colleagues that they were not ready to include the word "genocide" in their statement. The answer was revealed only during the recent seminar at the Gramsci Institute. It turns out that Ukrainian diplomats failed to prove to the Third Committee of the General Assembly that the Soviet regime did exterminate the Ukrainians. The documents they presented only proved that famine claimed millions of lives in Ukraine in 1932-33. But this was known even earlier.

According to Khlevniuk's authoritative statement, Soviet archival documents do not contain a straight answer to the question of why millions of Ukrainian peasants were exterminated. I said that we have exhaustive documentary evidence to answer the question of HOW the peasants were exterminated, but we do not have documents that state WHY they were exterminated. The perpetrators of the Kremlin's horrible crime required instructions, which were later stored in the archives. Yet Stalin was not obliged to report to anyone about WHY he had used instituted terror by famine, a term first proposed by the British scholar Robert Conquest.

A convincing answer to the question of the motives behind this crime may be found only through a comprehensive analysis of many documents. In 2005 Ukrainskyi Istorychnyi Zhurnal [Ukrainian Historical Journal] carried articles by Andrea Graziosi and Gerhard Simon, the latter a professor at the University of Koln and arguably one of the best Western experts on the nationalities policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These articles analyze Stalin's terror by famine. Based on the conclusions of my Western and Ukrainian colleagues and drawing on my 20 years of experience researching the problem of the Ukrainian Holodomor, I will attempt to answer the question: why did Stalin exterminate the Ukrainians? Substantiating this answer will require a separate monograph that has yet to be written. But I am hastening to publish a newspaper version of this book. The Day publishes in three languages and has an online version, which means that it has a broad readership among the general public. This is especially important because the Holodomor is, at the very least, a historical problem. First and foremost, it is a deep and unhealed wound on the body of the Ukrainian nation. This wound will not heal unless we understand what we were like before the Holodomor and what became of us after it.

My opening remarks are addressed to the government. I cannot say that the Ukrainian Institute of History is excluded from the process of making decisions relating to Holodomor issues, which take the form of presidential decrees. Decision makers consult the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, but the scholarly community's recommendations are not always taken into account. As a case in point, with his decree of July 11, 2005, the Ukrainian president ordered the Cabinet of Ministers a bill to parliament by Nov. 1 "On the political and legal assessment of holodomors in the history of the Ukrainian people." However, I am not familiar with the text of this bill. Moreover, I am certain that in the Ukrainian nation's history there was only one Holodomor, which is enough for all time.

This decree instructs the government to "resolve the question of creating" the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM) before the Day to Commemorate the Victims of the Holodomor and Political Repression, which will be observed this year on Nov. 26. An institution of this kind is crucial, as it would convey the knowledge collected by academics and scholars to society. However, the presidential decree does not propose a mechanism for creating the UINM. As evidenced by the Israeli and Polish experiences of creating similar institutions, Ukraine will face major challenges relating to the funding and staffing of the institute, defining its functions and drafting laws to incorporate this institution into the existing system of departments and organizations. It is inexpedient to restrict the efforts to create the UINM to a single item in the presidential decree, which merely declares intent to create it.

The presidential secretariat is already making plans to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2008. I hope that such steps will put an end to the old practice whereby the government raises the subject of the Holodomor only on the eve of major anniversaries. Creating an Institute of National Memory is the first step to making this work systematic and effective. It is also important to convince the Ukrainian public and the international community that the Holodomor of 1932-33 was no accidental phenomenon of unknown origin, but the result of terror by famine, i.e., genocide, which was applied by the totalitarian government.

Earlier Attempts to Equate the Holodomor with Genocide

In equating the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33 with genocide, scholars primarily face terminological difficulties, which is why the analysis of this problem must begin with terminology.

The term genocide (the killing of a nation) was coined by the Polish lawyer Rafael Lemkin, who first used it in his book, Axis Rulers in Occupied Europe, published in 1944. Lemkin used this word to describe the total extermination of Jews and Gypsies on Nazi-controlled territories. With this understanding of the term genocide, the UN General Assembly stated in its Dec. 11, 1946, resolution: "...genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices - whether private individuals, public officials, or statesmen, and whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political, or any other grounds - are punishable."

Since history has known many cases of mass extermination of human beings, and in view of the continuing threat of their recurrence, the UN decided it was necessary to introduce the notion of genocide into international law. This laid the legal groundwork for establishing international cooperation to combat such crimes, including those committed by individuals constitutionally vested with supreme power. On Dec. 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article I of the convention reads: "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish." Article II contains a definition of genocide: "[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The convention was adopted by 56 attending members of the UN General Assembly and opened for signature, ratification, and accession. It became effective as of Jan. 12, 1951, i.e., on the 90th day after 20 instruments of accession or ratification were deposited with the UN Secretary General. Since that time this convention has been an instrument for preventing genocide. Its effectiveness increased significantly after the end of the Cold War.

The legal norms formulated in this document did not fully guarantee that all cases of mass extermination of human beings would be identified as genocide. Only the Holocaust of World War II fully corresponded to them: the Nazis either exterminated Jews wherever and whenever they found them, or placed them in conditions that were physically unsuitable for life. In effect, the convention was developed when the memories of the Holocaust were still fresh. There was another reason why cases of mass extermination that occurred before the Holocaust were not always identified as genocide. Legal experts were unwilling to make exceptions to the basic principle of jurisprudence, i.e., that the law has no retroactive effect.

The famine of 1932-33 was a forbidden topic in the USSR. At the 20th party congress of the CPSU in 1956 party leaders finally dared to speak out about the Stalinist terror that primarily targeted the Soviet-party nomenklatura and intelligentsia. However, they concealed the terror by famine in collectivized villages until the last possible moment. The Stalinist taboo on mentioning the famine was broken only after the Ukrainian diaspora succeeded in persuading the US Congress to create a temporary commission to investigate the events of 1932-33 in Ukraine.

Led by the late James Mace, the congressional commission had no access to Soviet archives. It collected most of its information from emigres who had survived collectivization and famine and ended up in North America after the Second World War. Of course, Holodomor survivors could not figure out the crafty stratagems of Stalin's policies, but their victim's instinct told them that the Soviet government meant to physically destroy them. Based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts, James Mace's commission recreated the real picture of those events and presented a final report to the US Congress in April 1988.

Interviews conducted in Ukraine since 1988 have confirmed the tendency recorded by James Mace: recalling events from half a century earlier, Holodomor survivors sensed the authorities' intent to punish "saboteurs" of the grain procurement campaign by starving them to death. Individual documents that have been unintentionally preserved in archives confirm that this is what famine victims felt. An anonymous letter sent from Poltava in August 1933 to the editorial offices of the newspaper Komunist, which was written by an individual with a higher education, judging by the content and style, even claimed to be a summary of Stalin's national policy: "The physical extermination of the Ukrainian nation and the exhaustion of its material and spiritual resources are [some] of the most important points in the criminal agenda of Bolshevik centralism."

The congressional commission called the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine an act of genocide. Yet this conclusion was not based on documents but on subjective judgments of Holodomor survivors.

Moreover, the purpose of the commission was to establish facts (which it did, brilliantly) but not to provide a legal assessment of them. Therefore, after the commission completed its work, Ukrainian organizations in North America decided to seek legal help. The World Congress of Free Ukrainians initiated the creation of the International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine, presided over by Professor Jacob Sundberg.

Representatives of the Ukrainian Diaspora in North America appealed to the most outstanding jurists, who because of their high public and scholarly status had sufficient credibility with the international community. In November 1989 Sundberg's commission published its verdict, naming excessive grain procurements as the immediate cause of mass famine in Ukraine, and identifying its preconditions as forced collectivization, dispossession of wealthy kurkul peasants, and the central government's desire to curb "traditional Ukrainian nationalism." Thus, the jurists not only recognized in the Holodomor the Kremlin's desire to impose an alien lifestyle on the Ukrainian peasants, they also identified a national component in this act of terror. The Ukrainian Holodomor was therefore identified as genocide.

Sundberg's commission determined that the principle of the non- retroactive nature of laws applies only formally to the UN Convention of Dec. 9, 1948. They pointed out that this principle applies to criminal law, whereas the Convention is outside of its boundaries because it does not pass verdicts. The Convention only encourages nations to cooperate in preventing and condemning genocide.

Addressing those who opposed the identification of the Holodomor with the crime of genocide only because the term "genocide" did not exist before WWII, the International Commission of Inquiry asked: was it possible before the war to freely destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group?

The answer is obvious. Relying on the above arguments, the commission stated in its final report: "Commission feels justified in maintaining that if genocide of the Ukrainian people occurred, it was contrary to the provisions of the international law then in force" [This sentence was misquoted in the Ukrainian original, which omitted the word "if" - Ed.]

This verdict was based on the facts available to the commission. It stated, however, that the inquiry into the Holodomor must continue to document with additional facts the conclusion that it was an act of genocide, i.e., to reinforce its source base.

Politicization of the Holodomor Issue

We all remember how important the question of the 1932-1933 famine was in the late 1980s-early 1990s: it helped people break old stereotypes and reevaluate Soviet history. This subject became a lethal weapon in the hands of those who had fought for the republic's independence. After all, the death sentences for millions of Ukrainian citizens had come from outside Ukraine.

It seemed that after independence the question of the Holodomor would become the exclusive province of historians. Indeed, historians started to explore it in a systematic and comprehensive manner. But it also became a popular issue in the political arena. Political opponents extracted convenient facts from scholarly publications on the famine of 1932-1933, while ignoring their overall significance. None of them managed to prove anything to their opponents because nobody was interested in ascertaining the truth. It was easy to predict the outcome of these struggles between politicians and scholars of various stripes. While the former had unlimited access to media outlets, thereby shaping the public opinion, the latters' voices did not reach society and died away in the meager press runs of books and brochures.

Let us listen closely to the words of Levko Lukyanenko, the long-time Soviet political prisoner, Ukrainian parliamentarian, and chairman of an association of Holodomor researchers. Addressing a Nov. 15, 2002, scholarly conference, he said: "The members of the Association of Researchers of the Holodomors in Ukraine and other scholars have amassed a large number of documents that prove that Moscow deliberately planned and carried out the Holodomor in Ukraine in order to curb the national-liberation movement, decrease the number of Ukrainians, and dilute the Ukrainian ethnos (nation) with Muscovites, thus preventing Ukrainians from struggling to get out from under Moscow's control in the future."

It would seem that these words echo the above-mentioned anonymous letter to the editors of Komunist, which we can now support with documentary evidence. However, there is a substantive difference between them. The anonymous author of the 1933 letter was justified in faulting the Bolshevik party leadership for the Ukrainian Holodomor. Meanwhile, with all the documents uncovered by contemporary historians at his disposal, Lukyanenko unjustifiably expands the Bolshevik-dominated Kremlin to the size of Moscow, while referring to the Russian people pejoratively as "Muscovites."
The "colonization" by representatives of the dominant Soviet nation of the national republics (especially the Baltic nations and Ukraine) was not Stalin's idea alone. This policy was in fact designed to stem national liberation movements. However, these Russian resettlers (military personnel, intellectuals from the technical and humanities spheres, and skilled workers) had no idea of the Kremlin's strategic plans, nor did Russified Ukrainians, who had experienced assimilation, voluntary or otherwise, throughout the centuries, not just decades. How could the millions of so-called "Muscovites" who currently reside in Ukraine respond to the Holodomor according to Lukyanenko's interpretation? Because of the irresponsible actions by individuals whose primary concern was their own political career, our tragic past started to divide Ukraine instead of consolidating its citizens. We felt this during the presidential elections of 2004.

The opposing side also fueled interethnic tensions. The leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Symonenko, spoke during the Feb. 12, 2003, parliamentary hearings in connection with the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor. He could no longer deny the fact that there was a famine in 1932-1933, because Volodymyr Shcherbytsky had confirmed it in 1987. However, much like his predecessors, Symonenko blamed the famine on drought and misrepresentations of grain procurements in raions and oblasts. According to Symonenko, the Politburo of the CPSU's Central Committee condemned the misrepresentations and demanded criminal prosecution of those responsible. Such blatant lies could be uttered before the archives were opened during Gorbachev's perestroika. On the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor such statements were shameless blasphemy.

A natural question arises: Why do representatives of the extreme right- and left-wing political forces politicize the Holodomor issue by exchanging contradictory statements without believing one bit in them or caring about establishing the truth? This question is easy to answer because the same fate has befallen other historical problems. No one is crossing swords over the revolution of 1905-1907, and its centennial is passing completely unnoticed. The situation with the Holodomor or the problem of the OUN and UPA are different because they are part of the life experiences of the current generation of Ukrainian citizens, who were participants in those events, or the children of these people. People tend to have differing opinions on events in the not so distant past, whereas all politicians try to please the public. Therefore, let us have a look at the people.

Three generations are represented in our society: grandfathers and grandmothers, and their children and grandchildren. Living at the same time with them is a small number of representatives of adjacent generations, i.e., great- grandparents and great-grandchildren. Let us analyze the life experience of each generation.

I will begin with grandparents born before 1920 inclusive. This is the generation of the 20th century, which experienced countless disasters and a great deal of suffering. This generation survived the Great War of 1914-1918, the Civil War and interethnic wars after the fall of the Russian Empire, the famine of 1921-1923, industrialization, collectivization, and the Holodomor of 1932-1933, the Great Terror of 1937-1938, World War II of 1939-1945, postwar destruction, including the famine of 1946-1947. I am quite familiar with this generation thanks to my profession and as a result of personal communication with these people. I still communicate with the youngest representatives of this generation. My exchanges have been especially fruitful with Vasyl Kuk, the last UPA army commander; Bohdan Osadchuk, the Berlin-based professor and the oldest active journalist in Europe; and Petro Tronko, the former deputy prime minister for humanitarian policy of the Ukrainian SSR, who occupied his ministerial seat for 17 years.

With the exception of those who lived outside the Soviet Union's borders until 1939 and 1940, the representatives of this generation were the "builders of socialism." The Bolsheviks, whom Lenin called "a drop in the people's ocean," built their "commune state," as defined by Lenin, together with the people. The concerted action of the party and the people was achieved with the help of two slogans: "Those who are not with us are against us!" and "Unless the enemy surrenders, he will be destroyed!"
Mass repressions were the main method of building a "commune state." They continued even after this state was built and had passed a test of strength during the Soviet-German war, and until the death of Joseph Stalin. Once the repressions had almost wiped out society's political activity, the Kremlin chiefs switched to other methods of administration: propaganda and indoctrination.

I belong to the generation of those born between 1921 and 1950. These people were raised in the Soviet school and were not affected by the mass repressions. The older representatives of this generation are the veterans of WWII, who now rightfully enjoy society's respect. As a rule, how they picture the past differs from the way subsequent generations view it. And this is not only due to their understandable idealization of their youth.

When the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, who were "rehabilitated" by Stalin's successors, returned to their homes from the GULAG, Lidiya Chukovska made her famous declaration: "Two Russias have encountered each other: the one that did time, and the one that put the former behind bars." However, there was also a third Russia, much like a third Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc., which did not take part in the repressions and was not subjected to them. The representatives of my generation formed the largest percentage of these people. After returning from the GULAG, our fathers kept silent, as a rule. Perhaps they did so not only because upon their release they had signed a "pledge not to disclose information."

Perhaps they did not want to complicate the lives of their children, who out of ignorance could start saying bad things about the Soviet government. Finally, they feared for their own lives, because in that country parents were responsible for children and vice versa. Such responsibility was viewed as the norm. We lived in a kingdom of crooked mirrors, but didn't realize it. There was no longer any need to deport us, because we respected or even loved the Soviet government. We knew the things we could discuss in public, and it seemed normal that there were things that were best kept private. A case in point is the famine of 1932- 1933.

Young and old knew that it had occurred, but we also knew that it should not be discussed - period. My foreign colleagues who study the Holodomor and whose numbers are growing do not understand this. They try to find explanations in our national character or talk about how the KGB intimidated the population. To fully understand the Soviet people's behavior and way of thinking, they should have been born and raised in this country.

Soviet citizens' dependence on the government was not just reinforced and not even so much by standard repressions, such as extermination or imprisonment. The government was the universal employer and could fire anyone, if necessary. Almost everyone who "misbehaved" could end up like a beached fish.

Notably, the chekist selectors spent a decade imprisoning or exterminating the most active part of the population. Society was becoming conformist for two main reasons: the percentage of dissenters was progressively declining, while the percentage of people raised in the Soviet school was increasing as part of a natural process.

Indoctrination and propaganda proved successful after the period of mass repressions because the Soviet system showed the people many advantages compared to the pre-revolutionary system. The system enslaved the person politically, but ensured a minimum level of its material and cultural welfare, whether this person wanted it or not. In the Soviet period alcoholics underwent "reeducation" in therapeutic sanatoriums, and there were almost no homeless persons.

What anticommunists cannot understand is that the Soviet government's care for the people was not dictated by moral duty, but was a precondition of its existence. In order to emerge, the communist system had to destroy private enterprise in all its forms, i.e., take over the job of feeding, healing, educating, and entertaining the entire population. The commune state was so drastically different from states in which citizens had political freedom that it should be viewed as a civilizationally different phenomenon. This state did not even hide the lack of political and national freedom in the general accepted sense. At the same time, it labeled these freedoms "bourgeois democracy" and "bourgeois nationalism," while espousing the "loftier" values of "socialist democracy" and "socialist internationalism."
Communism also demonstrated its "significant accomplishments" on the republican level. It gave Ukraine internationally recognized Soviet statehood (a founding member of the UN!), increased its pre-revolutionary industrial capacity many times over, turned it into a culturally developed republic, and fulfilled the dream of many generations of Ukrainians: the reunification of ethnic lands.

It is extremely difficult to convince the many representatives of my generation that the civilization in which they spent the better part of their lives was built on the blood and bones of the previous generation. Many of my peers a priori refuse to believe that the Soviet government could deliberately exterminate people. There are many who still believe that "enemies of the people" really existed. A post- genocidal society, as defined by James Mace, is a sick society.

People born between 1950 and 1980 belong to the third generation of Ukrainian citizens. Long ago this generation outnumbered all the other generations, and after the Orange Revolution its representatives ousted almost all of their parents from managing the affairs of state and society. This generation, and the preceding generation, was not separated by a barrier in the form of a pledge not to disclose information. This is why few of its representatives share their parents' stereotypes and biases, especially since they live in an age of transformations, i.e., a time when the established underpinnings of life become unstable.

When the commune state collapsed and vanished as a result of growing external and internal pressures, it was replaced not by a Western-style social state but primitive capitalism. Quite naturally, many representatives of the third generation, much like their parents, are nostalgic for the Soviet past. Citizens find it hard to take for granted historians' assertions to the effect that the Soviet system under Lenin and Stalin could be built only with steel and blood-plenty of blood.

We must bear all this in mind when we want to convince the public that terror by famine was a tool of "Soviet construction" on par with other forms of terror. We should not fault our parliament for not having shown any interest in the Holodomor until 2002. Parliament is the mirror image of society. We should be happy with what has already been accomplished. At a special session on May 14, 2003, the Ukrainian parliament adopted an Address to the Ukrainian People in Connection with the Famine of 1932- 33. It defined the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. With 410 parliamentarians present, the document was passed by a mere 226 votes, i.e., the minimum required.
On the fourth Saturday of November 2003, marking the Day to Commemorate the Victims of the Holodomor, only the state-owned television channel UT-1 dedicated air time to the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor by airing a 30-minute program entitled "The Bells of Popular Memory." Meanwhile, private television channels broadcast the usual weekend fare of entertainment shows, comedies, and erotic films.

Nothing has changed even now. In a commentary published in the Aug. 17, 2005, issue of the [Russian-language] newspaper Segodnia on a proposal to plant high-bush cranberries known as kalyna on all the Dnipro slopes in Kyiv in memory of Holodomor victims, a female journalist addressed a question to herself and her readers, which was framed in the banner headline: "Is this not a lot of sorrow for Kyiv?"

Historians have their work cut out for them to convince society of the need to face the problems of the Holodomor. Only when we accomplish this will marginal politicians let go of this issue.

[Second Part]

With the Stalinist taboo broken, Soviet historians began to explore the famine of 1933 with increasing intensity. It would be a mistake to say that the agony of the totalitarian regime and the empire that it had created began with the opening of this particular "Pandora's box." Nonetheless, the subject of the famine resonated throughout Ukrainian society, evolving into a discussion of the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

Cut off from the Ukrainian Diaspora behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet historians were largely unaffected by the results of the Diaspora's investigation of the Holodomor. The Iron Curtain was located not only on the borders of the USSR but inside our minds.

What I would least like to discuss in this chapter is the quantitative accomplishments of Soviet historians on the subject of the Ukrainian famine. The line of discussion is determined by the wording of the question: Why did Stalin exterminate the Ukrainians? I will therefore not discuss the facts they exposed but only how those facts affected the researchers' worldview. In particular, they developed an ability to reject Soviet stereotypes, which enabled them to elicit the true cause-and-effect relationships in the problem of the Holodomor. The chosen line of discussion requires me to explore my own worldview and life experience especially closely. In this sensitive matter it is hard to find other material for the necessary generalizations.

I spent 11 years working at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, where I studied the history of the nation's economy, moving from one time period to the next. I then transferred to the Institute of History to prepare a doctoral thesis within the framework of the so-called interwar period: from 1921 to 1941. When I received my doctorate and was appointed to chair the Department of Interwar History, my scholarly specialty and position required me to study the 1933 famine once it became a widely discussed topic.

Other people in the department were studying the history of the peasants before and after collectivization, while I specialized in the problems of industrialization and the history of the working class. Like everybody else, I knew about the famine. Moreover, I had access to demographic data that was locked away in special repositories and knew that the Ukrainian countryside had lost millions of people, and that this loss could not be attributed to urbanization. But I could not understand the causes of the famine. Even in my worst nightmare I could not imagine that the Soviet government was capable of exterminating not only enemies of the people (at the time I never questioned the legitimacy of this notion), but also children and pregnant women. After several years of studying the famine, I chose a newspaper with the highest circulation in my republic to publish a sharply-worded article "Do we need the Soviet government?" I am grateful to the chief editor of Silski visti [Village News] for publishing the article in unexpurgated form on June 7, 1991. He did, however, change the title to: "What government do we need?" Unfortunately, piety toward the Soviet government is still widespread among many people of my generation.

Before the worldview transformation caused by my study of the Holodomor, I was a Soviet scholar like everyone else. That is, I looked at history from the class point of view, viewed capitalism and socialism as socioeconomic formations, considered uncollectivized peasants to be representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, believed that collective ownership of production facilities was a viable option and that collective farms were the peasants' collective property.

I considered it a normal thing that there were special repositories in libraries and archives, i.e., I accepted the division of information into classified and public. But for this very reason I could not understand why the 1933 famine was a forbidden topic. Since there was no one in Ukraine who didn't know about it, why did this information have to be classified? An older colleague, who also chaired a department at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, confided in me that in his village everybody knew who had eaten whom. They spent the rest of their lives with this knowledge.

When some important individuals on the staff of the CPU's Central Committee, whom I knew well, got word of a US congressional commission on the Ukrainian famine, they went into a state of continuing stress. The Feb. 11, 1983, report by the Central Committee's secretary in charge of ideology and the Ukrainian KGB chief contained a recommendation addressed to our specialists abroad: Do not enter into polemics on the famine. It was clear that this polemic would be a losing proposition under any circumstances. At the time, however, they could no longer bury their heads in the sand.

In the fall of 1986 the CC CPU formed a so-called "anti-commission." I found myself among its members. We scholars were expected to produce studies that would "expose the falsifications of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists."

I had worked in special repositories before, but received clearance to access "special files" of CPU committees only once I began working as a member of the commission. Soviet archives had one special characteristic: a researcher could have access to 99.9 percent of all files, yet all crucial information relating to the history of this totalitarian state was contained in the 0.01 percent of inaccessible files.

After six months of working in the archives, I learned about the agricultural situation in the early 1930s. After this, some causes, which I had taken for granted since my school years, changed places with consequences. The new cause-and-effect relationships often coincided with what I got to read in the so-called "anti-Soviet" literature.

While I was working in the archives, the commission's work was proving fruitless. Perhaps those upstairs realized that the scholars had been given an unrealistic assignment. I sent an analytical report under my own name to the Central Committee with a proposal that the famine be officially recognized.

Now I understand that I was demanding something impossible from the Central Committee. Indeed, why did Stalin's taboo on recognizing the famine last for so long? After the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Stalin's successors readily condemned the political terror of 1937- 1938 because its primary victim was the ruling party. Unlike individual terror carried out by state security agencies, terror by famine in 1932-1933 was carried out by party committees, the Komsomol, trade unions, and komnezam committees of poor peasants. How could they possibly admit that Stalin had succeeded in using the system of government, which everybody called "people's rule," to exterminate the people, i.e., to commit genocide? In exposing famine, the rhetoric about Stalinist vices would not hide the organic flaws of the Soviet government behind the great chieftain's broad back.

I remember writing that report at a time when I still had not given up many stereotypes of the official concept of history. Now I understand that this helped me formulate my arguments in such a way that my report would not appear too explosive to those in a position to make the political decision to recognize the famine.

I think this report was only about recognizing the fact that famine had really occurred. While I, an expert on the history of the interwar period, still could not interpret this mysterious famine as genocide in 1987, our chiefs in the party committees were even farther from such an interpretation. Granted, we knew that books had been published in the West, in which the victims of the 1933 famine said that the government had intended to destroy them. But such stories were always rejected in the USSR as anti- Soviet propaganda.

While rereading the text about the ability or inability of our government officials of the time to recognize the fact of the famine, I caught myself in a contradiction: while I state that I was demanding the impossible of the members of the Central Committee, I am insisting that they could not identify the famine with genocide.

I teach a course on historical methodology to M.A. students and always draw their attention to the phenomenon of presentism: people tend to invest the past with characteristics of contemporaneity, which it does not have, and overlook those characteristics of that past, which are not present in their life. For the past to shine with its true colors, we have to approach it with expert knowledge.
I think, however, that even people who are not expert historians but have enough life experience can recall exactly what they thought about the 1933 famine a decade and a half ago, and how their views have changed now that thousands of horrifying documents have been published.

Those who were in power in the late 1980s had access to such documents even in those days. I dare say, however, that they could not evaluate them properly because they were not Stalin's contemporaries and did not contribute to his crimes. Like me, they were products of the Soviet school. Later in this article I will show with concrete examples that it took both time and great mental effort for people of my generation to grasp the famine as an act of genocide. Representatives of the generation that had survived the famine did not realize, but only felt, that somebody had intended to destroy them. However, there is a difference between understanding and feeling. A judge listens to eyewitness testimony about a crime (in our case, the crime of genocide), but issues his ruling only after establishing the entire sequence of events that constitute the corpus delicti of the crime. In appealing to the international community for recognition of the Ukrainian Holodomor as an act of genocide, we must stop playing on emotions, which we have been doing until now, and must instead supply corroborated evidence of the crime.

Thus, I am certain that none of the CPU leaders realized the true essence of the events of 1933, but they all knew that something horrible and monstrous had happened. On the other hand, they felt that the Stalinist taboo on the word famine could no longer continue.

For several months my report wandered from office to office at the Central Committee. Finally, they allowed me to submit it as a scholarly article to Ukrayinsky istorychny Zhurnal, but only once a political decision to recognize the famine as a historical fact was publicized. That event was scheduled for Dec. 25, 1987, when Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the first secretary of the CC CPU was slated to deliver his report on the 70th anniversary of the Ukrainian SSR.

In the meantime, the liberalization of the political regime, which started with Gorbachev's announcement of his policy of perestroika, was becoming more and more pronounced. The conspiracy of silence surrounding the famine began to disintegrate by itself. On July 16, 1987, the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina carried two articles that mentioned the famine matter-of-factly as a well-known fact. Discussions of the famine began in Moscow. On Oct. 11, 1987, the famous scholar Viktor Danilov of the Institute of Soviet History at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who had already experienced much unpleasantness within the party organs for his "distorted" portrayal of Soviet agrarian history, published a statement in the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossiia, stating that famine had claimed a huge number of lives in the winter and spring of 1933. In his short article entitled "How many of us were there then?" published in the December issue of the magazine Ogonek, Moscow-based demographer Mark Tolts blew the lid off the suppressed union-wide census of 1937, revealing that its organizers had been repressed for the malicious underestimation of the population. Tolts pointed to the 1933 famine as the cause of this "underestimation."

On Nov. 2, 1987, CPSU Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a report in the Kremlin, pegged to the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution. Aleksandr Yakovlev recalled that the conservatives and liberals on Gorbachev's team prepared several versions of the same report. A conservative version of this assessment of the country's historical path got the upper hand, and Gorbachev did not mention the famine.

Volodymyr Shcherbytsky could not follow his Moscow patron's example because what had raged in Ukraine was not merely famine but manmade famine, or the Holodomor. Moreover, the US congressional commission was about to announce the preliminary results of its investigation. For this reason Shcherbytsky's anniversary report contained six or seven lines about the famine, which was allegedly caused by drought. For the first time in 55 years a CPSU Politburo member broke the Stalinist taboo on the word "famine." This created an opportunity for historians to study and publish documents on the Holodomor.

My article, "Concerning the Evaluation of the Situation in Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR in 1931-1933," was published in the March 1988 issue of the Ukrainskyi istorychnyi Zhurnal. Its abridged version had already been published in January 1988 in two Soviet newspapers for Ukrainian emigrants: the Ukrainian-language Visti z Ukrainy and the English-language News from Ukraine. In May 1988 the Foreign Ministry of the Ukrainian SSR received the materials of the US congressional commission via the Soviet Embassy in the US and passed them on to the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The English-language version of my article was almost entirely quoted and analyzed. James Mace concluded, "The scale of the famine is minimized, the Communist Party is depicted as doing its utmost to improve the situation, while the actions of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, which exacerbated the famine, have been ignored."

This is an objective conclusion, for I had deliberately excluded materials that had already been discovered in party archives from this article, which in fact was my report to the CC CPU. I could not afford to make things difficult for Shcherbytsky to render a decision that was coming to a head under the conditions of increasing glasnost and which was necessary in the face of the investigation being pursued by the US Congress.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian writers were bringing the subject of the famine to the forefront of civic and political life. On Feb. 18, 1988, Literaturna Ukraina published Oleksa Musiyenko's report to a meeting of the Kyiv branch of the Writers' Union of Ukraine. Welcoming the new CPSU leadership's policy of de-Stalinization, Musiyenko accused Stalin of orchestrating a brutal grain procurement campaign in the republic, which resulted in the Holodomor of 1933. The word "Holodomor" used in this report was coined by the writer.

In early July 1988 the writer Borys Oliynyk addressed the 19th CPSU conference in Moscow. Focusing on the Stalinist terror of 1937, he surprised those present with his conclusion: "Because repressions in our republic started long before 1937, we must also determine the causes of the 1933 famine, which killed millions of Ukrainians; we must list the names of those who are to blame for this tragedy."

In a November 1988 interview with the Moscow weekly Sobesednik [Interlocutor], the writer Yuriy Shcherbak, the founder of the Green movement in Ukraine, devoted much attention to the problem of the famine. He was convinced that the 1933 famine was the same kind of method for terrorizing peasants who opposed collective farm slavery as dekulakization. At the same time, he was the first to speculate that Stalin's policy of repressions in Ukraine was also aimed at forestalling the danger of a large-scale national liberation movement. The peasantry, he said, was always the bearer of national traditions, which is why the 1933 famine was a blow aimed against the peasants. In the summer of 1993 James Mace published his analytical article "How Ukraine Was Permitted to Remember" in the American journal The Ukrainian Quarterly. In describing the process of how the Holodomor was understood, I have followed this article to some extent and in separate instances, while making independent evaluations. I cannot agree with one of his statements.

In July 1988 the Writers' Union of Ukraine instructed Volodymyr Maniak to prepare a memorial book comprised of testimonies of Holodomor survivors. Mace wrote that Maniak was not allowed to address the famine eyewitnesses in the press; this mission was entrusted to me. In December 1988 I appealed to the readers of Silski visti and published a questionnaire.

In fact, neither Maniak nor I were instructed to prepare a memorial book. This problem did not concern the republican leadership. The initiative was Maniak's. After enlisting the support of the Writers' Union, he came to the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR with a proposal to join forces. At the time we were actively searching for documents relating to the famine, which had been amassed in the archives of Soviet government agencies. We collected so many sensational materials that we processed them in parallel form: memoirs and documents. We could not immediately publish the manuscripts we had prepared. Radiansky Pysmennyk published the colossal book of recollections, Famine 1933. The People's Memorial Book compiled by Maniak and his wife Lidia Kovalenko, only in 1991. In 1992 and 1993 Naukova Dumka published a collection of documents from the Central State Archive of the Highest Organs of Government and Administration of Ukraine, compiled by Hanna Mykhailychenko and Yevhenia Shatalina.

In the meantime, the substance and even the words from my article that appeared in Ukrayinsky istorychny Zhurnal became the target of harsh criticism in the press immediately after its publication in March 1988. Only one year after its publication society was viewing the fundamental questions concerning Soviet reality in a completely different way.

In 1988 I wrote a brochure for the society Znannia [Knowledge] of the Ukrainian SSR. While the brochure was being prepared for publication, I obtained permission from the society to publish it in Literaturna Ukraina. At the time this newspaper was most popular among radical intellectual circles and in the Diaspora. The text, published in four issues of the newspaper between January and February 1989, was the product of 18 months of archival work. Complete with photographic evidence, the story of Viacheslav Molotov's extraordinary grain procurement commission shocked the public.

In June 1989 Znannia published 62,000 copies of my brochure entitled 1933: The Tragedy of the Famine. Not surprisingly, it was published as part of series entitled Theory and Practice of the CPSU. The art editor designed an original cover depicting a cobweb with the brochure's title centered in red and white lettering. As I reread it now, I can see that it is an accurate portrayal of the socioeconomic consequences of forced collectivization of agriculture, the major one being famine in many areas of the USSR. However, at the time I still did not understand the specifics of the Ukrainian famine. In particular, the brochure listed all the clauses of the Nov. 18 decree of the CC CP(b)U and the Nov. 20 decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, both of which were approved as dictated by Molotov. These decrees were the spark plug of the Holodomor. The brochure also cited the most disturbing clause, calling for the imposition of penalties in kind (meat, potatoes, and other foodstuffs). However, at the time I still had no facts about the consequences that stemmed from that clause. For this reason the Ukrainian famine was considered the result of a mistaken economic policy, not a deliberate campaign to seize food under the guise of grain procurements: "Openness in the struggle against the famine would mean recognizing the economic catastrophe that crowned Stalin's experiment of speeding up the pace of industrialization. Stalin thus chose a different path, the path of cowardly and criminal concealment of the situation in the countryside." It follows from these words that I did not see signs of genocide in the concealment of information about the famine.

A detailed analysis of my own brochure was necessary to provide background to the story about the major accomplishment of the Soviet period, which was being quickly consigned to the past. I am speaking about the book The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Through the Eyes of Historians and the Language of Documents. The book was published in September 1990 by Politvydav Ukrainy as an imprint of the Institute of Party History at the CC CPU. It contained articles, including one of mine, but I will discuss the documents from the archival funds of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist (b) Party and the CP(b)U. The documentary section was compiled by Ruslan Pyrih, head of the team of compilers that included A. Kentiy, I. Komarova, V. Lozytsky, and A. Solovyova. The official pressrun was 25,000, but the real number of published copies was ten times smaller. When it became clear that the book would be published, somebody decided to turn it into a bibliographic rarity.
I saw the documents discovered in the party archives of Moscow and Kyiv by Pyrih's team one year before their publication. Some of them are reason enough to accuse Stalin of committing the crime of genocide, and I will cite them in subsequent articles. However, my immediate task is to elicit how the Holodomor was understood. I will only say that at the time nobody saw the true substance of these few documents, and thank God for that. If they had, they might have removed these documents from the manuscript. It is no wonder that their contents were underestimated. In my 1989 brochure I too could not assess the significance of those fines in kind.

A battle over this manuscript broke out at the highest political level in the republic - in the Politburo of the CC CPU. The Politburo meeting in January 1990, to which I was invited as an expert, took a long time to discuss the expediency of publishing this book. I got the impression that those present heaved a sigh of relief when Volodymyr Ivashko, the first secretary of the CC assumed responsibility and proposed publishing the documents.

Why did the Politburo decide to publish such explosive documents? There are at least two reasons. First, in 1988-1989 the originally bureaucratic perestroika was already evolving into a popular movement. Constitutional reform had divested the ruling party of its power over society. In order to remain on top of the revolutionary wave, party leaders had to distance themselves from Stalin's heritage. Second, the US congressional commission had already completed its work and published a conclusive report that contained many impressive details. The Politburo members were familiar with the specific results of the work carried out by Mace's commission. I am so sure of this because I have this particular volume, 524 pages, published in Washington in 1988, in my own library. The book's cover bears the red stamp of the CC CPU's general department, identifying the date of receipt as Sept. 5, 1988. I obtained the book during the transfer of Central Committee documents to the state archive after the party was banned (as material foreign to the compiler of the funds).

The above-mentioned Politburo meeting of Jan. 26, 1990, approved a resolution "On the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine and the Publication of Archival Materials Relating to It." The Politburo identified the immediate cause of the famine as the grain procurement policy that was fatal to the peasants. Yet this statement did not correspond to the truth, much like Shcherbytsky's statement about the drought.

Mace came to Ukraine for the first time in January 1990. He brought me a computer printout of the famine survivors' testimonies recorded by the US congressional commission. The three volumes of testimonies on 1,734 pages were published in Washington only in December 1990. In the first two weeks of that month the journal Pid praporom Leninizmu [Under the Banner of Leninism] published my article "How It Happened (Reading the Documents of the US Congressional Commission on the 1932-1933 Ukraine Famine"). My own experience of analyzing archival documents and the testimonies recorded by the American researchers enabled me to reach the following conclusion: "Alongside grain procurements and under their guise, a repressive expropriation of all food stocks, i.e., terror by famine was organized." Now the conclusion about genocide was no longer based solely on the emotional testimony of Holodomor eyewitnesses but on an analysis of archival documents.

March 1991 saw the publication of my conclusive book, Tsina velykoho perelomu [The Price of the Great Turning Point]. The final conclusion was formulated in no uncertain terms: "Famine and genocide in the countryside were preprogrammed" (p. 302). In the years that followed I wondered why this book was not known to many researchers of the Holodomor. But eventually I realized that the announced pressrun of 4,000 copies could have been reduced tenfold, as it happened with the collection of documents from the party archives. Even though the publishing house was renamed Ukraina, it was the same old Politvydav Ukrainy.

Reviewing the book a decade and a half later, I have reconsidered its merits and shortcomings. Its merit lay in the detailed analysis of the Kremlin's socioeconomic policy that resulted in an economic crisis capable of disrupting the political equilibrium. This explained why Stalin unleashed terror by famine against Ukraine in one particular period - a time when the economic crisis was at its peak. The monograph's shortcoming was the lack of an analysis of the Kremlin's nationality policy. Without such an analysis the conclusion of genocide was suspended in midair.

In those distant years Mace and I often engaged in sharp polemics. However, these polemics were disinterested, i.e., they concerned problems, not specific persons. I criticized him for his inadequate attention to the Kremlin's socioeconomic policy, and he criticized me for my inattention to its nationality policy. Time has shown that establishing that the Holodomor was an act of genocide requires an equal amount of attention to both the socioeconomic and nationality policies.

However, Mace had an advantage in this polemic. He did not have to change his worldview the way I had to change mine, one that was inculcated in me by my school, university, and my entire life in Soviet society, and to do so posthaste in the face of irrefutable facts. He saw in me an official historian, which in fact I was. However, in the above-mentioned article, "How Ukraine Was Permitted to Remember," Mace concluded the chapter on the evolution of my worldview with these words: "He approached the development of the topic [of the famine - Author] as a Soviet historian whose works were as political as they were scholarly. When the possibilities for studying archives expanded, he stopped being a Soviet historian and became simply a historian."

The world we live in now is no worse and no better than the communism of the Brezhnev period. It is simply different. We should not be happy or sad that it has passed. We must only understand that the communist system exhausted its life cycle and that its continued existence would necessarily have involved government pressure on society, which was germane to the first two decades of Soviet rule, i.e., the Holodomor could also be repeated. At this point I cannot help saying a good word about Yakovlev, who died last month. He proposed the best possible way for a quick and managed disintegration of the communist order.

Soviet communism disintegrated as an empire and as a system a long time ago. Now it is imperative for us to overcome the worldview inherited from it. Unfortunately, a decade and a half after the demise of communism this problem persists. It can be resolved with the help of knowledge about Ukraine's true history in the Soviet period, including knowledge of the real causes of the Holodomor. I can say this based on my own life experience.

[Third Part]

A Conflict Within A Generation

I have already mentioned that both right- and left-leaning unscrupulous politicians tend to politicize the subject of the Holodomor. In doing so, they aim to please their voters, which is quite natural for politicians. Why has it become possible to capitalize on the subject of the famine? Why do our fellow countrymen have differing opinions of the Holodomor? Finding the answer requires the use of a more or less abstract notion - a generation.

In the past I used to think that another abstract notion, territory, was more suitable for such analysis. So much has been said about the division of Ukraine into eastern and western halves, as well as about the special mentality of the population in the western oblasts, which came under Russia in the form of the Soviet Union (or reunited with the Ukrainian SSR, which is also true) only in 1939-1940. Now I consider that the decisive role in shaping the difference between the eastern and western oblasts of present-day sovereign Ukraine was played by the presence or absence of mass repressions when a particular generation was forming.

The Kremlin used mass repressions while building the "commune state" in 1918-1938, and during the Stalinist Sovietization of Ukraine's western oblasts in 1939-1952. Notably in the latter case, the repressions affected a different generation. This means that the representatives of Ukraine's oldest living generation in the western and eastern oblasts have had different life experiences, which is why they feel differently about history.

The residents of the western oblasts hate communism with a passion and despise the Communist Party and Soviet nomenklatura that carried out repressions during the "first Soviets," i.e., from 1939, and during the "second Soviets," i.e., from 1944. Meanwhile, the residents of the eastern oblasts were raised under the Soviet system. Unlike their parents, they were loyal to the government and were therefore spared Stalinist repressions. Even though mass repressions in the USSR continued until Stalin's death, they became selective, targeting individual territories (the Baltic republics, the western Ukrainian oblasts) or nationalities (e.g., the campaign to combat cosmopolitanism, "the Doctors' Case"). Manipulating the enslaved population, Stalin used the human and material resources of Ukraine's eastern oblasts to combat the anti-Soviet underground movement in western Ukraine.

The anticommunism of the population in the western oblasts is manifested always and in everything. The West and the Ukrainian Diaspora, whose representatives mostly have Galician roots, proved very responsive to the tragedy of the Holodomor, even though they were not directly affected by it. The well-organized North American Diaspora made a decisive contribution to exposing the Kremlin's most horrible crime.

For the anticommunist-minded representatives of the older generation in the western oblasts, the 1932-1933 famine was a priori a crime committed by the Kremlin. They needed no documents and accepted the testimonies of Holodomor witnesses as true. It turned out that they were right to do so. On the contrary, this generation's representatives in the east have embarked (at least one would hope so) on a long and painful road of de-Stalinization, consciously giving up the stereotypes of thinking and behavior, which the Soviet system had inculcated in them since childhood.

World War II veterans and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) veterans find it very hard to come to terms not because they fought on opposing sides. Other wartime enemies in Europe have long since made peace. Our veterans have had different life experiences, and it is hard for them to give up the beliefs of their youth. Perhaps the real picture of the Holodomor will facilitate this painful reassessment of values. I must admit that the realization that you have become what you are as a result of government manipulations is an unpleasant thing. Yet it is much more unpleasant to remain that way until your final hour. How can one be Stalin's puppet half a century after his death?

My own reassessment of values took place under the influence of my study of Holodomor history. In 1981 I published a book entitled Partiia Lenina - Sila Narodnaia [Lenin's Party - the People's Strength], which was designed for Soviet schoolchildren. I was being honest with them because I believed in what I was writing. I believed not only because I was raised in this faith. Built by forceful means, the Leninist "commune state" became harmonious in its own peculiar way, when there was no longer any need to use force. Then the eternal values propagated by the Soviet government came to the fore. Of course, I saw the double standards, but played them down as imperfections of human nature. I felt the lack of freedom, but justified it by the need to survive while being "surrounded by capitalists." Indeed, what can a bird born in a cage tell you about the sky?

After several years of exploring the Holodomor, I realized that the Soviet government was capable of exterminating people - millions of people. What could one's attitude be to such a government and its ideals after realizing what the Holodomor really was?

In 1991 two younger colleagues and I published the book Stalinism in Ukraine. The title itself is proof that I was clinging to the term "Stalinism," which is still popular in the West, and did so in an attempt to save the idea of social equality by blaming everything on Stalin. Later I realized that the millions of lost lives were the result of the implementation of Lenin's idea of the "commune state". If personalized, the communist idea should be called Leninism. In its party dimension it should be called Bolshevism.

Tsina Velykoho Perelomu [The Price of the Great Turning Point] is the title of my second book that was published in 1991. The title is derived from Nikita Khrushchev's thoughts on the cost of collectivization in the lives of Soviet citizens. At the time these thoughts astonished me because they came from a CPSU leader. The book's 432 pages contain hundreds of documents that paint a vivid picture of the Holodomor. Did this book influence the people of my generation, who need to reassess their values?

I doubt it. The state plays a key role in society's comprehension of the real nature of the Holodomor. Through its specialized agencies the state must bring to citizens' attention knowledge about the not so distant past, knowledge accumulated by scholars. In doing so, the state can prevent interpersonal conflicts stemming from differing life experiences. The Ukrainian president's calls for reconciliation are futile without daily educational efforts by the government.

After 1987 the Ukrainian Communist Party and Soviet nomenklatura approached the research and educational work on the subject of the famine with affected enthusiasm. In September 1990 I was made a member of the ideological commission of the CC CPU, even though I never held any posts in the state machinery. After the Ukrainian parliament proclaimed Ukraine's independence, information on the Holodomor was used by the "sovereign communists" headed by Leonid Kravchuk to convince voters that this [independence] was the right decision. James Mace recalled that Oles Yanchuk's film Holod-33 [Famine '33] on which he was a consultant, did not receive a single kopeck in state funding during the filming, but it was still aired on television before the Dec. 1, 1991 referendum. The first presidents of Ukraine mostly went no further than symbolic gestures (a memorial plaque on Kyiv's St. Michael's Square and the Day to Commemorate Holodomor Victims on the fourth Saturday of November). Most of the books on the Holodomor have been published with donations from sponsors, not with government funds. In a decade and a half the leaders of Ukraine have not shown the will or desire to republish the three volumes of witness testimonies that speak of the tragic events in the Ukrainian countryside after 1928, which were compiled by the Mace commission. These three volumes contain the voices of the generation born before 1920. What makes it unique is the fact that representatives of the first generation of Soviet people are no longer among us.

Whereas government bodies had no pressing desire to become involved in the subject of the Holodomor, opposition forces took over this function. We must recognize that they did a great deal of good. At the same time this subject became politicized. After the Orange Revolution, which removed the old nomenklatura from power, individual former oppositionists decided that now they could do as they pleased. They started with a "small thing" - an attempt to move the Day to Commemorate the Holodomor Victims, which Leonid Kuchma introduced in 1998, from fall to springtime, so that it would not conflict with the anniversary of the Orange Revolution. The moral myopia of such people is astounding.

Discussions with Russian Scholars

The attitude of the Russian public and government to the events of 1932-1933 is another important issue. Even if we substantiate with facts that the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine was an act of genocide, we will have to face a different interpretation of our common past at the international level.

Discussions with Russian scholars should be conducted as openly as possible so that we can prove the validity of our position to both the opposing side and our own public. This is necessary in view of how Ukrainian citizens presently understand the Holodomor.

Many our fellow countrymen believe that the causes of the 1932-1933 famine are unclear. Others think that the famine was caused by droughts and/or grain procurements. These were precisely the causes of the 1946- 1947 famine, which people still remember. Most of those who think that the Holodomor was an act of genocide have a shallow understanding of the political and legal essence of "genocide." They are certain that if the government's actions cause mass deaths among the population, they are always an act of genocide. The Kazakh tragedy refutes this supposition. Communist Party officials' ignorant attempts to force the Kazakh nomads to settle down resulted in famine, the scale of which exceeded the Ukrainian Holodomor if you compare the percentage of the affected population in the two ethnic groups. However, the Kazakh tragedy was not a result of terror by famine.

The 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine should be analyzed within the context of the political and legal substance of the term "genocide." During a relatively short period Stalin purposefully exterminated the village population in two Soviet political- administrative divisions in which Ukrainians were the dominant population (the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban province of the Northern Caucasus Territory of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic). From the very outset I would like to dissociate myself from those of my colleagues who define the purpose of this act of genocide differently: Stalin exterminated the Ukrainians! Of course, the end result was just that: Stalin exterminated the Ukrainians
. Yet we will not be able to prove the validity of a claim about it being an act of genocide if we use this simplified and purely emotional formulation.

For many years I have been conferring with a small community of scholars in Russia and the West, who are studying the Ukrainian Holodomor, and I know their way of thinking. For this reason I have to offer a thought-out and clear position on the subject of genocide.

I understood the socioeconomic causes of the 1932-1933 famine already in the early 1990s. Later, at the Department of Interwar History at the Institute of Ukrainian History we studied the totalitarianism of the Communist Party and the Soviets as a holistic political and economic system, which included a study of the Kremlin's nationality policy. Now we have arguments relating to the national component of the Kremlin's policy.

All of the comments provided here are necessary so that my account of discussions with Russian scholars on the nature of the 1932-1933 famine in the Soviet Union will strike the appropriate tone.

These discussions were touched off by the May 1993 informational and analytical conference organized by the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow, which was entitled "The Holodomor of 1932-1933: Tragedy and Warning." Both sides were represented by scholars, politicians, and journalists. We spoke about terror by famine, which the Kremlin used against Ukraine, while they claimed that the Stalinist repressions had no national component. Only Sergey Kovalev, a former dissident, who in 1993 chaired the Human Rights Commission in the Russian parliament, summoned the courage to say "Forgive us!" while addressing the Ukrainian side.

Then a Moscow newspaper carried an article by the journalist Leonid Kapeliushny, who wrote it after reading the book by Volodymyr Maniak and Lidiia Kovalenko, Holod 33: Narodna Knyha-Memorial [Famine '33. The People's Memorial Book]. In the book the journalist saw "eyewitness testimonies that have legal force, testimonies of genocide witnesses" (Izvestiia, 1993, July 3).

Kovaliov's "Forgive us" and Kapeliushny's conclusion were reinforced by papers presented at the international scholarly conference "The Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Causes and Consequences," which took place in Kyiv on Sept. 9-10, 1993 and was attended by the president of Ukraine. While President Kravchuk blamed the tragedy of the Ukrainian nation on the Stalinist government, Ivan Drach, who took the floor after him, placed this problem in a different dimension. "It is time to fully understand once and for all that this was only one of the closest to us - surviving and now living Ukrainians - stages in the planned eradication of the Ukrainian nation. Intolerance of this nation is deeply rooted in the descendants of the northern tribes, to whom our people gave its own faith, culture, civilization, and even its name," Drach said.

The Russian experts on the problems of collectivization and famine- Ilya Zelenin, Nikolai Ivnytsky, Viktor Kondrashyn, and Yevgeniy Oskolkov - wrote a collective letter to the editors of a historical journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, expressing their concern over the fact that most conference participants insisted on "a certain exceptionality of Ukraine, a special nature and substance of these events in the republic as opposed to other republics and regions in the country." They claimed that the famine in Ukraine was no different from famines in other regions, whereas the anti-peasant policy of the Stalinist leadership had no clearly defined national direction (Otechestvennaia istoriia [National History], 1994, no. 6, p. 256).

In an attempt to substantiate their position, the Russian colleagues emphasized the socioeconomic aspects of the 1932-1933 famine, quoting my paper presented at that conference. Without a doubt, the Kremlin's economic policy did not distinguish among the national republican borders, and in this respect their arguments were flawless. However, the rejection of the Ukrainian specifics of the famine, led the Russian colleagues, whether they wanted to or not, to state that the Kremlin had no nationality policy or repressive element of such a policy. I heard a similar statement to the effect that "Stalin's victims have no nationality" from a different Russian delegation at an international symposium in Toronto, entitled "The Population of the USSR in the 1920s-1930s in the Light of New Documentary Evidence" (February 1995). However, Soviet history knows many cases of ethnically motivated repressions. Is it worthwhile recounting them all?

In recent years the Institute of Ukrainian History has established cooperation with the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and through it with experts at other Russian institutions as part of the Russian-Ukrainian Commission of Historians (co-chaired by the Ukrainian academician Valeriy Smoliy and Russian academician Aleksandr Chubarian). On March 29, 2004, Moscow hosted the commission's meeting, attended by numerous prominent Russian experts on agrarian history. They discussed the book Holod 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini: prychyny ta naslidky [The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Causes and Consequences], published in 2003 by the Institute of Ukrainian History to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor. Thirty authors collaborated on this large-format volume of 888 pages supplemented with a 48-page section of illustrations.

Several copies of the book were sent to Moscow long before the commission's meeting. Yet it failed to convince the Russian historians. Soon after that meeting Viktor Danilov and Ilya Zelenin publicized their views of the problem discussed in an article that appeared in Otechestvennaia istoriia (no. 5, 2004). The gist of their position is reflected in the title of their article: "Organized Famine. Dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of the Peasants' Common Tragedy."

The journal printed a black band around the authors' names; our opponents died soon after the meeting. It is a great loss for Russian historical scholarship and all of us, since aspiring Russian scholars are not all that keen to explore these "complex problems."

New archival documents on Soviet agrarian history are now circulating among scholars. This has become possible primarily thanks to the tremendous efforts of Viktor Petrovich Danilov. The new additions to the source base have significantly reinforced the position of the Ukrainian side in its attempts to convince the world that the Holodomor was indeed an act of genocide.

Summing up the results of our meeting on March 29, 2004, Danilov and Zelenin came to the following conclusion: "If one is to characterize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as 'a purposeful genocide of Ukrainian peasants,' as individual historians from Ukraine insist, then we must bear in mind that it was in equal measure a genocide of Russian peasants." The Ukrainian side can accept such a conclusion. After all, we are not saying that only Ukrainians were Stalin's victims. Moreover, because of the specifics of "socialist construction" and the nature of the political system, between 1918 and 1938 the hardest hit (percentage of the total) by repressions were the immediate perpetrators of Stalin's crimes - Chekist secret police agents, followed by state party members, especially the Communist Party and the Soviet nomenklatura, followed by citizens of the national republics, and finally Russians.

How can one explain the Russian scholars' restraint when it comes to the question of genocide? It may perhaps be explained by the fact that the international community is using the Dec. 9, 1948, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide more and more actively. In January 2004 Stockholm hosted the international forum "Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibility," which was attended by many heads of state. The forum focused on the following questions: the political, ideological, economic, and social roots of violence connected with genocide; mechanisms for preventing and responding to the threat of genocide at the international level; the use of diplomatic, humanitarian, economic, and forceful means to prevent genocide.

In Ukrainian society only marginal right-leaning politicians insist that present-day Russia is responsible for the Ukrainian Holodomor and demand moral or even financial compensation. However, the fact that Russia has been recognized as the legal successor of the USSR does not burden it with responsibility for the crimes of the Bolsheviks, White Guards, or any other regimes that controlled Russian territory in the past. Even the attempts of the Kremlin leadership to associate itself with certain attributes of the former Soviet Union, as evidenced by the melody of Russia's state anthem, are not reason enough to put forward such claims. After all, nostalgia for the Soviet past is equally present in Ukrainian and Russian societies, mainly in the older generations.

Russia is freely publishing documentary collections that reflect the state crimes of the Stalinist period. In fact, it has become possible to build the concept of the Ukrainian Holodomor as an act of genocide only on the basis of documents publicized in Moscow. At the same time, Russia's attempts to inherit the achievements of the Soviet epoch, especially the victory in World War II, are forcing Russian officials to throw a veil over Stalin's crimes as much as this can be done in the new conditions of freedom from dictatorship. This applies particularly to the crime of genocide, even though the Dec. 9, 1948, Convention does not place responsibility on the legal successors of criminal regimes.

Naturally, if Russia wants to inherit the accomplishments of the Soviet epoch, it must also inherit its negative aspects, i.e., the obligation to utter Kovalev's "Forgive us." The European Parliament hinted at this "liability" in 2004, when it found the deportation of the Chechens to be an act of genocide. However, few would like to inherit moral responsibility for the crimes of previous regimes, unless absolutely necessary.

This is why Russia is a decisive opponent of recognizing the Ukrainian Holodomor as an act of genocide. In August 2003 Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin said in an interview with BBC's Ukrainian Service: "The Holodomor affected the entire Soviet state. There were no fewer tragedies and no less pain in the Kuban, Ural, and Volga regions, and Kazakhstan. Such expropriations did not just happen in Chukotka and the northern regions because there was nothing to expropriate."
Russia's official representatives at the UN did everything possible to have the definition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide excluded from the Joint Statement of 36 nations on the 70th anniversary of the Ukrainian Holodomor.

It remains for us to convince the Russians that the Ukrainian famine was a result of not only repressive grain procurements, but also a perfectly organized campaign to seize all food stocks from peasants. There is a body of evidence to this effect, and if the voices of Ukrainian scholars are reinforced by the voices of Western historians, this goal will become practicable.

Position of Western Researchers

A closely interconnected network of research institutions specializing in so-called Sovietology formed in the West during the Cold War. However, no Sovietologists were interested in what happened in Ukraine in 1932-1933.

After moving to the US, Robert Conquest, an English literary scholar and contemporary of the Russian revolution, started to work at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of the USSR. He is the author of the first book of non-Ukrainian historiography on the Great Famine in the USSR, which was published in 1986. The author of this famous work, The Great Terror, was right to define Stalin's policy in Ukraine as a special kind of terror - terror by famine. Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow was based on literary sources, most of them collected by James Mace. The international community found the book sensational. On the contrary, Sovietologists disapproved of it and accused the author of political bias, because the book was commissioned by the Ukrainian Diaspora.

In the late 1980s a "revisionist" trend emerged in the ranks of Sovietologists. Its representatives believed that Cold War historiography had to be revised because it was ideologically opposed to communism, i.e., it went beyond the bounds of scholarly knowledge. The "revisionists" unleashed a torrent of criticism against the publications of the US Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Mace himself recalled that he was accused of falsifying history. With no prospects for steady employment in the US, Mace moved to Kyiv and found a job at the institute, which had been organized by Ivan Kuras on the foundations of the former Institute of Party History at the CC CPU.

Much like during the Soviet period, in the early post-Soviet years Ukrainian historical studies did not have an independent international status. In contrast, Russian historians only had to strengthen their long-standing ties. The international status of Russian scholarship rose sharply with the opening of archives from the Stalinist period.

In 1992 Viktor Danilov launched a theoretical seminar entitled "Modern Concepts of Agrarian Development" at the Interdisciplinary Academic Center of Social Sciences (Intercenter). During its meeting on June 24, 1997, the participants discussed the work of Stephen Wheatcroft (Australia) and Robert Davies (UK) entitled The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. The journal Otechestvennaia istoriia (no. 6, 1998) devoted dozens of pages to a report on this seminar. It is hard to describe it in several paragraphs, but I will try.

In his introduction Wheatcroft condemns the thesis that it was an "organized famine" and that Stalin purposefully seized grain to cause the peasants to starve. The report focuses much attention on Ukraine. It states that the Kremlin did not know anything, and when information about the famine started to come in, "the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) was addressing the increasingly pressing problem of dispensing additional grain [to the peasants - Auth.]." Between February and July 1933 the CC AUCP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR issued 35 resolutions and decrees to dispense food grain.

That was the report. Interestingly enough, the cited facts were true. The only thing that is not known is why millions of people died of hunger. Only one document struck the researchers with its cynicism: a CC CP(b)U resolution on dividing peasants hospitalized and diagnosed with dystrophy into ailing and recovering patients. The resolution ordered improving the nutrition of the latter within the limits of available resources so that they could be sent out into the fields to sow the new crop as soon as possible.

Of course, Stalin did not use terror by famine for the indiscriminate extermination of all peasants for whatever reason. Those lucky enough to survive were sent to perform agricultural labor and received food in the fields while they worked. They received food dispensed according to special resolutions from supreme government bodies. This was meant to show how much the government cared about keeping its citizens alive. In this way the peasants learned to work as part of state- owned collective farms.

Based on the authors' estimates, Roberta Manning of Harvard University pointed out that before the 1933 harvest government stockpiles contained between 1.4 and 2 million tons of grain. This was enough to prevent mass hunger. "What forced the Soviet government to seize and export such a large percentage of a very low harvest and stockpile more grain than it did during the previous grain crises? These questions demand answers," she said in a polite rebuttal of the basic points of the report. On the contrary, Lynn Viola of the University of Toronto supported the view of the 1932-1933 tragedy as outlined in the report primarily because it was "revisionist," i.e., it differed from previous opinions about the famine organized by the government or even an act of genocide committed by the Stalinist leadership. Yu. Moshkov agreed that peasants received food relief in the first half of 1933, but added to this obvious fact that "in my view, it is impossible to deny Stalin's clear intent in the fall of 1932 to punish disobedient peasants who refused to surrender everything including grain." M. Viltsan used the points in the report to launch an attack against the authors of the "concept of manmade famine" Nikolai Ivnytsky, Viktor Kondrashyn, and Yevgeniy Oskolkov. Armed with facts, these three repelled the attack.

This was the gist of the theoretical seminar at the Intercenter, with praise for "revisionists" and attacks against Russian scholars who called the famine of 1932-1933 "manmade" in the face of irrefutable facts. It is not surprising that they did not dare go one step further and call the Ukrainian famine an act of genocide.

This seminar reflected the way the Holodomor was comprehended in the West in the late 1990s. The situation has improved significantly. It appears that the turning point came during the international conference organized by the Institute for Historical and Religious Studies in Vicenza, Italy, in October 2003. I will not dwell on its work, because James Mace wrote about it in one of The Day's October 2003 issues. Its result was a resolution supported by scholars from Italy, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, the US, and Canada (Ivnytsky and Kondrashyn abstained), urging the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, who was then holding the EU's rotating presidency, and European Commission chairman Romano Prodi to apply efforts to have the Ukrainian famine 1932-1933 recognized internationally as an act of genocide.

The Vicenza conference had a sequel. On Sept. 5, 2005, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy launched a book entitled Death of the Land. The Holodomor in Ukraine of 1932-1933. This event was attended by Italy's Ambassador to Ukraine Fabio Fabbri and the director of the Italian Institute in Ukraine, Nicola Balloni. The book is based on the materials presented at the Vicenza conference. Nadia Tysiachna's article (Sept. 13, 2005) on this presentation bore the same title that James Mace used for the newspaper column that he sent from Vicenza: "Intellectual Europe on the Ukrainian Genocide."

University of Koln professor Gerhard Simon, who participated in the Vicenza conference, organized a discussion panel entitled "Was the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine an Act of Genocide?" at the 7th International Congress of Historians in Berlin, held in July 2005. This question touched off a heated debate. I am grateful to Dr. Simon for sacrificing the presentation of his own report to give me additional time to substantiate my position. I am also grateful to him for his assistance in having my article translated into German and published in the reputable magazine Ost Europa. The entire staff of the Institute of Ukrainian History is thankful to this authoritative expert on the history of Central and Eastern Europe for his interest in the problem of the Holodomor and his article published in Ukrainskyi istorychnyi Zhurnal [Ukrainian Historical Journal], which is a fresh contribution to the German historiography on this problem.

Peering Into the Abyss

It is obvious that comprehending the Holodomor is no simple task for Ukrainian and foreign scholars, Ukrainian society, and the international community. Do we know everything that happened in our Ukraine seven or eight decades ago? Have we broken free of the stereotypes that were inculcated into the consciousness of several generations?

Sometimes in the face of new or reconsidered facts one has to give up one's established views of certain aspects of the past. This is a normal thing for a professional historian. This is the meaning of scholarly quest. At the start of Gorbachev's de-Stalinization one impulsive woman could no longer endure it and screamed out loud for all of the Soviet Union to hear: "I cannot give up my principles!" She could not find the courage to peer into the abyss and see how much Leninist ideology differs from Leninist and Stalinist practice.

We have to squeeze the hypocrisy of the Soviet period out of ourselves one drop at a time. The sooner our society liberates itself from the stereotypes of the previous epoch, the easier its life will be. The truth about the Holodomor can become a powerful lever in this process.

What is this truth? In the coming issues I will propose my version of the 1932-1933 events in Ukraine. Readers who have read this historiographic introduction in the form of these four articles should make their own judgments based on the facts currently in possession of historians. The upcoming articles will address the essence of the communist "revolution from the top," the Kremlin's nationality policy, mechanisms of genocide, and other subjects that together can provide the answer to the question of why Stalin exterminated the Ukrainians.

Programs | Regulations | Admission and Registration | Awards | Postdoctoral Research | Interdisciplinary Studies | About Us | Links