James Mace

“Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming half- Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least half — Ukrainian”

Arsen Zinchenko, a member of the 1st Convocation of the Ukrainian parliament, has launched a publishing project called Stoziria (A Hundred Stars), which is part of the Library of the Ukrainian Family. Many well-designed and illustrated books in this series have already been published. Each of them focuses on a certain historical figure. Mr. Zinchenko suggested that I write a book on James Mace.

This book will soon be published. Here I would like to share some reflections with readers of The Day

, the newspaper to which Mace devoted, in my opinion, the best years of his life. A US citizen, this eminent researcher of the 1932-1933 Holodomor was inseparably linked with the Ukrainian nation.

1. THE DIFFICULTIES OF UNDERSTANDING THE GENOCIDE

On June 23, 2008, The Times of London noted in an editorial that was immediately reprinted by The Day : “Writing in 1946, George Orwell lamented ‘the fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine...’ Even the fall of communism has done little to dispel the fog.”

Indeed, it is only now, in the course of a vigorous awareness-raising campaign, that the world is starting to learn what happened in Ukraine 75 years ago. During the commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the famine, the bulk of Ukrainian society also began to be aware of what really occurred in the early 1930s.

The Verkhovna Rada launched this process by holding parliamentary hearings on Feb. 12, 2003, timed to coincide with the Holodomor’s 70th anniversary. The process likely ended on Nov. 28, 2006, with the adoption of the Law on the Holodomor as an Act of Genocide of the Ukrainian People.

I must emphasize that there are still many well-informed and highly- educated people, including those whose family members died during the Holodomor, who have a negative attitude to the subject of the famine. Genocide carried out by one’s own government? In order to believe this, you have to reexamine your life. Not everyone is prepared to rethink, let alone break with, the past. No matter how terrible the Holodomor was in and of itself, it compels one to reassess many other events, phenomena, and values — in fact the entire history of the Soviet era. This is why there is no end to the disputes surrounding this sensitive issue.

On the eve of the 75th anniversary, especially now that the Holodomor law has been passed, these disputes have reached the level of acute interstate debates between Ukraine and Russia. In the years that preceded the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor there were no less heated debates among other individuals and in a different part of the world — in the Western Hemisphere, where for the first time, through a concerted effort, civic-political organizations of the North American Ukrainian Diaspora shattered the conspiracy of silence around the 1932-1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine. Despite the resistance of the US administration, which did not want “anger” Moscow, the Diaspora managed to persuade the US Congress to establish the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine. The young American academic James Mace was appointed executive director of the commission and the head of its working group.

The commission might have achieved zero results because it had no access to Soviet archives. In addition, the famine terror against the Ukrainian people was carefully concealed, and the Holodomor, its inevitable consequence, was no less carefully hushed up in subsequent decades. But Mace organized the commission’s work in such a way that information about Stalin’s crime was accessible to anyone who wanted to find it.

Even then, a quarter of a century ago, this information was undesirable for many people. Mace was the first to sense this. Yet he remained devoted to the Holodomor topic until the end of his scholarly activities, which were interrupted by his untimely death.

2. THE HARVARD PROJECT

James Mace was born in 1952 in the city of Muscogee, in Oklahoma. His ancestors belonged to the Cherokee tribe whom the US government had forced to move from North Carolina and Georgia to Oklahoma. His father was a railway switchman who, like his wife, had never finished high school. Yet they were eager to give their son a university education because they were aware of his thirst for knowledge.

After completing his Bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Oklahoma in 1973, Jim transferred to the University of Michigan to major in Russian Studies. Influenced by his mentor Prof. Roman Szporluk, he began to study the history of Ukraine. In 1978 James graduated with an M.A., which opened the way to further research. When it was time to choose his thesis topic, he opted for Ukrainian national communism. This subject was considered semi- taboo in Soviet Ukraine if only because the national communists were not rehabilitated after the 20th Congress of the CPSU.

In 1981 Mace successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918- 1933.” The dissertation was later published, and the young researcher joined the circle of prominent experts on the history of the USSR and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

At this time the civic organizations that had established a Ukrainian studies foundation at Harvard, one of America’s most prestigious universities, invited Omeljan Pritsak to launch a research project on the 1932- 1933 famine. Pritsak was a world- famous Orientalist, who became the founder and first director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). He did the right thing by enlisting the services of Robert Conquest, 63, a British-born professor at Stanford University, who was an expert on the prewar history of the Soviet Union and a talented writer. Conquest could recount the Ukrainian tragedy in a brilliant and readable manner. His book on the Ukrainian famine was expected to cause a great ripple because his previous book, The Great Terror , was an international scholarly bestseller that was translated into many languages.

There was a serious obstacle, however: Conquest did not know Ukrainian and was not familiar with any sources on the history of Soviet Ukraine. So Pritsak went to the University of Michigan and made Mace a tempting offer to move to Harvard and work with Conquest on the sources related to the 1932-1933 famine.

Mace accepted the invitation and became Conquest’s assistant in 1981. The manuscript of the book The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine was completed in 1984, and the author offered it for discussion to the Ukrainian community. Two years later the book was published simultaneously in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. In the foreword to the English edition, Conquest thanked Dr. Mace “for his cooperation and considerable contribution to the research and a detailed discussion of the manuscript.” Cooperation was to be understood literally, although neither Conquest nor Mace ever broached this matter later.

When the work on Conquest’s book ended, Mace was invited to continue working on the sources of the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine as part of the Harvard project. In 1984-1985 he supervised the Harvard University program “Oral History of the 1932- 1933 Famine in Ukraine.”

Oral history was emerging as a popular research area in US universities, and survey methods that minimized the subjectivity of eyewitness reports had already been developed. Mace was assisted by a gifted graduate student named Leonid Heretz, who tape-recorded about 50 accounts of Holodomor survivors who had immigrated to the US after the war.

3. US CONGRESSIONAL COMMISSION ON THE UKRAINE FAMINE

In connection with the 50th anniversary of the 1932-1933 famine, Ukrainian American organizations lobbied hard for a bill to create a commission of inquiry into this tragedy. The bill passed smoothly through the Senate but got bogged down in the House of Representatives.

On the final day of the 98th United States Congress, Senator Bill Bradley made a last-ditch to get the bill voted into law. He “hitched” the amendment on expenditures for this commission to the financial resolution (the state budget law). To vote this amendment down, Congress would have had to discuss it in both chambers, i.e., to continue its session.

But nobody wanted this, and on Oct. 12, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed the Congress-approved financial resolution on the 1985 fiscal year. The law that had been lobbied by Ukrainian organizations thus slipped through. Now Congress had a commission that was supposed “to conduct a study of the Ukraine 1932-1933 famine with the goal of expanding the world’s knowledge and understanding of the famine and a better understanding of the Soviet system by the American public.”

The fiscal year was supposed to begin in July 1985, but nobody was hurrying to form the commission. It was not until early 1986 that the top Harvard administrators helped create a working group composed of six Ukrainian specialists, headed by James Mace as executive director, who were supposed to conduct research on the famine.

Mace organized the commission’s work in simple terms. With 57 recorded interviews at his disposal, he summoned to Washington eyewitnesses who were to give their account of what happened in Ukraine. Concurrently, the working group drafted the commission’s report.

The international repercussions of Conquest’s book, the activities of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, and the beginning of the radical liberalization of the Soviet regime during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika campaign forced Ukraine’s First Secretary of the CPU Volodymyr Shcherbytsky to officially acknowledge the famine on Dec. 25, 1987.

Mace then published a preliminary report of his commission and sent it to the Soviet Embassy in Washington on March 30, 1988. The material also reached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, which handed it over, along with a cover letter from Deputy Minister Anatolii Zlenko, to the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, which had already begun to research the famine on the basis of archival sources.

The final text of the report was submitted to the US Congress in April 1988 and published as a book in July at a government printing house in Washington. Congress approved it and extended the commission’s work for another two years to complete the collection and handling of evidence. On Sept. 5 of the same year a copy of the report, as is clear from the seal on it, was delivered to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CC CPU).

In sending the commission’s preliminary report to the Soviet Embassy in March 1988, Mace expressed a wish to visit Ukraine, but he was denied a visa. Within a couple of years the situation in the republic had changed radically. Kyiv’s party and state leadership began to consider the possibility of freeing itself from the Kremlin’s tutelage. Under these circumstances, the information on the 1932-1933 famine was an important additional factor in favor of such a political step.

In December 1989 Mace was suddenly invited to visit Ukraine. Early the next year, in January 1990, the CC CPU gave its permission to publish famine-related materials that were stored in the party archives.

Mace visited Ukraine that month. He brought me a computer printout of the three-volume famine eyewitness accounts that were later published in Washington. When the three-volume document was being printed, I had published a long article entitled “The way it was: reading the documents of the US Congressional Commission on the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine” in the large-circulation bilingual journal Pid praporom leninizmu (Under the Banner of Leninism). In my article I expressed the hope that we would be able to republish the collection of eyewitness reports in Kyiv and thus make it available to the Ukrainian reader.

Only now can I say that in October or November 2008 we will have the three volumes of eyewitness testimonies and the report to the US Congress, Mace’s principle work. These four large volumes are being prepared by Kyiv Mohyla Academy’s publishing house. (Readers who wish to acquire a copy should place their orders early.)

4. IN UKRAINE

In the fall of 1990 the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine finished its work, and Mace was suddenly faced with the problem of finding employment. The Harriman Institute of Columbia University had promised to award him a one-year scholarship to study Siberian nationalities. But when he arrived in New York, he was told that the duration of the scholarship had been reduced to one semester.

In 1991 a group of influential Ukrainian organizations in the state of Illinois lobbied a local university’s top executives to employ Mace. The university was promised a million- dollar endowment if he were appointed to a chair. However, Russian scholars dug their heels in, and only an annual program of Ukrainian Studies was created.

Throughout the year 1992 Mace applied for positions to teach Russian and Eastern European history at a number of US educational institutions (Ukrainian Studies was not a permanent subject). He only managed to find a temporary job as a consultant to the American Jewish Committee. His family life also went awry. Who needs a world-renowned Ph.D. who earns less than a cleaning woman?

In August 1993 he came to Kyiv, invited by the organizers of the 2nd International Congress of Ukrainists. He had to rent an apartment and, as a result, used up his savings. Looking for a job in Kyiv, he came to see me. I advised him to speak to Ivan Kuras, the founder and director of the Institute of Political and Ethno-National Problems at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. I knew that Kuras could make unconventional decisions, and he had enough political clout to push these decisions through unopposed.

I warned him about Mace’s visit. Thus, the distinguished anticommunist scholar James Mace began to work as an observer/research associate at an institute that had once been a subsidiary of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CC CPSU. Kuras invented the position of “observer/research associate” to bypass the procedure of approval by the board of the Academy of Sciences.

Mace worked at the institute for three years and then found other full- time jobs, teaching political science at the National University of Kyiv- Mohyla Academy and working as a consultant to the English-language version of Den, The Day . His work at this newspaper was his main job, which allowed him to earn a living. He also wrote a regular column and was the English style editor of the The Day .

5. “HERE I STAND, I CAN DO NO OTHER”

The chairman of the hearing that took place in Ukraine’s parliament on Feb. 12, 2003, gave the floor to James Mace, who was the first debater to speak after the official speeches. This was a show of respect on the part of the Ukrainian authorities for the man who had done so much to expose the most horrendous of Stalinist crimes. That day The Day printed Mace’s article entitled “The legacy of the famine: Ukraine as a postgenocidal society.” Both his speech in parliament and this article left an imprint on Ukraine’s modern history.

Concluding his brief speech in the Verkhovna Rada, Mace declared: “I would like to thank your parliament and to express my cherished dream for a monument to be erected in honor of the Holodomor victims and for ordinary Ukrainians to light candles in their windows on this day — candles in commemoration of their fathers, grandfathers, and great- grandfathers. They will light up a future without victims, without violence, without horrors.”

Mace considered this proposal an important act of confirming that Ukraine’s national memory still exists, a symbol of unity for a nation in which almost every family lost some members. “A candle in the window” was the headline of Mace’s column in The Day six days after his speech at the parliamentary hearings.

Today, during the Year to Remember the Victims of the Holodomor, this inextinguishable candle is uniting Ukrainians wherever they reside — in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. The people among whom they live also share their aspiration to condemn Soviet totalitarianism.

The article that Mace wrote on Feb. 12, 2003, seems to be the most powerful of all his works — not only because it posits the idea of the post- genocidal nature of Ukrainian society, which must affect the assessment of the general laws of transition from totalitarianism to democracy, from a command-style economy to a market economy. This article is also valuable because of its confessional tone, which was not just pure chance: less than a month later James underwent surgery. The operation was very difficult, and his doctors literally pulled him from the brink of death. But he was destined to live for only 18 more months.

Mace was often asked why he, an American, chose the Ukrainian Holodomor as the key subject of his research. He replied in the same article, saying, “I did it because Ukrainian Americans required such research.”

But I will say again that it was an article of confession, and he could not confine himself to a simple answer. I know that Holodomor studies are causing strong reactions — both positive and negative ones. The reaction from Russian expert circles in the US, in which Mace had worked, was very negative.

After he moved to Ukraine, his life was not all beer and skittles either, especially during the early years. Yet he summed up his scholarly life as follows: “Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming half- Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least half- Ukrainian. I have spent enough years on this work for Ukraine to become the greater part of my life. To quote Martin Luther, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’”