IN MEMORY OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY
November 25 was the Day of the Memory of Victims of the Holodomor Famine and Political Repression. Under the presidential decree of October 31, 2000, this event is to be commemorated every fourth Saturday of November.
The decree has been adopted. What next? For one can often hear today even in the professional circles: “Again holodomor. Again repression. We’re fed up with this crap! Did we have nothing bright and sacred in our past?” Yes, we did, of course. We had bright and sacred things which instilled strength and life in many previous generations, gave them a feeling of dignity, confidence in themselves and the future of their descendants. But there were also things it would be a crime to forget or scorn in our conscience.
Suffice it to recall the notorious Red Terror, which spared neither university professor; factory worker, the so-called hegemon of the socialist revolution; nor peasant. They all, irrespective of their political persuasions and attitude toward the rapidly changing powers that be (like in a well-known Soviet operetta), found their last refuge in one carelessly dug mass grave.
All that occurred in Ukraine during the Civil War struck terror into not only the hearts of the local population but also the numerous international organizations which tried, in one way or another, to influence the situation here. An International Red Cross report of February 1920 stated bluntly: “The pictures of violence, horror, and bloodshed described below are unparalleled in the history of cultured humanity. It would be a crime pass over them in silence.”
While the Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine and ensuing Red Terror resembled an avalanche sweeping away everything and everyone in its deadly path, the establishment of Soviet power gave the political leadership an opportunity for consistent and planned extermination of its political adversaries and neutralization of all those who put common human values above those of social class.
For example, as soon as at the end of 1920, Kharkiv secret police and revolutionary tribunal operatives “uncovered” the case of a so-called pro-monarchic “national center,” which resulted in the best representatives of the Ukrainian nation, who refused to put up with Bolshevik acts of vandalism, finding themselves in the dock. Today, we can find in all encyclopedias the names of convicted Professors N. Sumtsov and F. Shmit. At that time, however, these authoritative scientists had to explain to the undereducated investigators why and how they and six hundred colleagues had signed their Appeal of South Russian Scholars to the Scientists of Western Europe.
No sooner had the sentence been pronounced than the those who pulled the strings, Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine functionaries and the secret services they fully controlled, began to prepare new trials. This time, they turned their gaze on the active members of the Central Rada, Hetman Skoropadsky’s government, and the Directory. That many of these people were abroad at the time did not matter. The main thing, as Dmytro Manuyilsky, one of the manipulators of those trials, noted, was political expediency. Then came the Mensheviks, left and right wing Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists. Their only fault was that they, by force of their philosophical persuasions, did not and could not accept the existing societal pattern set by the Bolsheviks.
What amounted to a challenge to the Ukrainian intelligentsia was the Kyiv Action Center trial held in Kyiv in March- April 1924. Among those who came under the swift sword of Soviet justice was the outstanding scholar, Academician N. P. Vasylenko. Even though the eventually-meted-out punishment was not so severe, it showed independently-minded intellectuals who was going from then on to determine their way of thinking.
They did not obey. But that made no difference: the secret police had concocted a new blueprint: the 1930 trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. The defendants were ideally selected: Academicians Serhiy Yefremov and Mykhailo Slabchenko, Professor Yosyp Hermaise, and Maria Starytska- Cherniakhivska, the daughter of a well- known Ukrainian playwright — a total 45 persons. Each of them was assigned a role to play in this tragedy or, to be more exact, judicial farce.
Another showpiece trial, of the Ukrainian National Center, came in 1931, with the outstanding Ukrainian historian, statesman, and politician, Mykhailo Hrushevsky supposed to in the dock. But something went awry in the system. Although debilitated by these circumstances, Hrushevsky was nonetheless merely exiled to Russia, and the trial was held in camera and with different defendants. Or perhaps the point was not at all a glitch in the system? The authorities, after ripping away the last vestiges of democracy, simply decided to make short shrift to their ideological enemies. Why resort to all this masquerade with defense and prosecution attorneys, and witnesses, when a reliable mechanism of out-of-sight reprisals had been successfully worked out during the Civil War? From now on, human destinies were to be sealed by tribunals, two-person courts, and special committees. The military branch of the USSR Supreme Court, presided over by Ulrikh and being only a ritual imitation of judicial procedures, was nothing but an Inquisition which interpreted the law arbitrarily, with all eyes on the Kremlin.
It would be wrong to think that political reprisals only touched the political adversaries of the ruling party or those who, with the scales falling from their eyes, suddenly understood all the harm of the path they had proclaimed. They also touched factory workers who were termed wreckers, members of counterrevolutionary organizations, or even spies and hirelings of world imperialism for the slightest violation of work discipline or forced deviation from the technical process.
Socialist transformation took an especially heavy toll on the Ukrainian peasantry. The tornado of collectivization not only deprived them of strong and stable farmers, not only ruined the centuries-old rural structure, but also turned many plowmen into exiles. 63,817 families were deported from Ukraine in 1930-1931 alone. Even at the most conservative estimate, the number of those exiled to the north, the Urals, Western and Eastern Siberia, and Far East was about 300,000.
And what about frontier cleanup operations (carried out in conjunction with the introduction of internal passports beginning in December 1932, and picking up steam when the November 1933 CP(b) U “uncovered” the “treason of differend nationalities, i.e., Poles and Germans — Ed.), when ethnic Poles and others were forcibly evicted without any charges leveled or explanations offered? According to NKVD data, 4,769 Polish and German families were evicted from the frontier areas in February-March 1935 alone. The ensuing years also saw no less intensive operations of this kind.
The political reprisals went hand in hand with uninterrupted famine which repeatedly abated and flared up again in the twenties and thirties (1921-23 and 1932-33 to be exact — Ed.). Whatever the economic causes, the ruling power strove not to miss the most important political goal: to destroy individual agricultural, drive the peasants into the collective farms (actually, 80% of the peasants and arable land were already in the “socialized sector” in 1932 and this did not increase during the Holodomor — Ed.), forcibly weaning him from the soil, and tie him up to coal mines and factory machines. The Ukrainian famine reached its apex in 1932-1933, when, to quote the official documents of that time, “individual facts of malnutrition among the population” grew into a nationwide tragedy. Let us not excite the reader’s imagination with the horrible pictures of defunct or semi-defunct villages and facts of cannibalism, when a mother, trying to save the whole family, sacrificed her youngest son. This is a textbook example; besieged Leningrad pales before what Ukraine lived through in those terrible years. Even at the most conservative estimate, the 1932-1933 famine claimed about 3 million Ukrainian lives (Deputy Director of the Institute of History Prof. Stanislav Kulchytsky estimates the death toll at 3.5 million, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Serhiy Pyrozhkov {Ukraine’s leading historical demographer} at 4.8 million, and others give higher figures — Ed.).
These are losses no one can ever replace. But we cannot avoid mentioning one more loss which determined, to a large extent, our existence. By force of its unbridled cruelty and lack of moral principles, the system crushed the feeling of dignity, the most important human property. It is perhaps for this reason that we used to sing the praises of our leaders, only to trample upon them after a Party decision. It is perhaps for this reason that we, looking through blinded windows, silently watched Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy, Mykola Rudenko, Mykola Lytvyn, and Vyacheslav Chornovil went to prison camps only for trying to force us to regain this dignity.
Let us look things in their face: neither the Act of the Proclamation of Ukrainian Independence nor any kind of Presidential decree will help us squeeze the slave out of ourselves. It takes years to repent, while freedom is, above all, the result of an internal process.
