Regime accused

On August 23, 2009, Europe for the first time honored the memory of victims of Nazism and Stalinism. After the OSCE resolution was issued, the parliaments of the Baltic States one by one adopted decisions to honor the memory of the victims of two totalitarian regimes.

On August 25 a round table “Crime of Genocide–Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933” was held by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Law experts provided legal evaluation of the events that took place 76 years ago.

SBU Chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said in his opening address: “Today’s round table is being held on international Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism, which is marked by the world community on August 23 every year according to the resolution of the European Parliament. It is significant that in its resolution OSCE equals Stalinist repressions with Nazi crimes. The events of the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine have already received historical and political assessment, in particular by parliaments of many countries of the world.

“On the legislative level, pursuant to Article 1 of the Law of Ukraine “On the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine” of Nov. 28, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine issued recognized the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people. Now it is time for legal assessment of this crime. It was a crime against humanity, against all the people in all countries.”

On May 22, 2009, the SBU opened a criminal case regarding the 1932–1933 genocide in Ukraine under Article 442 Part 1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. At the round table it was announced that special investigation groups were formed in 25 oblasts. They are working on different aspects of the problem.

The investigators have already learned about the number of repressed people who were charged with “sabotage and derailment of the grain procurement campaign,” about the struggle of the Ukrainian intelligentsia against Stalin’s regime in 1932–1933, about political repressions led by the GPU’s (State Political Directorate) organs against ranking ethnic Ukrainian officials. Documents were found that prove that in 1932–33 grain was taken out of Ukraine under the pretence of providing aid to other countries, while Ukrainians were starving to death. At present the SBU regional offices have already studied and entered into the case file 1,378 archive documents, with the SBU’s Specialized State Archive adding 400 more documents.

These archival documents contain horrible facts. Documents in Kharkiv oblast show that every day 130 to 303 corpses were brought to the morgue of the Kharkiv Oblast Forensic Laboratory, and many of these were bodies of children. In 1933 the total of 8,940 bodies were brought to this morgue, and starvation was the cause of death in 6,021 cases.

In Dnipropetrovsk oblast several types of documents were found: government instructions were found about banning trade in grain or any other food products, lists of blacklisted collective farms and village councils, and records on the confiscation of all the foodstuffs, clothes, tools, and furniture from peasants.

At present information about the number of famine victims is being processed regarding every population center, raion, and oblast in Ukraine. Most people died in central and eastern Ukraine. Numerous mass graves of people who had been starved to death were found: 57 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, 2 in Zhytomyr oblast, 3 in Kirovograd oblast, 90 in Luhansk oblast, 30 in Mykolaiv oblast, 273 in Poltava oblast, 206 in Kharkiv oblast, and 35 in Khmelnytsky oblast. Hundreds of thousands of people were buried there.

There are also documents that prove the fact that the Soviet authorities concealed the information about the famine from the public and the international community.

The witnesses of those events are very important for the investigation. At present investigators are identifying and interviewing people who witnessed the genocide and those who know from their parents, relatives, or acquaintances about the systematic repressions, dekulakization, introduction of in-kind fines, constant searches for and confiscation of all the foodstuffs and possessions from people, the spiking mass mortality caused by the famine, and many registered cases of cannibalism and corpse eating. The total of 533 witnesses were questioned in 17 oblasts.

Importantly, the materials produced by the special US Congress Commission led by the executive director James Mace were entered in the case file. Mace was one of the first people who started to speak openly about the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine. For this purpose he even permanently moved to Ukraine. For quite a long time he worked in The Day. The Commission collected testimonies of Ukrainian emigrants who survived the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine.

A great deal of work is also being done through Ukrainian embassies. Petitions and inquiries were sent to other countries through Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with requests to provide archived diplomatic documents related to the 1932–1933 events in the USSR.

Ukraine’s commissioner in the UN International Court Volodymyr Vasylenko stressed that there are no reasons to doubt the legitimate nature of criminal proceedings instituted by the SBU. He said: “It is important for us to prove not only an intention to destroy a large number of people but an intention to destroy Ukrainians as a national group. People were killed not just because they were human beings, but because they belonged to a certain ethnic group. In general, the Holodomor was only one stage of destroying the Ukrainian nation. During this operation the engineered famine dealt a crushing blow to Ukrainian peasantry in order to physically eliminate the core part of the Ukrainian nation and thus undermine its liberation potential.”

Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims Bohdan Futey, who was present at the round table, used the examples of the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro to explain why Ukraine can bring accusations against one country — the Soviet Union. True, this state does not exist anymore, but this is a different question.

Futey said: “Ukraine ought to initiate a criminal case, because it is its responsibility before international legislation. Furthermore, the convention on statutory limitations removes any possible domestic legislative limitations on persecution of anyone charged with committing an act of genocide. It is very important that the party that claims that there was genocide prove its intentions with convincing evidence.”

In contrast to this, Ihor Yukhnovsky, acting head of the Institute of National Memory, believes that accusations should primarily be directed at communism rather than the state. That is why it has to be clearly proved that premeditated destruction of the Ukrainian nation was perpetrated, he said.

The main idea of Yevhen Zakharov, co-head of the Kharkiv Human Rights group, was to create a special court — a tribunal with a clear statute. This tribunal should handle the criminal case of the Holodomor. Zakharov also said that Ukraine’s legislation has to be changed for the Holodomor case to be tried in court.

MP Hryhorii Omelchenko, one of the initiators of an appeal to the SBU requesting that a criminal case be opened, disagreed and said: “We should not be elaborating the theory of law here. Our legislative framework, in particular the Code of Criminal Procedure, allows us to consider this case and put an end to it, just like it was done by Estonia, for example.”

Therefore, it appears that every lawyer has his own vision of the ways to investigate the criminal of the 1932–1933 Holodomor, but they all pursue the same goal — a legal assessment of the crimes committed by the totalitarian regime. Claims that there is no longer such a state as USSR and its leaders are gone are not a reason to abandon the case. International legal practice provides numerous examples of similar convictions.

For example, Estonia heard eight criminal cases and convicted the accused — Security Service chiefs and police officers who were involved in the 1949 mass deportation of Estonian citizens to remote parts in the Soviet Union. Eight persons were convicted, deportations were adjudged to be a crime against humanity, and the Soviet Union was proclaimed to be a criminal totalitarian occupation regime.

Ukraine is now slowly moving forward in the direction of bringing USSR crimes to court, and the Holodomor is only one of the numerous crimes committed by the communist regime.