A Lesson in Genocide
A draft resolution introduced in the United States Senate commemorating the Holodomor Famine of 1933 has encountered vigorous opposition from Russian diplomats in Washington, reports Radio Liberty. The resolution introduced by Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, Co-Chairman, U.S. Helsinki Commission, on July 28, 2003, among other things would put the Senate on record as recognizing that the Manmade Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and then the predominantly Ukrainian Kuban constituted an act of genocide as defined by the United Nations Convention and support the efforts of the government and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to gain greater recognition of this tragedy. A separate resolution with different language but much to the same effect has also been introduced in the US House of Representatives. Both resolutions are attracting support in Congress, and the Ukrainian-American community is actively lobbying for them.
The US Commission on the Ukraine Famine — a hybrid commission composed of members of both Houses of Congress, representatives of the president, the American public at large, and of which this writer was executive director — earlier found that the Holodomor did indeed constitute an act of genocide, but it did not put any other branch of the US government on record, although there have been Congressional resolutions and presidential proclamations to that effect.
According to the Radio Liberty report, the press secretary of the Russian Embassy to the United States has taken a different sharply different view: “The policy of collectivization in famine in Ukraine in the thirties in no sense falls under the definition of genocide. The Russian side understands one thing: we do not agree with this formulation that the situation in the Soviet Union in the thirties, famine in Ukraine, and the processes that took place in the period of collectivization and with the treatment of all these events as genocide.”
At the request of Radio Liberty, the press-secretary of the Russian Embassy Yevhen Khoryshko said: “We categorically disagree with such an assessment of the famine that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s. Many aspects of the implementation of Soviet policies under Stalin’s leadership in those years were tragic for many peoples of the USSR, not only for Ukrainians, but also for Russians, Estonians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, and many others.”
There is indeed a case to be made that the Baltic nations, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars also were victims of genocide. What happened to Russians and Kazakhs was a bit different, but their sufferings are also a matter of record. Here the reader can be referred to an article, “Genocide in the USSR” in the collection, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, edited by Israel Charny and published in London in 1988. The author of that article was I.
Now there are efforts to introduce something similar to the Campbell resolution in the United Nations, and similar opposition from Russian diplomats is only to be expected. This is unfortunate for both the Ukrainians and the Russians, for if our Russian friends take upon themselves the task of defending Stalin, who was not Russian but used things Russian for his own purposes, they also inevitably take upon themselves blame for the things of which he was demonstrably guilty. Ukrainians and Russians have their own histories, even when they were associated in the same state, and the best path to enduring friendship between them would seem to be an attempt to analyze those similarities and differences.
Earlier, in a somewhat more measured statement, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin stated that Russia would not apologize to Ukraine for the famine but made no comment on whether it had or had not constituted act of genocide by the Stalinist regime. While some Ukrainians, especially in the emigration, have found his statement objectionable (and it did betray a certain measure of insensitivity), nobody is asking for a Russian apology, because the Soviet Union was not strictly speaking a Russian state. It was in the process of becoming more Russian, inter alia, by becoming less Ukrainian, which is, as we shall see, what genocide is all about, but Russia is not the Soviet Union, and all of us can only welcome the independence of Russia from Ukraine and vice versa. What needs to be discussed here is why Ambassador Chernomyrdin was right while his diplomatic colleagues in the United States are wrong.
In order to settle the controversy over whether the Ukrainian Holodomor was genocide, two questions must be addressed: What is the definition of genocide? Does what happened in Ukraine and the then fit this definition:
WHAT IS GENOCIDE?
The world came to adopt the idea of genocide as a crime against humanity only when the character of Nazi German occupation policies became clear during World War II. At the time, Winston Churchill called it a crime without a name. However, there was a man who was ready to give it a name, and he personally drafted both the international documents that defined genocide as a crime that had always existed and that now became recognized for what it is. His name was Raphael Lemkin, and in order to understand what genocide is, the basic task is to determine what he had in mind and what he persuaded the international community to adopt.
A Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin wrote and lobbied through the United Nations two documents: UN General Security Resolution I:96 in 1946 and the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The actual idea, however, is older: in 1933 he proposed the idea that those who out of hatred for a group of people harmed the members of that group be considered guilty of barbarism, that those who destroyed the cultural treasures of such a group out of hatred for it be considered guilty of vandalism, and that such persons be apprehended, tried, and punished wherever they might be found. The model of what he later called genocide and what he persuaded the international community to agree to was modeled on what Hitler did to the occupied peoples throughout Europe, to cripple them so that the German nation would be relatively stronger and those conquered by it would be relatively weaker regardless of how the war turned out. The idea of recognizing genocide as a crime against humanity that had been committed from the beginning of recorded time was not modeled on the Holocaust, although the destruction of European Jewry might be termed the greatest and most terrible genocide of all time, but on something broader, something designed to simplify humanity by ridding it of those who were different and leaving in their place those who were the same. Since Lemkin recognized that the greatest attainment of the human civilization shared by all were made possible by contributions made possible through participation in a cultural collectivity, he saw the destruction or forcible diminishment of such a collectivity as thereby impoverishing humanity as a whole. When the international community discussed this concept after World War II, the representatives of the various nations who came together in the newly formed United Nations discussed mainly how they had themselves been victims of genocide and how what had been done to them never be allowed to happen again. Thus to determine if something is genocide, one must compare an event not to the Holocaust, a unique blot upon the history of mankind, but to what Hitler did to the occupied peoples as set out in the documents defining genocide as a principle of eternal and unchanging universal law.
WHAT HAPPENED IN UKRAINE?
Genocide is basically understood as an attempt to destroy or permanently cripple a human collectivity as such in order to criminally alter the national character of a given area through means specified in the Genocide Convention, such as killing people and deliberately creating conditions of life calculated to make it impossible to live. There are other means specified to achieve this goal but these are the most important in the Ukrainian case. Even in the 1980s, when all Western scholars had to work with was the Soviet Ukrainian press and asking people who had fled Ukraine what in particular they had run away from, it was clear that in 1932-33 there were in Ukraine simultaneous campaigns to starve people to death by taking their food and to cripple their culture by banning its treasures and suppressing those who bore and created them — the latter process being a more extended one lasting from 1929 to 1939, from the suppression of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and blows against the Ukrainian intelligentsia to the mass slaughter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine during the Great Terror. The general scheme of this process was outlined on the basis of the official Soviet press by the late Hryhory Kostiuk in 1960. The Holodomor clearly fit into that scheme. For this reason, the US Commission of the Ukraine Famine found that Ukrainians had been victims of genocide. This writer drafted that finding and stands by it.
We now know much more than we could have then. Ukrainian historians in Ukraine have had over a decade to work in the archives, and what remains unknown is largely locked in closed archives in Moscow. Still, even those archives are slowly opening, and our picture becomes more complete with each new historical work. My friend and colleague, Stanislav Kulchytsky, deserves perhaps the greatest credit for first cracking open the door when he, at the time a loyal soldier of the Communist Party, persuaded the leadership of what was still Soviet Ukraine that so much was becoming known that something had to be said on the official level. He persuaded then CPU First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky to include in his address of December 25, 1987, an admission that there had indeed been a famine in 1933 in some areas of Ukraine. Stanislav Vladislavovych was ready with more articles, as cautious as the times dictated, but the door began to open, at first a crack, and then more.
Ukraine’s writers entered the fray in force. I later learned that Ivan Drach had first publicly uttered the word Holodomor at a writer’s congress in 1986, but only on February 18, 1988 — it turned out to be my birthday — could Oleksa Musiyenko publish the word in Literaturna Ukrayina (Literary Ukraine). Then the trickle became a flood. The Writers Union established a commission to study 1933, and Volodymyr Maniak was named to compile a people’s book of memory. Kulchytsky was commissioned to write the questions in Silski visti (Village news) in a way intended to show how the Communist Party had tried to save people and make the best of a bad situation, but the address given for those to send their answers was Maniak’s. 6000 people wrote letters, and the result was a book, ‘33 Famine: People’s Book of Memory, the literary editor of which, my wife, can say more. Literaturna Ukrayina announced the formation of an organizing committee for an international symposium on the famine. The committee was first headed by Oles Honchar, then by Ivan Drach. I was invited to Ukraine, took part in organizing that symposium, and the efforts of those abroad were reinforced and ultimately overshadowed by those here who began to take up the task themselves.
It turned out that the Central Committee had ordered the Party historians to search the archives and was shocked by what it had found. I was invited to be present and say something when on January 26, 1990, the Party admitted that there had been a famine and that it had been a crime committed by Stalin and his associates. They ordered the documents be published, and by the end of 1990 the first collection appeared, albeit as an instant bibliographic rarity, because certain members of the Central Committee forced the official press run to be reduced from the officially announced 25,000 to a mere 1500. The symposium that Drach, Maniak, and I organized, took place in September 1990. Then came the documents from the state archives. Ukrainian historians began to peruse caches of documents that had been closed for decades. Kulchytsky’s student, Vasyl Marochko, traveled to every oblast to seek documents. Yury Shapoval began to pore through the KGB documents on repression and later the personal archives of Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who were personally commissioned to organize the horrors that were committed in Ukraine and the Kuban. Ukrainian historians in Ukraine began to reconstruct their nation’s history themselves.
On August 11, 1932, Stalin wrote a letter to Kaganovich that Ukraine could be lost and had to be turned into the most inalienable Soviet republic. There was obviously understood to be only one way to do this, to remove from Soviet Ukraine the Ukrainian national content that the Communists had been forced to allow into it in order to stabilize the situation a decade earlier. On October 22, Molotov and Kaganovich were named to take direct control of the grain seizures in Ukraine and the Kuban. On November 18, Molotov pushed through a resolution blacklisting collective farms (closing down the store, taking everything away from it, and expelling the collective farm leadership) along with fines in food of individual farmers who “maliciously” did not have enough bread to take (seizing the potatoes, beans, chickens, cow, etc.). On December 14 Communist Party of Ukraine was blamed for not finding grain that did not exist, because they had allegedly been penetrated by nationalists and thus came under a reign of terror, and the following day saw an order to end Ukrainization and close Ukrainian institutions outside Ukraine wherever Ukrainians lived in other republics of the Soviet Union. In January the denunciation of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine was made public, Pavel Postyshev was made Second Secretary but de facto dictator, and a reign of terror against even the Communist intelligentsia began. Ukraine was de-Ukrainized by force, as the peasantry, whom Stalin considered the basic reserve of the national movement, was literally decimated. We can argue about precisely how many millions died, but that millions died is beyond dispute. That they were denied some of their most precious cultural values and the memory of their creators for decades is also undeniable. In 1928, a survey of lending libraries was published, finding that the most read Ukrainian authors after Shevchenko, of course, were Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Mykola Khvyliovyi. In 1933 both were banned and the orthography in which they had written was altered without asking those who had used it.
WHO IS TO BLAME?
There are from time to time irresponsible voices who want an apology or reparations from the Russians. Stalin was not a Russian, but he was not very nice to his Georgian kin either. He did use things Russian as a glue for an empire he built under the name of Soviet patriotism, but Soviet patriotism was not the same thing as Russian nationalism and the Soviet Union, although it had a tendency to become more Russian over time, was never really a Russian state. Those in Russia who point out that Russians also suffered are quite right, although they suffered in order to build a Russocentric but by no means truly Russian state. Historians do not like to be judges, but they are the inevitable instruments of their peoples’ becoming aware of who were their parents and what they would like their children to become. Ukraine has suffered its own agonies as part of its own history. Those who recognize this are Ukraine’s friends, but those who deny this are simply denying Ukraine its own history and will never enjoy mutual understanding with them. This should be held in mind by those who seek to deny Ukraine’s rightful claim to the recognition of its suffering.
There were, of course, uncounted Ukrainian Communists who participated in the campaigns that deliberately caused the death of uncounted millions of Ukrainian peasants and the flower of those who helped give their nation expression, if only because the choice became one of doing what one was told or suffering the fate of those condemned by the force or orders that same from Moscow. Can a collaborator be blamed for choosing collaboration over facing the firing squad himself and risking his family? We cannot blame the Russians for the fact that Molotov was Russian any more than we can blame the Jews for the fact that Kaganovich was Jewish or the Georgians for the fact that Stalin was Georgian. We can only blame the system that in its various ways crippled many peoples of the former Soviet Union and attempt to overcome all that is evil and debilitating in the legacy all of those born here have been burdened with. We can only try to help all who have been damaged understand and recover, each community in its own way, from the evil that will hopefully never be allowed to return to nations and individuals well rid of it. Let the Soviet myth of the enforced friendship of peoples be replaced by the truth of voluntary recovery from the Soviet evil in friendship and mutual understanding.
