James Mace is fifty
The photo published here usually precedes the articles by James Mace, The Day’s expert and professor at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. He now permanently resides and works in Kyiv. Incidentally, he also edits the English-language Day. But this time this is not the photo of an author. It illustrates an article on James Mace who turned fifty on February 18.
There can be hours of triumph in a human lifetime. It can also happen that an individual, prepared for action by all his or her previous life, encounters objective circumstances which force him/her to take some action. My story is about James Mace, a Harvard veteran and expert in the history of Soviet Ukraine. Let me start with the objective circumstances.
Drawing itself into the Afghan war in December 1979, the Soviet leadership put an end to the policy of detente, which exacerbated the US-Soviet confrontation. US President Ronald Reagan focused more attention on the non-governmental and political organizations of an almost million-strong Ukrainian diaspora, trying to use it for his propaganda campaign against what he called the evil empire. One of the diaspora’s leading political figures, Georgetown University Professor Lev Dobriansky was appointed US presidential foreign policy advisor. The US Congress established then Ukrainian-Baltic Commission incorporating about 80 senators and representatives. Congress passed a resolution to support the USSR’s non-Russian peoples.
Meanwhile, the US Ukrainian diaspora began to unfold measures to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1933 famine. The diaspora’s non-governmental organizations decided on this anniversary to finally bring down the wall of silence masterfully built by Stalin even outside the USSR. North America already had research centers which conducted international-level Ukrainian studies: the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada organized a workshop devoted to the key problems of the famine, where Bohdan Kravchenko, Sergei Maksudov (Aleksandr Babionyshev), James Mace, and Roman, Serbyn delivered the most exhaustive reports.
Following this, journalists from all over the world began to query Ukrainian UN diplomats about the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine. The latter either evaded an answer or denied “the falsifications of bourgeois nationalists.” At last they were forced to turn to Kyiv for instructions. The KPU politburo obliged the Central Committee secretary in charge of ideology and the Ukrainian KGB chief to study the matter. On February 11, 1983, Central Committee First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky received a memorandum from them, the essence of which is well illustrated by its title, “On Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda Measures to Counter the Anti-Soviet Campaign Unleashed by Ukrainian Emigration Reactionary Centers Concerning Food Shortages that Took Place in the Early 1930s.”
US public committees organized a demonstration in October 1983 to honor the memory of the millions of Ukrainian peasants who died in the manmade famine. Simultaneously, Representative James Florio introduced a bill to set up an official commission (a hybrid commission consisting of both congressional and presidential representatives – Ed.) to study the circumstances and consequences of Stalin’s famine. Congressional members were at first surprised at this unprecedented move. Never before had it been parliamentary practice to investigate a fifty year-old crime committed in a foreign country. Yet, the irrefutable evidence of the crime itself (including materials in US archives), a half century of silence on this matter in the USSR, and a categorical denial of Ukrainian diaspora accusations by the officials of the Ukrainian SSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Representation of the Ukrainian SSR at the UN bore fruit. As early as October 1984, first the House of Representatives and then the Senate held hearings on the bill. Congress decided to set up a commission to investigate the 1933 famine in Ukraine. On October 12, 1984, President Reagan signed the bill into law.
As the bill was indeed forced through, lobbying was done by the non-governmental Organization of Americans in Defense of Human Rights in Ukraine founded and headed by the late Ihor Olshaniwsky. This organization took part in forming the commission which consisted of four representatives in Congress, two senators, three sub-Cabinet officials appointed by the president, and six representatives of the public, meaning the Ukrainian diaspora. All these people were to do as commission members was get together on a certain day in order to hear and approve the report of a person who performed the legitimate functions of a researcher and director of this commission.
In the mid-eighties, you could count on the fingers of one hand the graduates awarded a doctorate in twentieth-century Ukrainian history. Among them there was one non-Ukrainian American, James Mace. So Congress confirmed him as researcher and director of the commission on the 1932- 1933 Ukrainian famine.
Before being confirmed in office, Mace supervised the taping, as part of an oral history project, of about sixty famine eyewitness reports and thus had experience in this kind of work. To help him, a research group was formed, consisting of Olha Samilenko, Susan Webber, and Walter Pecheniuk, which collected bibliographic materials and polled eyewitnesses using Mace’s methods. This essentially came down to a past-oriented sociological survey. Overlapping each other, the testimonies corrected the subjectivism typical of personal reminiscences, thus becoming a full-fledged historical source. This was all the more important because the researchers had no opportunity to use Soviet archives. They only had access to the archival materials of the Smolensk Oblast VKP(b) Committee; the town of Krynychky, Dnipropetrovsk oblast; and NKVD of district center Chernukhy, Poltava oblast, captured by the Nazis and brought to the US after the war. Congress appropriated $400,000 for the commission from the fiscal year 1985 onwards. Some research funds also came from Ukrainian diaspora organizations and private individuals.
There have not been many instances in the history of humankind when a genocide took a death toll of millions. In the first half of the twentieth century, the best known genocides were those of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, of peasants in Ukraine and Kuban in 1932-1933, and the Holocaust of the Jews and Gypsies in Nazi- occupied Europe. The documented history of the Jewish Holocaust has been written by thousands of researchers for many years, while the bibliography of Ukrainian famine was very scarce. The commission was to convincingly prove the fact and show the extent of the famine and, if possible, to find the reason why USSR leaders had kept protracted silence over this action by Stalin and his associates. The fact of mass terror in 1937-1938 had been officially acknowledged in the times of Nikita Khrushchev.
As the KPU Central Committee (CC) estimated, the US Congress Commission on the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was to finish work in the summer of 1987 (it was actually scheduled for the spring of 1988 – Ed.). The conclusion was hence made that the results of its work would be used to unfold a broad campaign on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution. This is why the CC set up a commission of its own in the fall of 1986. This commission members were expected to conduct thorough research to “refute the falsifications of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” I was in contact with the CC people who set up this “anticommission” and took part in its proceedings from the very first day. I will say now what never occurred to me before. Stalin left many skeletons in the closet for the coming generations of Soviet Communist Party oligarchy. Suffice it to compare the 1932-1933 famine with other of Stalin’s covert deals to understand that it stands out.
Let us take, for example, the secret protocol to the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In March 1985, new CPSU CC Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev was invited to certain premises, shown the original secret protocol, and asked to sign the visitors’ log which already contained the signatures of his predecessors. Five years on, at the Second Congress of USSR People’s Deputies, Mr. Gorbachev sat onstage and listened to Aleksandr Yakovlev’s report being heard live by millions of people. Relying on the German original of the secret protocol published after the war (claimed a fake by the Soviets), Mr. Yakovlev convincingly proved that the later events only confirmed that the Soviet original did exist. The events occurred in strict compliance with the German-Soviet accords. Mr. Gorbachev did not interrupt the speaker: he did not say that the Soviet original is a few hundred meters away from the Palace of Congresses. The point is that the publication of this inflammable document would mean immediate release of the Baltic republics.
One can also recall the Katyn affair. It is a cynical crime when VKP(b) CC Politburo members made a cold-blooded decision to wipe out thousands of Polish POW officers. CPSU leaders knew only too well that admitting this crime was incompatible with the existence of any kind of Communist Party dictatorship. These documents were unveiled later by Boris Yeltsin.
But the famine bears no seal of state secret and not only because it was common knowledge. This is an entirely different phenomenon: Stalin put his seal not on the document, thus making it secret, but on human souls. There is only one, extremely shocking, explanation of why a so-called anticommission was set up to counter the American one. The founders of it sincerely hoped for a positive result. In 1986, nobody knew for certain what had happened in the Ukrainian countryside in 1932-1933. The manmade famine stories of emigrants were regarded as malicious falsification, while eyewitnesses in every Ukrainian village kept silent. They were silent because they were afraid even to tell their children about the past: God forbid they blurt it out and mar their lives. After all, it is not only famine eyewitnesses who kept silent – so did a million GULAG former prisoners released by Khrushchev, for they took a written pledge not to disclose their past after the release.
Although the Mace commission had not yet finished its work in 1987, eyewitness evidence made it possible to draw some far-reaching conclusions. Preliminary information about the commission’s proceedings also reached the KPU CC. On November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a Kremlin report on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution, expounding the history of overall collectivization of peasantry according to the Stalinist pattern. He did not mention the famine of 1932-1933.
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky could not follow the suit of his patron, for the famine raged precisely in Ukraine. The findings of the US commission were so convincing that the anticommission only confirmed them. On December 25, 1987, when the seventieth anniversary of Soviet power in Ukraine was celebrated, the KPU CC first secretary delivered a longwinded jubilee speech with six or seven lines about the famine. It was for the first time in 55 years that a KPU CC Politburo member broke Stalin’s taboo and pronounced the word “famine.” From then on, historians obtained the opportunity to study and publish documents.
The 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine commission had the last meeting in April 1990 to hear and approve the final text of its report to Congress. Soon after, Mace published the report he had drawn up. In August of the same year he presented several copies of the report to the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
I have this book with a cover letter signed by First Consul of the USSR Embassy in the US Oleh Diachenko. The letter was written in calm tones, for the Soviet Embassy had no claims against Dr. Mace. Nor did the KPU CC have any claims and allowed him to visit the republic. I must perhaps explain how I got hold of this book and the embassy letter bearing the red seals of the KPU CC’s General Department. In the fall of 1991, I was an expert in charge of transferring the documentation of the abolished KPU CC to the state archives. My job was to review the CC materials referred to as scrap paper. The selection having been done by highly skilled archivists, the experts almost always agreed with the latter. The US Congress commission report was not part of the CC materials, but the red seal barred it from being transferred to a library. Knowing my involvement in the famine issue, the leaders of this campaign turned a blind eye to the rules and gave the book to me. I think I can now confess this.
In 1990 James Mace came to Kyiv, bringing me the computer-typed three volumes of the testimonies of former Soviet citizens about the famine. Later that year the three volumes were printed in Washington. In December 1990 I published the article “The Way It Was,” as a review of the work in the journal Pid praporom leninizmu (Under the Banner of Leninism). Now this article can be regarded as a document. I will let myself a quote, “Listening to eyewitnesses, J. Mace and his associates tried to establish a true picture of the famine. They managed to do this, so reading the whole verbatim, page by page, shocks you and inspires horror. It was just impossible to invent the described apocalyptic scenes that occurred in the agonizing Ukrainian countryside. The physical condition and looks of the famine-stricken, the sufferings of parents watching their children shrivel without food, the tragedy of orphanages stripped of state funding, the attempts of peasants to survive by eating various substitutes, the hopeless standing in miles-long lines for non-rationed high-price bread made of the grain seized from none other than them, the hair-raising scenes of cannibalism – all these stories were committed to paper the way they sounded in front of the microphone, with all the faltering, slips of the tongue, and stylistic errors.”
The commission’s three-volume publication come to a total 2,258 pages of a small-sized print. The method of interviewing still remains unsurpassed. It is thus difficult to overestimate the American researcher’s contribution to famine studies. Unfortunately, it turned out impossible to republish Mace’s four volumes (plus Report to Congress in English — Ed.) in Ukraine for lack of funds, although some proposals were put forward as long ago as 1993, when the sixtieth anniversary of the famine was observed.
Ukrainian history textbooks for senior grades twice touch on the subject of the famine: for the first time, in the chapter about the total collectivization of agriculture, and, for the second time, on the pages about Gorbachev’s perestroika turning from a bureaucratic campaign into a revolutionary popular movement. In 1988-1991 the subject of the famine helped arouse society from its political lethargy and promoted the national liberation movement. No doubt, this subject also turned many leading Communists into the sovereignty communists who eventually banned this party in 1991. I am certain that our society will duly honor the contribution made by US citizen and Professor James Mace, to the making of our independent Ukraine.
