Ukraine in the postcommunist world

1. A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY

Columbia University ranks among the top five institutions of higher learning in the US. Founded as a private institution in 1754, it is still run by a Board of Trustees.

The university campus covers an area of 15 hectares in downtown New York City overlooking Broadway. It has a student body of 5,500 plus 15,000 postgraduates. Enrolment here means winning the hardest competition imaginable.

The Harriman Institute is one of Columbia University’s most authoritative institutions. It was founded in 1946 by William Averell Harriman, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943-46. The objective of this institution was to carry out in-depth studies of the USSR and to train specialists who were required to substantiate US policy in Eastern Europe. Harriman, after whom the institute was named in 1992, declared time and again: “I want to stimulate and encourage the advanced study of Soviet affairs. To base policy on ignorance and illusion is very dangerous. Policy should be based on knowledge and understanding.”

The renaming of the Russian Institute was not only a sign of recognition of the founder’s achievements and gratitude to the Harriman family for its multi-million-dollar endowment for the development of the Institute. The new name was necessitated by the changes that had emerged in the geopolitical situation. Whereas previously Americans identified all things Soviet with Russia, starting in the 1990s it became necessary to study the 15 post-Soviet countries after the USSR’s collapse. Ukraine also became the focus of attention, especially after the institute’s directorship went to Mark von Hagen. The scholarly merits of this youngish and dynamic Ukrainian Studies specialist were recognized when he was elected president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies (replaced at the last MAU congress by Yaroslav Yatskiv of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). In the fall of 2007 von Hagen was appointed chairman of the Department of History at the University of Arizona. Ukrainian Studies at Harriman Institute continue unimpeded.

2. A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE SCHOLARLY CONFERENCE

In the 1950s research centers specializing in the study of Soviet and Eastern European history appeared in the West. One such center was founded at Columbia University in 1954. By the 1990s it had evolved into a large institution focused on Central and Eastern Europe. In 1997, in collaboration with the Harriman Institute, it established the Association for the Study of Nationalities. Its goal was to organize annual ASN conferences dealing with politics, economics, social, and cultural aspects of the post-Soviet countries. These conferences focus on the current situation in these postcommunist countries, and many historians participate in these scholarly gatherings. To comprehend the logical aspects of escaping the dead-end in which these countries found themselves as a result of the forcible implementation of the communist doctrine, it is necessary to study their recent past.

This year’s ASN conference at the Harriman Institute took place on April 10-12. There were 11 panels, each lasting two hours. In view of the brief time allotted to the conference, strict time-limits were imposed on every presentation and debate. None of the sessions was clearly defined either thematically or regionally.

I was amazed by this when I first attended the ASN conference a few years ago, and it took some time for me to figure out the secret. Each ASN conference has a clear-cut albeit invisible structure. Between eight and twelve thematic and regional panels take place during the conference, and sometimes films are screened or books discussed. The panels take place according to a certain chronology, so each expert specializing in a “narrow” field has an opportunity to take part in discussions of a topic that particularly interests the participant, who does not have to rush from one panel to the next.

This year’s conference was attended by 594 scholars. Papers were submitted to the organizing committee in advance, and their topics were circulated among the participants of the various panels, so that they would be prepared to hold substantial discussions on a given subject. This took up at least one-third of the allotted time.

Most of the conference participants were young people. Remarkably, a large number of representatives of Western universities and research centers hailed from postcommunist countries, judging by their surnames. This is further proof of the ongoing “brain drain.”

As a rule, conference participants’ expenses are remunerated by the institutions where they are employed. For the most part, Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences cannot afford to send its research associates to international conferences. My expenses were covered by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in America (NTSh).

The hundreds of papers that were heard and discussed were well worth the money that was spent on a conference of this scope. The presentations reflected the broad range of changes that have taken place in the postcommunist world. The leaders of the “golden billion” countries led by the United States are following these changes with concern. They long ago realized that it is impossible to isolate oneself from the problems of postcommunist countries, so they want to figure them out, at times more so than the political elite of these countries. Harriman’s thesis that policy should be based on knowledge and understanding is still valid.

3. DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS

The panel on the Holodomor was one of 117. Other sessions that I attended attracted audiences that hardly surpassed the number of speakers. The spacious conference hall was packed for the subject of the Holodomor, which interests many people today. Before the session was called to order, one American scholar said that he had learned on the Internet that Olha Ginzburg, the chairperson of the State Archives Committee of Ukraine, had been relieved of her post. The audience responded instantly with applause. The Herostratus-like reputation of this communist member of the Ukrainian government is known halfway across the world.

The Holodomor panel was chaired by Dr. Henry R. Huttenbach, a noted Holocaust researcher. The presenters, including me, were Oleh Wolowyna, Taras Hunczak, and Roman Serbyn, all professors of Ukrainian parentage, from North American universities. I got the impression that after James Mace no American or Canadian has become an expert in this field.

A group of Canadian researchers from Toronto and Edmonton took part in the debate: Wsevolod Isajiv, Anna Procyk, Roman Senkus, Larissa Onyshkevych, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Yuriy Sergeev, the Permanent Representative of Ukraine’s Mission to the UN, and his predecessor in this post, Professor Valeriy Kuchinsky of Columbia University, and others.

4. WHY ONLY NOW?

Soviet Ukrainian history in its undistorted form was returned to our children a long time ago. Despite the appeals of Petro Symonenko’s party to stop the “rewriting” and “smearing” of the Soviet past, Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science has refused to endorse old textbooks. Pavlo Poliansky, who had been in charge of school curricula and textbooks, was relieved of his post during the period when socialists were dominant in the education ministry, but later returned after being promoted to the rank of deputy minister.

As for those who completed their education under the Soviets and are now under the spell of Russia’s television series, nothing has changed. We live in cities and walk down streets named after those who shed rivers of blood in the comparatively recent past. We walk past monuments to people who destroyed their fellow human beings, guided by the Inquisition’s merciful principle “with no bloodshed,” except that they used famine, not fire. We have grown accustomed to paying homage to the victims of Soviet repressions and the famine once a year, a tribute to our own conscience, without realizing that the past has us firmly gripped by the throat.

At least this is what the situation was like until recently, when President Yushchenko of Ukraine suddenly began signing one edict after another dedicated to historical problems. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was founded as a state committee with branches in regional centers. Ukrainian diplomats began using every opportunity to broach the subject of the 75- year-old Holodomor in their dealings with colleagues. As though in response, President Putin of Russia also started issuing statements, and Russia’s State Duma passed resolutions on the same historical issue, but they had a completely different content.

Have Ukraine and Russia opened a new front of struggle in their common past? Is this so? We were asked these questions by various conference participants. Yuriy Sergeev offered the most convincing answers.

In reality, there is no struggle. It is just that Russia and Ukraine are moving at different speeds in understanding the history of building the communist system between 1918 and 1938. There is an objective reason for this: Ukraine suffered incommensurably more because it wanted to remain Ukraine.

I asked my colleagues, “Suppose three and a half million of your fellow countrymen were killed by famine. Wouldn’t you want to know what caused that famine?” No one contradicted me, but I was asked another question in response: “Why is the Ukrainian government so insistently placing this issue before the international community?” The government is doing this probably because it is a Ukrainian government, not a Soviet or post-Soviet one. We owe a debt of gratitude to the top-level Soviet functionaries, who finally allowed people to call the famine a famine 55 years after it took place in 1932-33. We should actually thank James Mace’s working group in the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine and the Ukrainian Diaspora in the United States, which succeeded in having this commission established.

5. WHY GENOCIDE?

This question remained foremost. There were many objections: e.g., it was not an act of genocide, the Russians suffered equally during the famine, so they cannot be held responsible for the Holodomor in Ukraine, etc.

Such objections are heard in both Russia and Ukraine. They sound convincing to those who identify Soviet power with the Russian government and the Soviet Union with Russia. After all, few people in the West called the USSR by its official name. Harriman called his institute “Russian,” not “Soviet.” I think that Ukrainian and Russian scholars will have to work long and hard to distinguish the Soviet part of our past from the Russian past, and vice versa. This is the only way for our society to comprehend the true nature of the Holodomor and many other phenomena in our shared history. In the course of communist construction the Kremlin used the “nationalities policy” as an effective means of overcoming the resistance of a multinational society to the forcible imposition of unnatural production relations.

Everything stated above helps us to understand our opponents’ stand but does not offer rebuttals to their objections. Did the Russians suffer as much? Should they be held responsible for the Holodomor in Ukraine? These questions are not interrelated, so there should be separate answers to each of these questions.

First, let us consider the national aspect of the mortality rate. There are statistics for 1932-33, including regions and nationalities, but they are incomplete. During the conference at the Harriman Institute Oleh Wolowyna presented a paper on the reconstruction of demographic statistics. He has many authoritative predecessors in this field. In particular, Stephen Wheatcroft of the University of Melbourne submitted his article “On Demographic Evidence of the Tragedy of the Soviet Village, 1931-1933” as a supplement to the third volume of the five-volume document collection/monograph entitled Tragediia sovetskoi derevni (The Tragedy of the Soviet Village, 1927-1939, Moscow, 2001, p. 866-887).

The crux of his article lies in its closing lines, where the author writes that an additional 3 to 3.5 million deaths occurred in Ukraine alone, which probably brings the USSR’s total to 6-7 million. These figures tally with statistics published earlier in Ukraine.

On April 2, 2008, Russia’s State Duma adopted the resolution “In Memory of the Victims of the Famine of the 1930s on the Territory of the USSR,” which boils down to refuting all attempts of the Ukrainian side to have this tragedy recognized as an act of genocide. The resolution, however, contains Wheatcroft’s calculations of direct losses inflicted by the famine: seven million people. This alone is indicative of colossal headway compared to the Russian Federation’s earlier official stand. If one takes into consideration the sharp decline in the birth rate during the famine years, this figure will rise to at least 10 million.

Does such a number not provide enough grounds to talk about the genocide that was perpetrated against Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Russians and all the other peoples who were devoured by the state terror machine? The authors of the Duma resolution, including Konstantin Zatulin, babbled something about drought. There are preserved archival weather reports for this period, as well as Stalin’s statement of 1933, in which he resolutely denies all talk of drought.

Russian politicians and researchers themselves must determine whether the man-made famine of 1932-33 was an act of genocide in the Russian Federation. That is their prerogative. Ours is to assess the tragedy of the Ukrainian people by using international legal categories, all the more so as a closer look at the famine statistics shows that the Holodomor in Ukraine was qualitatively different from the all-union famine in 1932-33.

There were two regions in the Russian Federation, Kuban and Kazakhstan, which suffered terrible losses during the famine. These losses had a significant impact on the all-Russian mortality picture. The famine in Kazakhstan was caused by the forcible settlement of nomads and the confiscation of most of their cattle for state meat deliveries. The heavy consequences of the famine in Ukraine and the Kuban had the same causes: the confiscation of all foods under the guise of state grain deliveries and the blockade of these two Ukrainian territories. Elsewhere in the European regions of the USSR the death toll from the famine was considerably lower (by 10 to 20 times) because it was caused either by the confiscation of grain (in grain-producing regions) or by the stoppage of state grain deliveries (in grain-consuming regions).

If only grain had been confiscated, one can speculate that the state was forced to sell grain abroad in order to raise funds for an accelerated modernization. But when the state confiscated all foods that keep for a long time from areas that were already starving as a result of the grain confiscations, then blockaded these regions, and banned the word “famine,” one must speak about the deliberate creation of conditions for the population, which were incompatible with its physical survival-in other words, genocide. None of our opponents at Harriman Institute could refute these simple and logical conclusions.

Did the Russians have anything to do with Stalin’s policy of terror? Such allegations are heard every now and then in Ukraine, and they are instantly picked up and capitalized on by the Russian media. One should not pay attention to marginalized politicians and scholars who are carrying out their orders. The terror by famine was perpetrated by a narrow circle of the Communist Party and Soviet leadership: Stalin and his team. The Russian people, just like all the other nations of the totalitarian Soviet Union, have nothing to do with the Kremlin’s policy of terror that commenced in December 1917, with the rout of the Constitutional Democrats, and ended in March 1953, with the Doctors’ Plot.

The international scholarly community has begun to treat the Holodomor in Ukraine as an actual phenomenon that must be studied. After returning to Kyiv, I received an invitation from Stephen Wheatcroft to take part in a comparative study of various forms and types of famine in the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and other countries of the communist bloc. It is necessary to ascertain how the weapon of famine was used in the process of the state’s enslavement of society. Only one conclusion can be made: it will not be possible to conceal the horrific history of communism from international scholarship.