Political sabbathon a grave
Ukrainian democracy finally pinned our politicians to the wall, and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed a resolution recognizing the 1932-33 Holodomor as genocide. This is a great victory of all the patriotic forces, and its importance is difficult to overestimate. Directly or indirectly, this resolution will have far-reaching consequences. The Verkhovna Rada passed this decision reluctantly, and the bill was the subject of heated debates. The opponents of this resolution again tried to dodge the issue and agreed to any definition but the awesome word “genocide.” But there was no place to retreat because on that day all eyes not only in Ukraine but the entire world were on the Ukrainian parliament.
The truth about the Holodomor was deliberately hushed up even during perestroika and in the first years of independence. The Holodomor is the same for Ukraine as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is for the Baltic states. This was the crucial factor for Ukrainians, when they were making their choice in favor of independence. Recognizing it as an act of genocide, i.e., carnage on a mass scale, is a serious preventive blow to the forces that harbor revenge. Ukrainians’ long and tense struggle for their right to learn the truth has passed the first watershed: the first battle, but not the war, has been won. This could have been the final word on this historic resolution if something that aroused public indignation and stung me personally had not happened during the debate.
Let me start with a quote.
“When it became evident that in order to save its tarnished image the Orange team badly needed to play on the subject of the famine, they urgently signed on a Holodomor fantasist named Dr. James Mace from the United States. Working in Ukraine, this person dies. This immediately causes the president of Ukraine to decree the design and unveiling of a monument to a US citizen, erect a commemorative plaque, rename a Kyiv street, prepare a series of radio and TV programs, and make a documentary film — of course, at the expense of Ukraine’s state budget.”
These are the words of the communist MP Petro Tsybenko, who uttered them during the Verkhovna Rada debate on recognizing the 1932- 33 Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In fact, his speech set the ball rolling. Although the resolution was passed, I will never forget those who voted “no” and what they were saying. Whenever I recall that debate, I, as a citizen of Ukraine, feel shame for those who kept silent. I can only thank Mykola Tomenko, who managed to reach the microphone and say a word in defense of James. He still did not have enough time to explain clearly what aroused his indignation and fury, and what and who was in question.
A few facts are in order.
The Orange team could not possibly have “signed on” James Mace because he was already living in Ukraine for 15 years. He first arrived at the invitation of the Ukraine Society, which was under Soviet secret police control before that, in 1990, well before the collapse of the USSR. He arrived with the permission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, i.e., the party to which Comrade Tsybenko belongs, after the press published Volodymyr Shcherbytsky’s speech in which he admitted that a manmade famine had taken place in Ukraine.
Allow me to quote James: “...In late 1989 I began receiving letters from Soviet Ukrainian diplomats at the Soviet Embassy. At the end of Ukrainians Abroad and, after consulting pertinent US bodies and the members of my Commission, I accepted. It turned out that the real reason for the invitation was that the Communist Party of Ukraine wanted me on hand when it officially adopts a resolution recognizing the Holodomor as a deliberate and criminal act by Stalin and his associates, and orders the unsealing of relevant archives of party documents (these documents appeared some months later and were truly extraordinary), so that I could say how positive a step this was.”
In 1993 James moved to Ukraine for good. This is how he explained his decision: “It seems to me that when the very object of one’s research is in danger, one has to reassess one’s priorities. By trying to understand the damage done and what came about as a result, one can become a factor in helping to heal that damage. When the fate of a component of humanity itself, of a nation and a culture, hangs in the balance, I felt I had no other choice.
“In 1944 Raphael Lemkin predicted that the legacy of German genocide, the artificial and forcible strengthening of the German national element at the expense of others, would long remain a problem. In the German case, thanks to the utter defeat and destruction of Nazism, and the courage of the German people to face up to their terrible past, he may have been mistaken. Yet, for a variety of reasons, in the Soviet case, he seems to have been eerily correct. To explain this fully would require another work longer than this, but dealing with that legacy might well prove to be the ultimate challenge for the study of genocide. After all, one of the basic goals of knowledge is to heal.” (From the book Pioneers of Genocide Studies, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002).
Of course, James Mace is not the ace pilot Ivan Kozhedub, and it is pointless and unwise to compare their merits, as the communist MP Tsybenko did. If I understood correctly, what so offended Tsybenko was the fact that a US citizen was being honored on such a broad scale. Dominique Arel, the titular of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) wrote the following words in his online newslist The Ukraine List when he heard about the death of Dr. James Mace: “It is a sad day for Ukrainian Studies: the American historian James Mace died today in Kyiv at the age of 52. Author of the classic work Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (1983) and the monumental three-volume study of the Ukrainian Holodomor, Oral History Project (1987-1988), James paid a professional price for his sacrilegious claim — in Russian studies, that is — that the Ukrainian famine was man-made.”
I know this so-called professional price very well and would like to say in this connection that James was an outstanding humanist scholar. He totally rejected assassination as a method of resolving conflicts. He worked like a slave, and his great labor cannot but evoke respect here in Ukraine. Unfortunately, publishing a study of about 300 printer pages, his dissertation and articles, needs a mighty scholarly potential, which is not available in Ukraine, as well as considerable funds, which are also not available when it comes to a project of this scope.
It is not the same thing as erecting a monument or renaming a street. After all, I erected a monument at Baikove Cemetery with my own funds. Naturally, help also came from the children whom Mace brought up and taught — the Ukrainian children who are no strangers to him, and from Volodymyr Yavorivsky, the only one who chipped in 1,000 hryvnias. I bow down to him. Establishing a monument at Baikove was an insurmountable task for a private individual. My face was burning with shame when I was asking all kinds of foundations and organizations for material assistance. I got the cold shoulder even from those who knew Dr. Mace very well and who to a large extent owed their careers and well-being to him. God is their judge.
And now about Ukraine’s state budget that was “looted” so much by Dr. Mace.
When he was admitted to hospital, it was not the state that came to his rescue but Ukrainian women — journalists and accountants from Den/The Day — as well as friends, neighbors, and his children. They came in friendly ranks to the emergency hospital and donated as much blood as necessary. James needed a lot of blood. He joked that he was at last a full-blooded Ukrainian because his veins were now full of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish blood. James was pronounced clinically dead and needed four operations in a row. The state did not help, although word has it that there was a Kyiv City Administration decision to allot some funds. But we will never know where those funds vanished. I had to use my own money to pay for drugs, operations, equipment, and care. Among those who helped me as much as they could were Larysa Ivshyna, Marina Zamiatina, Oleksandr Suhoniako, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Nadia Stepula, and Ivan Drach. The state stood on the sidelines. James would have survived if he had had the required period of convalescence. But the state or, to be more exact, state officials gave me the runaround when I asked them to help James pay for a holiday at a good health center. By then we had run out of money and the state was not interested in us.
He felt especially bad on May 1, 2004, well before the election campaign started and the Orange team emerged on the political scene. He had just finished editing an issue of The Day, given an exam, marked the diploma theses of his students at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and written the last article for a British publication. He and I talked at length about the scenarios of the coming election. This was tormenting him because Ukraine had become his native land. He kept asking, “What can I do? How can I help?” He agonized over our country’s problems and woes, such as poverty, the scorn heaped on the Ukrainian language of which he had an excellent command, and bureaucratic high-handedness.
We lived in the outermost building of Troieshchyna, a skid row where moonshine was sold in almost every tenement hall and entrances were littered with used syringes. Not a day passed without a scruffy tramp ringing our doorbell and begging for money. I would balk and ask him not to lure suspicious people. He was embarrassed but could never say no. He did the same in the US: once, at an Oklahoma bus station, a recent Ukrainian immigrant came up to us. He was ragged, without a passport, on the run from the police, and living as a hobo with Mexicans. When he heard us speaking Ukrainian, he asked James for 100 dollars. We were very hard up for cash and I protested, but as soon as I turned away, the wallet became much emptier. He knew only too well that his alms would change nothing, but he simply could not look a hungry person in the eyes.
I am saying this for the first time because I am fed up with all kinds of ambushes out of nowhere, shouts behind my back, and malicious hissing about Dr. Mace and me. Please don’t lie, Comrade Tsybenko! The Ukrainian state did nothing for his funeral: it could not refuse him a place at Baikove Cemetery only because hundreds, if not thousands, of letters and telegrams arrived suddenly in Ukraine from ethnic Ukrainians and prominent scholars all over the world. The funeral and post-funeral dinner were subsidized by Den/The Day and Kyiv Mohyla Academy, respectively. Incidentally, the academy has his complete library, including rare books dating to the 16th century. I literally wrested the last part of it from the US, this time with the help of the state in the person of President Viktor Yushchenko. In terms of value, it surpasses all possible and impossible immortalization projects. I must say that even though American Ukrainians acknowledged my rights as James’s heir, they were extremely reluctant to part with his books and archives on the grounds that the tape recordings of eyewitness testimonies about the Great Famine, which James had brought to Ukraine and which had been stored at the Parliamentary Library were destroyed in the literal sense of the word. Ukrainians in the US were also in the dark about the circumstances of his death.
The circumstances surrounding James’s death were typically Ukrainian. On May 1, I tried to call a doctor, but it was a public holiday and the telephones seemed to be frozen. Then, for the first time I turned to an insurance company that caters to foreigners. After all, we had been paying them a handsome monthly premium for 12 years because issuing a visa was directly linked with medical insurance. Foreigners know that this insurance is daylight robbery, but this procedure is unavoidable.
It was my fault (I bitterly regret this now) for not calling the municipal emergency medical service, where experienced professionals work albeit in unbearable conditions. The insurance company sent its medical specialists, who work on contract with it, and they made a wrong diagnosis. They said it was just a bruise on the leg. I won’t name the people or companies involved because I forgave that young doctor, who wept bitterly, kneeling in front of me. It was not his fault.
The blame lies with Ukrainian circumstances, where a company offers someone a highly-paid job through connections. This kind of company has expensive equipment and fabulous work conditions, but those who are employed there are more financial killers than professionals. Their clientele is easy to deal with because foreigners come and go, without staying too long in our country. I feel sorry for that young doctor because he will have to face up to this. When I called for a municipal ambulance the next day, it was too late. In the case of a dislodged thrombus, death comes within 24 hours. The time was lost.
Now, a word about publications is in order. The posthumously rleased book Day and Eternity of James Mace, edited by The Day’s editor in chief Larysa Ivshyna, was published with the personal funds of the newspaper staff. I cannot understand why Ukrainian officials are taking a lukewarm attitude to this high-profile work, which has won wide acclaim at international book fairs. This book must be available in the libraries of all Ukrainian schools and universities.
Neither did the state budget fund my articles or hundreds of others that appeared in the press. The death of Dr. Mace caused shock abroad, especially among Ukrainian emigres. He was the most prominent genocide researcher, and he had an excellent knowledge of the classical works on this subject as well as world history. This is why Turks, Armenians, Basques, Chechens, Tatars, Jews, and even Karaites often sought his advice.
His correspondence was all-embracing. Read his letter to the Holy See and you will realize how well-versed he was in the problem of the Verkhovna Rada recognizing the famine as genocide. He warned that it should be a very well-considered step in order not to trigger opposition on the part of Russia. He also warned about Russia’s steps towards Ukraine: he was knowledgeable in energy problems and very worried about the lack of reforms, the slow modernization of the Ukrainian economy, and rampant corruption. He wrote about the increasing clout of the “kleptocrats” as early as 1993.
I would like to inform Comrade Tsybenko that I am a professional journalist and author, winner of the All-Ukrainian Literary Prize of the Cabinet of Ministers, the Ministry of Culture, and the National Union of Ukrainian Writers, and the Dmytro Nytchenko Literary Prize. In general, I am going to continue writing and publishing wherever and however much I like. This is my constitutional right, as well as it is to write scripts and raise funds for films. I will also add that I took part in making three films long before the presidential decree — but not at the state’s expense.
Now I will address the remark about James Mace being a Holodomor fantasist. Mace’s research was mainly based on the Soviet press, official Soviet statistics, and eyewitness reports. If James were still alive today, he would have answered not only Tsybenko but all those who so vehemently opposed the very idea of classifying the Holodomor as genocide.
James was a brilliant polemicist, and it was dangerous to engage in polemics with him. I will give just two examples. The publication of the US Congress report and the three volumes of work on the Holodomor sparked very few comments. Pro-Russian foreign academics simply ignored it. But the doors of practically all educational institutions with Ukrainian Studies departments in the US were closed to Mace. There was unparalleled resistance. Talking about the GULAG or Stalinist repressions in the USSR is one thing, but admitting that the US officially recognized the USSR when millions were dying before the eyes of the whole world is a totally different matter.
In general, the Ukrainian question was too sensitive even for such human rights champions as General Petro Hryhorenko and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I read Solzhenitsyn’s open letter to the CPSU’s Central Committee: it was the letter of a true loyalist, who carefully eschews interethnic problems in the USSR and only asks that the destructive communist rhetoric and ideology be rejected — and a new empire will blossom. After all, as James kept repeating, Russian democracy ends where the Ukrainian question begins.
Critical remarks were feeble and sporadic: they mostly boiled down to malicious gibes and personal insults. Comrade Tsybenko’s “Holodomor fantasist” is a mild epithet compared to some other labels. The most interesting diatribe, in my view, came from the mouth of a respected doctor of sciences, who accused James of discrediting the idea of developed socialism to the rising colonial peoples of Asia and Africa.
But it was impossible to argue with facts. His conclusions were clear-cut and well-founded. He gradually turned his former opponents, for whom he was a “bourgeois falsifier,” “out-and-out Ukraine-lover,” and a “person with a misanthropic mentality,” into Soviet professors. As James wrote later, during 10 years of independence Ukrainian academics achieved a real, hitherto unheard-of, scholarly feat without any essential government support by publishing a plethora of studies and documents. He had a high regard for the works of Yuri Shapoval, Stanislav Kulchytsky, and Vasyl Marochko, those scholars who during a Verkhovna Rada session demanded a serious scholarly investigation of this problem because, you see, nothing is clear yet. I refer you to the enormous bibliography on the Holodomor. Published long ago, it is still incomplete — just a drop in the ocean. But who is to blame for the fact that monumental works on the Holodomor are published in a negligible print run, often at one’s own expense, and are inaccessible to the general public? Yet, they are accessible to people like Comrade Tsybenko. After all, he should know where the Parliamentary Library and the library of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy are located.
I remember the opening of a new Web site that for a few months posted political gibberish or outright lies about the Ukrainian famine. Mace wrote a serious article and sent it to that site, calling for a debate. The site was shut down within half an hour.
James looked forward to a response from the outstanding Russian scholar Dmitrii Volkogonov to his article “Lenin without Ukraine, or Dmitrii Volkogonov as a Mirror of Russian Democracy” published in two issues of the journal Suchasnist. He gave him his article but never saw an answer because Volkogonov suddenly died.
Mr. Tsybenko admitted in his speech that there had indeed been a famine in Ukraine: “It is true. But it is also true that there was a no less terrible famine in the Volga region and the Kuban, and in some other regions of the Soviet Union.” A lot has been written about the famine in Kuban, which was largely populated by ethnic Ukrainians. As for a famine in Russia, please ask Russian academics, and they will tell you how Russian residents used to run away from the borders of Ukraine, where there was a major outbreak of cholera. All Russian researchers accept the so-called Ukrainian question but have not yet made any serious study of the famine. This question is taboo. The Russian scholar Vladimir Kartashov complained at the Holodomor conference in Vicenza (Italy) that he had no access to archives, while studies are simply not published.
As for “other regions of the USSR,” the time will come when, for example, the Kazakhs, who lost a third of their population in 1932-33, will have their say. But this was a special case that resulted from the communists’ insane economic policy. Tsybenko asks who organized the famine there. Tsybenko is also terribly worried about European countries. So let me tell him some universal truths. The Nazi Germans organized the Holocaust all over Europe, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union organized the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Tsybenko is also worried about the population decline in Ukraine. This is a longstanding gibe directed at Mace, so let me quote Mace himself. “It turns out that it was a crime against the people of Ukraine to publish three volumes of eyewitness reports on the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine and to write the Report to the US Congress so that the entire world would know about the Ukrainian people’s tragedy. It turns out that in my activities I wanted to affect the socio-psychological strength of society in order to reduce the population of Ukraine. As for the ‘population,’ believe me, Dr. (...) I had no part in sending young Ukrainians to Afghanistan, nor did I design the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant that even today is still affecting the population rate in Ukraine — not hypothetically but factually.”
Here is a fragment from Mace’s reply to an opponent, “In Search of Yesterday,” an article that was published in 1994 in the newspaper Za vilnu Ukrainu. James was accused, in Tsybenko-like style, of “hypocrisy”: he allegedly provokes interstate and international conflicts, and defiles the memory and pride of Ukrainians by endorsing the idea of establishing an Institute of Genocide Studies in Ukraine.
I have deliberately omitted the opponent’s name and some biographical facts. This respected individual never again engaged in polemics with James. He went on to write quite a few intelligent articles and studies and no longer opposed the creation of such an institute. I will quote James again because his words have a direct bearing on Comrade Tsybenko.
“I am well aware of the economic hardships that the young state of Ukraine is now experiencing. But I’d like to note that the revival and building of any state in the world begins with a return to its cultural and spiritual traditions, history, and memory. And I am sure that an academic institution devoted to studying the tragic pages of Ukrainian history will sooner or later be established and work actively. For it is one thing when the truth about such an awful tragedy as the Holodomor remains at the level of everyday consciousness (in this case, there is a real danger of a constant psychological irritatant that will paralyze the creative potential of society), but it is a totally different thing when the work of historians, demographers, and politicians is constantly integrated, projected into public awareness, and plays the role of a preventive safeguard against the repetition of such tragedies.”
I remember the way James spoke during the parliamentary hearings on the Holodomor. He came straight from the hospital, all bandaged up and festooned with tubes. Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and Vice-Prime Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk had a high regard for his work. The audience gave him a warm welcome. Only the Communists shouted, “Yankee, go home!” He had always heard this shouted behind his back. After that fateful session, when Mace came up with the Candle in the Window project, there was a reception at the Canadian Embassy, and one communist leader rushed to hug him, swearing eternal love. “You know, I had to shout that.” James only shook his head.
Tsybenko also had to. He was simply given some papers to read. But if he had the slightest bit of information, he could not have been unaware that his speech amounted to libel against those whom he called the “Orange ones,” Dr. Mace and his activities, and the president himself, and that Mace’s widow is still around, who can sue him for the crime of libel. Or does parliamentary immunity means all-permissiveness?
In conclusion, I will say a few words about Ivan Kozhedub, Hero of the Soviet Union. As a hero, who fought against German Nazism, and an incomparable ace pilot, he naturally deserves veneration, as do other heroes, either Red Army soldiers who laid down their lives for freedom or OUN and UPA combatants to whom Ukraine was a sacred word. The latter fought, died, and languished in NKVD torture chambers for Ukraine. Likewise, Dr. Mace is worthy of honor, for he too gave his life for this country.
There is still no monument, memorial plaque, street, school, or college named after him. As a wise saying goes, there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. There is only a presidential stipend to his widow, which in the twinkling of an eye became one issued by the Cabinet of Ministers and then the writers’ union. It amounts to 375 hryvnias, while I have just received a rent and utility bill for 387.44 hryvnias, plus telephone, maintenance of the building’s front door, electricity, and television. In addition, I have vision problems, so it is difficult to find a job. And the Orange team is no longer in power.
I will confess that in a critical pre-election moment I applied for membership in Our Ukraine, i.e., the Orange team. But it quickly turned out that I am a member of a different party, the Reforms and Order Party (PRP). But since I am a member of the National Union of Ukrainian Writers, a corporate body that will lie under a tank with the last Ukrainian poem on its lips and for which the Ukrainian language has always been a point of honor, even in Soviet times, I considered this abbreviation as a personal insult — I had had too much of that — and decided to stay clear of any parties from now on — neither ours nor yours.
The votes of individuals should not be manipulated. I respect the mortal combat against soullessness and fear, which Viktor Yushchenko has entered. I admire it. But it is not clear to me that the president himself knows that this may be the last battle against barbarism. James was right (he was always right) when he said, “I devoted my entire adult life to studying this country and trying to understand it. And I can’t say that I like what I see. Frankly, I am ashamed. This country can only become an earthly paradise when, to paraphrase Marx, the dead hand of the past generations ceases to hang, like a curse, over the brow of the living.”
In general, I must say that choosing the Holodomor as a subject of study requires considerable courage and a very high pain threshold. In spite of all the political battles, it cannot be a matter of expediency. This is a fatally dangerous topic: suffice it to recall the destinies of Ivan Ilienko, Oleksa Musiienko, the trail-blazers Lydia Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, and the circumstances of their deaths. They were all so young and full of creative strength. And now we have failed to save James, and no awards, no honors will revoke this terrible fact.
Shortly before his death, we moved to a new apartment. My daughter got married. We had to settle in the new place, so we lived, ate, and slept on top of books — literally. Now I am wandering around my dream apartment in the same Troieshchyna, with new bills in my hand, and wondering how I can pay these enormous sums. “Forward to the past,” as Dr. Mace wrote.
I have a niggling thought. Dear lawmakers, you were elected by the people. Are you from an alien planet, a different world? Why do you hate your own people, their language, and country so much? The one called Ukraine, if you’ve forgotten. When I do something wrong, my peasant mother always warns me, “People are looking.”
They are looking at you, honorable parliamentarians, and sometimes they listen.
