We cannot live without the truth

When a person dies, the whole world dies with him. When an entire nation is annihilated deliberately, systematically, with infernal cruelty, what tempestuous scream of the soul will be commensurate with such a tragedy? There may be no appropriate words for this in the Ukrainian language — or any language for that matter. Even the words “doomsday,” “apocalypse,” and “Last Judgment” sound feeble.

There are people in the world that know what genocide is. Humanity will never forget the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews or the mass annihilation of the Armenians by the Ottoman authorities in 1915. Ukrainians, who experienced a planetary-scale catastrophe, which the Holodomor of 1932-1933 was, also have the indisputable right to declare that our nation has gone through genocide.

Understanding this manifest fact is an absolute imperative for us, who are living in 2006. For we cannot live without the truth about the past, no matter how horrific it was — nor can we live without the truth about the Holodomor. Only then we will comprehend what a (post-genocidal) society we are.

The main purpose of the roundtable, held at Ukrainian House under the patronage of the Secretariat of the President of Ukraine and with the assistance of the Institute of National Memory, was not just to organize a public discussion of President Yushchenko’s initiative concerning the political and legal assessment of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. The president has already submitted a corresponding draft law that will recognize this terrible catastrophe as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation. It was also a search for consensus on the main question: how to prevent the repetition of anything similar in the future.

Before the discussion began, the participants watched the documentary film Holodomor: Ukraine (The Technology of Genocide). This film is only 10 minutes of restrained, severe narration, a sorrowful seething memory, but these 10 minutes are truly shocking. The directors of the film recount the famine terror only in one Ukrainian village — Kapustyntsi, in Kyiv oblast. In the village stands an obelisk in honor of the heroic natives of Kapustyntsi who perished in the Second World War. Over a period of four years 170 such obelisks were erected (all named individually).

During a five-month period, from November 1932 to April 1933, the Great Holodomor claimed the lives of 1,124 people in this village alone. Elderly people who still remember the Holodomor unhesitatingly answer the question: what was more terrible, the famine or the war? — The famine. The same answer is even given by an elderly woman who was in Auschwitz.

Opening the roundtable, the first deputy head of the Presidential Secretariat, Ivan Vasiunyk, declared that in view of the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2008 the Ukrainian government wants to repay the debt to its people and finally give a proper state-level political and legal assessment of the events of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. The parliaments of 10 countries (Australia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Lithuania, Georgia, Poland, the US, Hungary, and Argentina) have officially recognized the Ukrainian Holodomor as our nation’s genocide.

But the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has not done this yet, even though more than half of all Ukrainians polled by sociologists would definitely support such an action. The goal of the roundtable, Vasiunyk underlined, is not the struggle against the shadows of the past, but the most drastic separation from the practices of totalitarianism, Stalin’s regime, which annihilated up to one-quarter of Ukraine’s population in the 1930s. The specialists’ discussion at the roundtable, President Yushchenko hopes, will help the Verkhovna Rada finally to carry out its duty to the Ukrainian people and facilitate its recognition of the fact of the totalitarian genocide.

According to the assessment of academic Ihor Yukhnovsky, the director of the Institute of National Memory, the Holodomor was the logical completion of a certain chain of events dating to 1918, not a sudden, instantaneous catastrophe. This was the opinion of all the scholars, who later presented papers: the historians Vasyl Marochko, Ruslan Pyrih, Vladyslav Verstiuk, and Valentyna Borysenko.

Dr. Marochko quoted a key statement of the well-known United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 1948, according to which genocide is “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This speaker underlined that the key thing is concrete actions, not intent; nevertheless there was undoubtedly intent — it is enough to mention Stalin’s rabid “class struggle” against “the kurkul” (a Ukrainian peasant in fact), “the blacklists” of “unreliable” villages (which in reality meant isolation and the total annihilation of the majority of the population), detachments that hemmed in the peasants, etc. Thus, all the features of genocide are present; the question is only the political will of the Verkhovna Rada.

In his brief speech Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Borys Tarasiuk mentioned his recent journey to Poltava and his polemics with a convinced communist, who stated the following: “Why are you, the government, duping the people — all the way to the UN — with your Holodomor and genocide?” Borys Tarasiuk asked rhetorically whether one can imagine a Jew or an Armenian having such an attitude to his own nation’s catastrophe. The foreign minister reminded his listeners about the 2003 Joint Declaration of the General Assembly of the UN, supported by 63 countries, concerning the Holodomor in Ukraine. Unfortunately, as a result of harsh resistance from the Russian Federation and a number of other countries, the word “genocide” does not appear in this document. In April 2006 Russia opposed a discussion of this question during a meeting of the foreign ministers of the CIS states. Thus, exceptionally difficult but absolutely crucial work is ahead.

The roundtable’s participants emphasized that there is a huge body of documents that indisputably prove both the fact of the genocide and its organized character (documents of the Moscow and Ukrainian republican party bosses, secret directives of the OGPU and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, population census data for 1926 and 1937, diaries of eyewitnesses of these events, their oral testimonies). But, as the historian Ruslan Pyrih remarked, none of these documents taken individually or altogether give exact figures of the number of victims, which is why these figures range from 3.8 to 12 million. He repeated his emphasis that all the hallmarks of genocide, according to the fundamental UN Convention, can be systematically substantiated by documentation. This is a scholar-historian’s view. Here are the recollections of a person who witnessed all this horror. The floor was taken by 87-year-old Hryhorii Haraschenko, a war veteran who was wounded 12 times, a courageous and honest man, and a long-standing CPSU member. This old but marvelously energetic man declared firmly: “It is a lie when people say that there was a poor harvest in 1932-1933, which then led to the tragedy. I say with all dependability: on the contrary, in our village in Polissia we didn’t know what to do with the harvest! But there was an absolutely merciless order of the GPU and local party authorities: do not touch a gram of “state” grain — literally not a gram, otherwise you could be arrested or even killed. The threshing was done under the personal strict control of a GPU lieutenant ...”

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The words of the outstanding German Friedrich Schiller were repeatedly mentioned during the roundtable: “World history is the world’s court of justice.” But this is true if you speak the language of conscience. In juridical language, all those present at Ukrainian House insistently called upon Ukraine’s parliamentarians to repay the debt to the sacred memory of those who were unjustly killed and to recognize the fact of the genocide of 1932-1933.

Let us not forget: there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity — above all, genocide.