UKL
#444 |
http://chairukrstudies.wordpress.com/
#6
On Holodomor Denial
by Dominique Arel
Chair of Ukrainian Studies Blog, 2 June 2010
http://chairukrstudies.wordpress.com/
In the recent issue of Holodomor
Studies, librarian Jurij Dobczansky, in an article reproduced
with permission in UKL445 (7 June 2010), writes that the Library of
Congress has introduced, last Fall, the new categories of Holodomor
denial literature (“for works that diminish the scale and significance
of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932‑1933 or assert that it did not occur”)
and Holodomor denial (“for works that discuss the diminution of the
scale and significance of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932‑1933 or the
assertion that it did not occur”).
It seems to me that the category of “Holodomor denial” conflates two
distinct strands in the charged debate over the Holodomor -- that of
“Famine-as-Mass-Murder” denial and that of “Famine-as-Genocide” denial.
The classic case of Holodomor denial was the official Soviet
policy, until 1987, of denying that a famine occurred in Ukraine (or
elsewhere) in 1932-1933. Anyone using the word “famine” was denounced
as a stooge of hostile foreign interests bent on defaming the Soviet
Union. The ideological rationale was simple: collectivization was meant
to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet economic system and an
admission that it killed millions of people would delegitimize the
Soviet project. In 1937, Stalin had the organizers of the Soviet census
shot for having produced an accurate population count that showed that
millions of people were missing in Ukraine.
The Soviet denial of the famine is on the same plane as the so-called
Holocaust “revisionist” literature that denies that gas chambers
existed and is beyond the pale of academic debate. (In Germany and
France, Holocaust denial is also illegal, but this is another issue
altogether). This does not mean, however, that this brand of denial
literature should not be researched as an artefact of political and
social discourse. Arguing that the Ukrainian Famine, or the Holocaust,
or other incontrovertibly documented cases of mass violence against
civilians, did not happen is morally contemptible and scientifically
fraudulent. Yet seeking to understand why and how agents of state
power, or socially meaningful social actors and organizations, engage
in denial 101 is central to the scholarly enterprise.
In a recent debate (UKL441, 16 February 2010, items 9-13), John Paul
Himka, of the University of Alberta, was pilloried for having included
Doug Tottle’s 1987 infamous screed Fraud,
Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard
on the syllabus of the course “The Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet
Ukraine in History and Memory”, which he taught in Winter 2009. Tottle
was a member of the Communist Party of Canada, but we know from
archival research done by Ukrainian historian Liudmyla Hrynevych (2007
conference paper at the University of Toronto) that his book had been
“reviewed” by three institutes of the Ukrainian SSR before publication.
In essentially presenting the official state position of the time,
however indefensible, on the famine, Tottle is worth studying as an
item of the politics of memory (denial and omission being key
dimensions of any politics of memory), the same way that the Soviet
postwar policy of omission towards the Holocaust on Soviet occupied
territory has been the subject of a growing body of historical
literature. As a contribution to our understanding of what happened in
1932-33, the Tottle book, it goes without saying, like other
famine-denial ones, is worthless.
The outright denial about the existence of the famine appears to be
over. In Dobczansky’s review of Holodomor denial literature, recent
authors -- from Russia and Ukraine -- have kept the hysterical polemical
tone of lore (Ukrainian nationalists being fascists and Nazis, having
invented the Holodomor to hide their crimes, etc.), but they no longer
deny that a famine took place. This is in line with the official
Russian position, actually going back to 1987, that famines, in the
plural form, resulted from Stalinist excesses. (The recent Famine
Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
[PACE], supported by the Russian Federation delegation, says that “mass
starvation” was “caused by cruel and deliberate actions and policies of
the Soviet regime.”)
This literature, however, is weak on agency. Its authors tend to
emphasize that these were tragic times, that collectivization was
unpredictable, that the Soviet Union was isolated, and so forth. The
general drift being that, the PACE resolution notwithstanding, the
extent to which the decisions and actions that led to the famine were
deliberate and, crucially, avoidable, is left ambiguous. This is also
in line with the current Russian ambivalence towards the 1930s, an
ambivalence that generally privileges the achievements of Stalinism
(making the Soviet Union a great power) over its human costs, such as
the Famine.
This, to me, justifies placing this literature alongside the old Soviet
denial discourse as types of “Famine-as-Mass-Murder” denial. Mass
violence perpetrated against civilians, including the mass violence of
modern famines, results from the purposive (“deliberate”) actions of
political (state or non-state) actors. This is actually the meaning of
the Ukrainian coinage Holodomor: to “kill” (moryty) by “hunger”. A
famine is when people “die” by hunger. A Holodomor is when the deaths
by hunger are caused by political agency. People are killed. The famine
in Ukraine, and the famines in the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, resulted from
political decisions (in insurance parlance, they were not “Acts of
God”). As a matter of fact, the comparative study of famines tells us
that all modern famines, since the 1850s, are Holodomory to different
degrees.
The dividing line is agency. On one side are those who deny the
Holodomor, the politically-induced (“man-made”) famine, either outright
(no famine) or through ambivalence, obfuscation, omission, or, to
paraphrase Dobczansky, by diminishing the scale and significance of the
political factor in the causality chain. On the other are those who
question, based on historiographical findings and/or theoretical
debates, whether the Holodomor constituted a genocide. This literature
includes those who deny outright that the concept of genocide applies
and those whose position is more agnostic, or ambivalent. The work of
the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin certainly belongs to the
former. Kondrashin has been making wild and, to my knowledge,
unsubstantiated claims on the demographics of the Famine lately (that
more people died of hunger in the RSFSR – Kazakhstan excluded – than in
Ukraine in 1932-33, a claim uncritically reproduced in article 7 of the
PACE resolution, contradicting the earlier claim, in Article 5, that
Ukraine “suffered the most”), but he is a serious historian that
actually has an article in the same latest issue of Holodomor Studies.
(The Editor, Roman Serbyn, must be commended for his commitment to open
debate).
Denying, or questioning, whether the Holodomor is genocide does not
necessarily mean denying or questioning whether the Holodomor is mass
murder. “Deliberate” mass killing actually captures three different
processes. Political actors can deliberately choose to target an entire
population on a given area for eradication (by means of extermination
or deportation, a.k.a. ethnic cleansing). Or they can deliberately
choose to exert violence to terrorize an entire population (by killing
many). Or they can deliberately choose not to be bothered with the
lethal consequences of their policies, consequences that any reasonable
mind can anticipate. The various meanings of deliberate
actions and their historical, political, legal and ethical
implications, is what we need to seriously debate. The starting point,
as Oleksandr Melnyk and Tim Snyder put it recently, is that these
people did not need to die. The Holodomor was tragic not because
leaders faced an impossible choice. It was tragic because millions of
civilians were victimized by a cruel regime.