TO:
HOLODOMOR WORKING GROUP
Ukraine: Holodomor, Genocide, Crimes of Communism
DATE: Sunday, March 22, 2009
DANCING
WITH STALIN
Speech by Steve Komarnyckyj, Writer, Poet,
Translator
At the Cambridge University Ukrainian Society Meeting
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom, Friday,
February 6, 2009
1) WELCOME
I would like to begin by thanking Cambridge University Ukrainian
Society for inviting me to present this lecture on the Holodomor or
Genocide Famine of 1932- 1933 and all of you who are here this evening
for displaying an interest in this tragic episode in Ukrainian history.
I am conscious of the responsibility that I bear to provide you with a
true account of the history of the Holodomor and also to convey the
experience of the millions of victims. Ukraine in 1933 may seem remote
from this ancient and beautiful university town in 2009.
However, the story of the Holodomor goes to the core of what
makes us human. During this speech I will of necessity refer to states
and nations but my intention is not to divide or condemn but to convey
my understanding. No nation, no ethnic group bears responsibility for
the famine of 1932-1933. Stalin and his associates planned the mass
starvation of Ukrainians and signed the orders and directives. However
as Tychyna says-
The Human heart only
Is our enemy
And who can find the cure
For our humanity?
The Convention on Genocide is based on a conception of the intrinsic
value of every nation, every individual and the belief that we all have
a duty to understand, protect and cherish human diversity.
2) OPENING
- DANCING WITH STALIN
I first travelled to Ukraine in 1993, flying KLM from Amsterdam to Kyiv
and, as we descended slowly towards the Ukrainian Capital, wiled away
my time by staring through the cabin window. It was difficult to
imagine that this hypnotic landscape of seemingly endless fields had
been the scene of Europe’s largest famine, a famine engineered by the
Soviet leadership.
In 1933 Stalin had introduced a number of measures which
included removing almost everything edible from the rural population
and sealing the borders of Ukraine and ethnically Ukrainian regions of
the Russian republic to stop starving peasants fleeing. By the spring
of that year the pastures below would have been dotted with decomposing
corpses and mass graves.
In between the fields there would have been abandoned
villages where everyone had died and others where people ate sorrel
nettles, and willowroot to survive. In the years afterwards
families would be shipped in from provinces elsewhere in the Soviet
Union and the abandoned cottages would once more be filled with the
bustle of family life- a pot bubbling with soup on the stove a gold
icon glinting in the candlelight. The years before and after the
Holodomor saw a wave of executions targeted on Ukraine’s cultural elite
and the forcible Russification of educational institutions and mass
media.
The word Holodomor is a compound term derived from the Ukrainian words
for “hunger” and “plague”. It is important to recognise that other
areas of the Soviet Union were affected by famine in this period.
However, the Holodomor has a number of characteristics which
distinguish it from these other superficially similar events. To begin
with it is linked to a wave of executions focused explicitly on
Ukraine’s political, cultural, and spiritual elites, which began in
1930 and has no equivalent in other regions of the Soviet Union.
The enforced confiscation of most edible material from rural
Ukraine and rural Ukrainian regions of the Russian Republic and the
sealing in of these regions, in other words enforced starvation, linked
to an ethnically specific area in early 1933 is a feature not repeated
elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
Finally the settlement, from 1933 onwards, of people from
other regions of the Soviet Union into areas where much of the
Ukrainian population had been exterminated can be linked to statements
by communist functionaries expressing a wish to crush Ukrainian
national feeling. These three features are a kind of unholy trinity
which elevate the Holodomor beyond the realms of agrarian policy and
endow it with the characteristics of genocide.
There is no doubt that in 1933 diplomats and journalists were aware
that there was something unique about the famine raging in Ukraine. The
Welsh Journalist Gareth Jones heard about the famine and decided to
find out what was happening for himself. In March 1933 he travelled to
Moscow and took the long train journey south to the Ukrainian city of
Kharkiv. The snow had fallen heavily as he walked along the railway
tracks into the countryside and saw that ‘there was no bread, many
children had swollen stomachs nearly all the horses and cows had died
and people themselves were dying’.
I noticed frequently patches where the dry skeletons of last
year’s weeds were peeping above the snow… [I] heard the villagers say
‘We are waiting for Death’.[1]
His colleague Malcolm Muggeridge also visited Ukraine and the North
Caucasus in early 1933 and wrote, of the battle that is going
on between the Government and their peasants. The battlefield
was as desolate as in any war, and stretches wider..... On one side,
millions of peasants, starving, often their bodies swollen, with lack
of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU [the political
police], carrying out the instruction of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of
locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot and exiled
thousands of peasants sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some
of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.’[2]
The voices of Jones and Muggeridge were two rare examples of human and
journalistic integrity- they wrote of what they had seen without regard
for the impact it would have on their careers. However, most of the
journalists based in Moscow knew of the famine but were happy to
conceal the deaths of millions of people in return for their pay
cheques.
I called this lecture ‘Dancing with Stalin’ but really the historical
record shows that journalists, writers and academics have been
performing a conjuror’s sleight of hand with the truth, shuffling words
like a magician’s pack of cards, dexterously diverting the eye away
from the uncomfortable reality depicted in the photographs of corpses
in the state archive of Ukraine and towards a partial account of the
truth. Magic, of course looses most of its charm when the secret of the
trick is exposed.
However, much the revisionist historians, who in recent
decades have challenged what they call the totalitarian paradigm of
Soviet History, argue that the famine was due to bad harvests and
bungling incompetence, behind them we see Stalin signing the New Year
Telegram of 1 January 1933, a death warrant for the Ukrainian
countryside.
I will show, later on in this speech that one of the main revisionist
historians whose work continues to dominate the account of the
Holodomor in English universities appears to have been guilty of a
misrepresentation of the case for the Holodomor and show that his
views, and those of the other revisionists, are no longer tenable
because of a basic error -- he chose to ignore the entirety of the
eyewitness testimony which shows that more than just grain was taken
away from Ukraine.
We now know what happened. But why did the Soviet Leadership try and
destroy the Ukrainian nation as an independent political cultural and
social entity during the 1930’s. To answer that question we need to
look at the country itself.
3) WHAT
IS UKRAINE
Ukraine is both vast and yet strangely invisible in much of the Western
world, still viewed through the prism of media and Soviet era
stereotypes; yet it is the largest country whose borders are entirely
in Europe and if you stand in a field of outside Kyiv it is easy to
imagine that those gold stalks, sprinkled with poppies like blood, roll
on forever. The country rears like a dragon over the black sea, its
vast and diverse terrain encompassing the jagged peaks of the Crimea,
the rolling Steppe and the Carpathians whose lush pine forests are
haunted by bears, wolves and spirits.
Ukrainians are one of three Eastern Slavic nations, the other two being
the Belarussians and the Russians, which emerged after the fall of the
medieval state Rus, whose capital was Kyiv. The histories of the
nations had followed very different courses with Russia developing into
an Empire, while Ukraine and Belarus were often under foreign
domination. At the time of the first world war Ukrainians,
paradoxically, had begun to develop a thriving cultural life but were
bereft of all political institutions a nation in spirit but, in
political terms, an outlying province of the vast Russian empire.
This lack of a sustained period of political independence
and stability may be due to Ukraine’s geographic position at the crux
of Europe and Asia. The lush ‘black soil’ rich and moist as gateaux, of
its vast central plain has been fought over by Turks, Tartars,
Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Germans.
However, for most of its existence the country has been
subsumed within the Russian state and the city of Kyiv is for some
Russians the mother of all Russian cities. The Tsarist regime looked to
eradicate Ukraine’s cultural distinctness by drastically curtailing the
use of Ukrainian, which it termed the “little Russian
language” under the decree of 1876 known as the Ems Ukaz [3]. Valuev,
the Minister who initiated this clampdown on Ukrainian language stated
the official view that ‘there was no little Russian language’[4].
This project of reintegrating Ukraine culturally within
Russia can be seen as arising out of a view that there was one Great
Russian nation at the time of Rus, which branched out in the thirteenth
Century, as the Russian historian Vernadskiy argued, into the Little
Russians, White Russians, and Great Russians[5].
In this view Ukraine’s cultural distinctness is in a sense an
aberration, the Ukrainian language is a dialect of Russian, and the
existence of Ukrainians threatens Russia’s own view of its history as
the inheritor of Kyiv Rus.
For many people, both Russians and others influenced by this Russian
account of history, Ukraine is a province of Russia and Ukrainian is a
dialect of Russian. Later on I will show that the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office is still influenced by this perception perhaps
because the United Kingdom does not have courses in Ukrainian studies.
The pen of the civil servant who wrote the FCO’s papers on the
Holodomor in some draughty Whitehall office was guided by a mind which
saw Ukraine as simply part of Russia and some British academics share
that perception seeing Ukraine almost as a kind of mad experiment
carried out by a deranged professor in front of a sceptical audience.
National identity is weak, they mutter stroking their chins,
the country will soon loose its independence, the culture is
artificial, and the language a hybrid of Polish and Russian. However,
at the time of the revolution in 1917, Ukraine was undeniably a nation
but a nation without a state. Events in Russia, particularly the
seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, would result in a new political
order being brought to Ukraine at bayonet point.
4) ALL
ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
But some are more equal than others is the slogan adopted by the pigs
who come to power in Orwell’s animal farm. This simple phrase sums up
the paradox of the revolution which is that, in the name of equality a
small clique seized power and raised themselves above the mass in whose
name they claimed to govern. Indeed Lenin [6], as he stepped of the
train in Petrograd and ascended the steps to the dais in front of the
deputies of the gathering of soldiers and workers deputies on 20th
April 1917 was undergoing a process of transfiguration. If the people
gathered before him had a faith in his capacity to transform their
lives them he was gripped by an equally firm conviction in his own
abilities. The April Theses which he announced were a kind of road map
to Utopia.
They comprised four areas of work which were intended to
transform the party into a communist party. He would not have known,
but as we imagine the scene, we can see over him the transparent
spectre of the Holodomor for the theses were intended to transform the
state into a Soviet state. If he had convinced himself that in a way he
had grasped the geography of the human mind and understood how to lead
the mass of the Russian Empire towards equality what he could not have
seen was the price in blood that would be paid.
He was, however, at one with Stalin in his conviction that
Human life – provided of course we exclude his own life- could be
sacrificed in the interest of humanity and his contempt for the country
whose destiny he now held in his rather small pallid hands. Russia, he
said, and excuse me for a crudity that is not mine, ‘is shit’. It was
not only the country that he had in mind, its fields, rivers, and
cities, but also the people. They were the excrement over which he
strode. The country was the clay that he would mould into a communist
paradise.
The revolution that took hold of Russia in February 1917 would be
transformed into a communist revolution with the seizure of control by
the Bolsheviks at all levels, of the Soviets which had sprung up as the
power of the Tsar’s state collapsed. These Soviets or Councils were in
the immediate aftermath of the revolution a reflection of the
fragmentary political parties and diverse groups vying for power.
Lenin’s slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ was linked to his
strategy of ensuring that these councils would be stuffed with
representatives of the party which he controlled. Power to the people
meant in effect the concentration of power in the party. Lenin’s demand
for the creation of a Soviet rather than a Parliamentary Republic can
be seen as a demand for absolute control for the Soviets would be
controlled by the party and the party by Lenin.
The transfiguration of the small émigré politician into a
red Messiah was complete and, once Lenin had ascended those steps to an
altitude above the workers he would stay there as his corpse stays now,
still idealised by some emblematic of a delusion that equality can be
achieved by dictatorship. Lenin himself used the word to describe the
government he envisaged a dictatorship which, he said, would be based
not on law, not on the formal will of the people, but on violence, or
as we say now, on terror. Within a few weeks of coming to power Lenin
elevated terror into a principal of the state with the establishment of
the All Russian Extraordinary Commission which would terrorise
political opponents.
However, if Lenin, perhaps in ways unknown to himself, was motivated by
the desire to control the society in which he emerged and reduce the
party activists to little more than marionettes at the end of the long
strings gathered in his hands we must acknowledge that many of his
followers believed in the communist ideal. Boris Antonenko Davidovich,
whose work ‘Death’ is one of the most significant works of the 20th
Century, understood how the ideal of equality could be used to seduce
people into acts of brutality and ultimately result in the Holodomor
and the Gulag.
The book documents the progress of a young communist
activist in the 1920’s who, seduced by the ideals of the party and also
by the need for acceptance, ultimately kills a farmer in one of the
skirmishes between party members and peasants opposed to the regime
[7]. Edmund Burke said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph
is that good men shall do nothing. We know now that evil can triumph
because of good people who are motivated by an absolute belief in an
ideal and are eventually prepared to kill on its behalf. The
Bolsheviks, at least initially, believed that they, and above them
Lenin, were gathering power from people in order to liberate them.
The intention to create a dictatorship was not masked by the Bolsheviks
but the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat was always used.
However, as I have described, the proletariat, indeed all sectors of
society were deprived of power and all of the Soviet Union would be
subject to the terror of the secret police, the Chekists. Declarations
about freeing the workers from exploitation would be adopted by people
who perhaps believed in them and could not see that by purging the
soviets of other parties they had in effect handed their freedom on a
plate to the small caucus at the top of the party structure, a pyramid
containing the mummified corpse of political accountability.
This was the nature of the state into which Ukraine would be
incorporated with the signing of the treaty which created the Soviet
Union on 29th December 1923 . Why, however, did a party so dedicated to
seizing and retaining power allow the formation of a Ukrainian state
and indeed a separate Ukrainian communist party after they had seized
the country? The initial name of the of the Ukrainian State that the
Bolsheviks created in Kharkiv on 25 December 1917, while the
Bolsheviks were still struggling with the Ukrainian national movement
for power, was the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
This was identical to the name given to their fledgling
Ukrainian state by the nationalist. The similarity between the names is
not accidental. Lenin wanted to assure Ukrainian society that national
autonomy would be preserved not in a “bourgeois” form, but in the form
of the ‘workers’ and peasants’ State’. So briefly for a while there
were two Ukrainian People’s Republics in the same country, one
nationalist, one soviet, like Siamese twins with their hands on one
another’s throats.
In April 1918 the Bolshevik Communist Party of Ukraine was created,
however, this party was given the task of struggling for the
‘revolutionary union’ of Russia and Ukraine that is the destruction of
the state whose name it bore. The appearance of an autonomous party and
state masked the extension of one man’s grip over the lives of more and
more people.
We can say that, as the dictatorship deluded the workers into believing
that they had power, so too the Ukrainian nation was seduced by the
creation of a virtual state that bore its name. Eventually a Soviet
Ukrainian republic would be created as the party sought to defuse
resistance by the policy of Ukrainianisation. While the Bolsheviks
secured control, creating temporary councils, which included local
communists, the Chekists, the activists, and the soldiers followed in
their wake, murdering anyone who might threaten the regime.
The nationalist movement which opposed them split, apart the
smaller faction under Petliura seeking protection and patronage from
the Polish leader Pidsulski. The larger section of the nationalist
movement was too weak militarily to resist and was seduced by the
promise of autonomy offered by the Bolsheviks.
Eventually the country would be split with the Western
provinces of Galicia and Volhynia being incorporated into Poland but
most of the country falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks. As the
communists looked to defuse separatist movements, not just in Ukraine,
but in the other republics a virtual federation a union of notionally
independent states was created. But each of them was one of the blocks
of the pyramid on which the Bolshevik party stood. Soviet Ukraine
appeared on the map but her fields were littered by corpses left in the
wake of the Chekists who had been instructed in 1923 to deal with a
long list of enemies of the Soviet State, ranging from members of non
soviet communist parties to the former owners of small shops. [8]
5) THE
EXECUTED RENAISSANCE
Those who argue that Ukraine’s national identity is a kind of
collective delusion must at least acknowledge that the country
reappeared on the map in 1917 and that, despite the chaos and
instability of revolution and civil war, a thriving and distinct
political cultural and artistic life developed very quickly. The
materialisation of the country centuries after all traces of political
independence had been abolished is evidence that the cultural
distinctness of Ukraine, its language literature and songs continued to
exist flowing through time like the underground stream at in Tychyna’s
poem “Golden Echo” [9].
Lenin, who while he was in Krakow attended a lecture by the
émigré Ukrainian writer Bohdan Lepkyj [10], was aware of the power of
Ukrainian national feeling and initially the Soviet Union allowed a
large degree of cultural autonomy under a policy known as
Korenizatsiya. Although the Bolsheviks had conquered Ukraine
they could not retain control of the country by armed force alone but
needed to convince Ukrainians that the Soviet power was also their own
Ukrainian government.
In April 1923 Trotsky gave a speech at the 7th All Ukrainian
Party Conference in which he said that “the alienation of the governing
party and soviet apparatus from the fundamental mass of Ukraine’s
population was dangerous’. He particularly emphasised the danger of a
lack of understanding with the peasantry and he urged the adoption of a
nationalities policy which paid particular attention to schools, to
culture, and to language.
Even Stalin echoed this message of national understanding
when he said at the 12th gathering of the Russian communist party that
the ‘Soviet power had to become for non Russian peasants their power’
and use the ‘native language’ of each Soviet republic. Korenisatsiya is
then the enrooting of Soviet power in the non Russian peasantry and the
policy had a different national specific name in each of the republics
where it was applied, in Ukraine it was Ukrainisatsiya, literally,
making Ukrainian.
The policy of Ukrainianisation began with an announcement at the 8th
all Russian congress that members of the Russian Communist Party in
Ukraine were required to use the Ukrainian language. However the policy
ran into an immediate obstacle a shortage of Ukrainian party members
and even by 1923 only 737 of 11826 party workers claimed to have
knowledge of Ukrainian.
Gerhard Simon, German authority on the national politics of the
Kremlin, argues that Korenisatsiya was intended to prevent the
development of the nationalist movements in the USSR [11]. Ukraine’s
aspirations towards independence would be sated by the creation of a
Soviet Ukrainian state. However, the politics of Korenisatsiya were
only useful to a certain degree and it quickly became apparent that the
Kremlin could not restrain Ukrainianisation to a policy merely of
applying a national veneer to Soviet power.
Kulchytskyy writes that the policy quickly moved beyond
being a bureaucratic campaign and became an instrument of the country’s
national renaissance, a renaissance which threatened Soviet power by
offering a different vision of the country’s development. Simon makes
it clear that the Soviet authorities knew they were walking on the edge
of a knife, a knife that could be laid at the throat of soviet
communism by an independent political movement.
This explains the paradox that in Ukraine the policy of
fostering Ukrainian culture was accompanied by continuous attacks on
“Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and great writers such as Kulish
attacked their own country’s aspirations. However, if there was
repression, the need to create the impression that the Soviet state in
Ukraine was rooted in the country’s own national culture meant that
even the secret police were encouraged to communicate in Ukrainian.
A generation of writers who would come to be known as “the
Executed Renaissance” after the anthology compiled by Yuri Lavrinenko
and published in Paris in 1959, flourished in Ukraine during the 1920’s
under these benign conditions. He had not heard Stalin’s phrase ‘a
destructive blow’, uttered in 1932 as the dictator planned the
Holodomor but used a similar term ‘terrorist blow’ to refer to the
genocide famine. He collated the work of these authors from
publications that had been kept in the archives of Ukrainians and
Ukrainian cultural institutions in the Diaspora.
Until 1930 Ukrainian poetry blossomed like the sunflower on the dust
jacket of Tychyna’s first collection, only to be annihilated in the
subsequent Stalinist inferno. During the 1930’s, 226 of 253 Ukrainian
writers were executed or rendered inactive by the Soviet Police. They
died in the underground basements of police stations, in arctic labour
camps, they were shot and tortured, they died of hypothermia,
exhaustion, malnutrition. Only a few survived.
Lavrinenko’s anthology covers the period 1917-1933 after which he wrote
‘Moscow’s adopted a policy of “Colonial provincialisation” towards
Ukraine and many of the works of these authors were banned’. The story
of this renaissance is best summarised by Khvylovyj whose slogan ‘Away
From Moscow!’ would be followed by his suicide in 1937 [13May1933]. He took his own
life to avoid the executioner’s bullet or a death by exposure and
malnutrition in some labour camp. His legacy remains the prose oeuvre
which depicts the convulsions affecting Ukraine and Vsesvit, a literary
magazine which to this day acts as a window on world literature for
Ukrainians.
There is no doubt that some Ukrainian writers were drawn by the vision
of equality and internationalism and became unwitting servants of their
nation’s destruction. Some, like Tychyna, clearly grasped at
an intuitive level the true nature of the men who cloaked themselves in
the rhetoric of equality, the closing lines of ‘Instead of Octaves and
Sonnets’ ask ‘Shall I stoop, to kiss the Slippers of the Pope’.
We know that the Pope of these lines was the high priest of
the communist state that would be built on the ruins of the Ukrainian
republic, whose birth and death were witnessed by Tychyna. He saw too
that the upsurge of energy unleashed by the volcanic awakening of
Ukraine in 1918 carried with it the potential both for spiritual
regeneration and violence. That indeed is the significance of the Crow
who appears in the final Poem of Solar Clarinets ‘Gold Echo’, the Angel
of Death hovering over a national revival.
However, although Ukrainian communist party chiefs had echoed the view
of their Russian colleagues, that national politics were a system of
double accounting or a deception designed to defuse political
opposition, for a while pursued a policy of cultural independence. I
have mentioned that the country’s borders and the distribution of
ethnic Ukrainians has shifted over time and, on 21 May 1927, M
Skrypnyk, Ukraine’s leading national communist politician raised the
question of Ukraine’s borders and annexing those territories adjacent
to Ukraine where ethnic Ukrainians were in the majority.
Kaganovich, who would later become one of the architects of
the Holodomor, drafted the request for the annexation of these ethnic
Ukrainian territories to the republic. The head of the Ukrainian
delegation that travelled to Moscow to discuss this question in the
1920’s, observed that the possible extensions of Ukraine’s borders met
with massive opposition from Russians on the Central Committee.
However, as a sop to Skrypnyk’s wish to extend the borders,
the policy of the Ukrainianisation of these areas, notably the Kuban
and the Northern Caucasus, was supported by the centre. In December
1928 the Communist leaders adopted a three year plan for strengthening
the use of Ukrainian language and culture.
Stalin’s transformation from support for Communism with a Ukrainian
face into the shadowy presence behind the activists smashing doors down
and removing food at gunpoint can be explained by his need to gain
political support in the 1920’s and to crush opposition in the 1930’s.
The policy of Ukrainianisation would ultimately fail to defuse
resistance to the Soviet state and particularly, the policy of
collectivisation.
The story of the Holodomor is at its most basic a struggle
for control over the endless and infinitely fecund fields of the
Ukrainian Republic and the attempt to engineer a communist state by
violence. Although the revolutionaries had talked of the dictatorship
of the proletariat it would be one man who waded to the top through a
river of blood in the boots and uniform that he carried in a grotesque
but significant gesture. Stalin was at war, but at war with the stuff
of humanity itself.
We have looked at how Ukrainian culture flourished in the 1920’s but we
must now consider how the agricultural policies pursued by the
communist state would lead to a war between the leadership of the party
and the Ukrainian peasantry that were the bedrock of Ukraine’s identity
the repository of its language, its songs and its folk poetry.
6)
FIELD OF DREAMS
We have seen how the Bolsheviks gained
control of Ukraine and won support from much of its population by the
creation of a virtual state where Ukrainian language and culture masked
the power of the party. However, the Ukrainian peasantry would remain a
source of resistance to Soviet power in Ukraine[12]. I have so far
emphasised how Lenin concentrated power in his own hands but it has to
be recognised that he saw himself as serving an ideal, the ideal of
communism based on reordering the economic relations in Society.
Engels and Marx had combined classical economic theory with
a Utopian vision of a society free from economic exploitation. It is
worth noting that Engels’ father owned a factory in Manchester over the
Pennines from where I live and that Marx’s work was financed by the
sweat of the proletariat to whom he promised liberation, even as Engels
lamented the poverty that helped finance his own privileged
life.
To use the extremist language favoured by some, Marx was a
parasite and Engels an expropriator. In the society which they
envisaged would develop, the Bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of
production would be vanquished, the state would wither away and we
would live in harmony. Each would give according to his ability and
each would receive according to his needs. The future they envisaged
was as vague and shadowy as the clouds of smog drifting over nineteenth
century Manchester.
The programme that the Russian Communist party adopted in 1919 foresaw
the creation of a system of collective agriculture and collective
farms. The ideas that Marx had formulated while hunched over his notes
in the reading room of the British museum were to be tested on the
fields of Ukraine. Market relations would be abolished and economic
activity controlled by the state. The peasant would be forced at
bayonet point through the gates of an egalitarian heaven.
There is no time to trace in detail the various shifts in
Soviet policy as the need to generate tax revenues was balanced against
the Utopian vision of collective agriculture. We must skip forward to 2
September 1930 when Stalin wrote a few sentences that would change the
countryside forever as he initiated the campaign for the final
imposition of collective agriculture.
The letter that Molotov subsequently received would result
in a slew of directives over the coming months but reality, obscured by
this blizzard of paper is quite simple. The control that
peasants had over their land and their lives would be ripped out of
their hands by the organised power of the state. The Kulak or in
Ukrainian, Kurkul, that peasant who had perhaps with their own sweat
and enterprise become a little more well off were targeted as the
‘chief and most ardent enemy of collectivisation’ in a plenary
resolution of the Ukrainian communist party of December 1930. The
attack on the Kurkul was the main weapon in the war to drive peasants
into the collective farm by creating terror.
However, there was no clear definition of what constituted a
Kurkul so the threat of being accused of being more successful and
wealthy than other peasants could be used against anyone. In halls with
armed activists stood round them, in villages where churches had been
destroyed peasants signed up to the collective. A Chekist document from
1930 states that, the individual farmers in one district were to be
subjected to grain and meat requisitions until they themselves would
ask to join the Kolhosp. In 1932 the campaign of dekulakisation was
strengthened in Ukraine as thousands of people were forcibly torn from
their homes and settled elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
By the end of 1931 the campaign of dekulakisation ceased
because most peasants had now joined the collective farm and been
stripped of control over the land they lived on and the crops they
grew. An ideology that had promised equality had resulted in the
enslavement of many of the peasants. During 1931 the chaotic reforms
resulted in a paradox that peasants would find themselves surrounded by
food but hungry as the dead hand of the state took bread from their
mouths.
7)
PRELUDE TO THE HOLODOMOR
Give us this day our daily bread. These few simple words sum up why
most researchers think the Holodomor happened. Stephen Wheatcroft
claims that the famine was due to grain being taken for economic
reasons. Deaths by famine were caused by a mixture of brutality and
incompetence.
In fact the Holodomor happened not because grain was taken away but
because everything edible was stripped from Ukraine and peasants
prevented from fleeing in early 1933. Think about it. If you have no
bread you eat something else. If you have nothing else to eat you
starve. It’s quite simple.
It is true that during 1932 grain was being requisitioned from all
across the Soviet Union, a fact which is used by revisionist
researchers to call into question the ethnically targeted nature of the
Holodomor. However, from August that year onwards Stalin had become
increasingly concerned at the possibility of Ukraine separating from
the Soviet Union. In a letter of 11th August to Kaganovich he stated
that he believed that Ukrainian nationalists working together with
Polish spies were preparing to sever Ukraine from the Soviet Union and
that the Ukrainian party was becoming a ‘caricature of a parliament’.
He stated bluntly that ‘Unless we begin to straighten out the situation
in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine’ [13].
His correspondence with Kaganovich is now well known and
indeed is not linked to the Holodomor by researchers who are
unsympathetic to recognising the Holodomor as genocide. This is rather
curious given that the letter initiated the installation of Balyckyj to
head up the Secret Police, and conduct a wave of executions and arrests
in Ukraine which, as we will see, acted as a blanket under which the
Holodomor was perpetrated.
On 7th August 1932 the Soviet Union introduced a law to strengthen the
defence of Socialist property popularly known as the law of five ears
of grain, this allowed peasants to be shot, or if there were
extenuating circumstances, jailed for 10 years for taking grain that
was state property[14]. This meant that the peasantry could be murdered
for trying to eat the crops they had grown.
Although the law was applicable to the Soviet Union it was
linked to specific measures which, as I will illustrate, would result
in the massively high death toll in Ukraine early in 1933. This was
followed by a law specific to Ukraine on the 15th August which forbade
the sale of bread to peasants until the collective farm had met its
quota for the bread requisitions by the state. [15] The Ukrainian
peasant was thereby prevented from either foraging for food or buying
bread.
During the Summer and Autumn of 1932 Stalin perceived the autonomy of
Ukraine and Ukrainian regions of the Russian Republic as a threat to
the integrity of the Soviet state. On 22 October 1932 he sent an
‘Extraordinary Commission’, led by his henchman Kaganovich, to the
North Caucasus which had a substantial Ukrainian population
concentrated in the Kuban region.
In early November 1932 Kaganovich wrote in his diary that
there were organised groups resisting soviet power and linked this to
the use of Ukrainian language in Kuban[16]. His solution was to cordon
off some of these villages to place them on the black board which meant
the confiscation of all products from the stores and the prohibition of
trade within these villages, it was in effect a death sentence.
Although his diary reveals that he was targeting Ukrainian
regions of the North Caucasus his public pronouncement at the Presidium
of 23rd November deviously referred to the need to concentrate all the
pressure for grain requisitions on the Kuban because the quality of the
bread was better there, a pretext as thin as a cobweb[17]. The Black
Board was mainly targeted on culturally Ukrainian villages and
prevented the influx of goods from other areas; became one of the key
components in the machinery of mass starvation.
According to the former head of the archives of Ukraine,
Hennadiy Boryak [18] this system, which had been occasionally used from
1930 onwards, was applied to villages in habited by 5 million people
across Ukraine and Kuban in 1933. The Ukrainian Communist party began
placing villages on this black board system en masse from December 6th
1932 onwards. [19]
The extension of the black board across much of Ukraine was accompanied
by the introduction of natural fines. On 9th November 1932
Soviet Ukraine introduces a secret law that is central to the Holodomor
and allowed peasants who failed to produce grain, to meet requisitions
by means of confiscating other foodstuffs.[20] The law itself talked of
meat and potatoes but the evidence, as we will see, is that everything
was confiscated from most of rural Ukraine early in 1933.
By December of that year the country, in common with much of the Soviet
Union, was experiencing shortages and some people were beginning to
distend like grotesque balloons of skin with hunger. Although we have
noted some peculiarities regarding the situation in Ukraine and in
particular the growing concern at the threat of autonomy some
researchers argue that the famine in Ukraine was identical to the
famine elsewhere. That case is untenable when we examine the
documentary base for the events of 1933.
At a politburo session of 27th November Stalin spoke of the
need to strike a ‘destructive blow’ [21] against krestyany (peasants)
in the collective farms who were resisting grain requisitions. This
verbal permutation is probably because as we have noted in their
private correspondence and diaries, Stalin and his henchmen could admit
a hostility towards Ukrainians.
In their public pronouncements they sought to maintain the
illusion of a voluntary union of peoples opposed by the evil bourgeois
nationalists. At a meeting on 10th December Stalin harshly criticised
Skrypnyk, the champion of Ukrainianisation in the North Caucasus of
ties to Ukrainian nationalist organisations. It is however the secret
central committee resolution of 14 December[22] regarding grain
requisitions in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Western Oblasts which
reveals the link between the requisitioning of food and the attack on
Ukrainian nationalism.
Under this resolution the campaign of food requisitioning
was to be strengthened while the party in these regions would be purged
of counter revolutionary elements and in particular the “bourgeois
nationalists” in the Ukrainian communist party. The decree also
required the Russification of education and publications in the Kuban.
The destructive blow would fall on the Ukrainian countryside for as
Stalin said ‘the nationality question is in the essence of the matter a
question of the peasantry’[23].
8) THE
CRUSHING BLOW
The willingness of revisionist researchers to overlook the final round
of searches which resulted in everything edible being stripped from
Ukraine is the sleight of hand which makes the Holodomor, as a
genocide, vanish. However, commonsense, if nothing else, requires us to
see that when Stalin arranged for everything edible to be confiscated
from Ukrainian areas and sealing the borders it was more than
coincidence. The case for the Holodomor as genocide rests on the
eyewitness testimonies now running into the hundreds of thousands which
say that during a final round of searches everything edible was taken
from Ukraine and on four documents-
the New Year Telegram to the Ukrainian
farmers
the Directive of 1933 to seal the
borders of Ukraine and Ukrainian areas
the operative order No.1 of 5th December
(which talked about the “organised sabotage of bread collection and
theft” in Ukraine
the operative order No.2 of 13th
February (which talked about liquidating the nationalist underground in
Ukraine).
The New Year Telegram, when studied together with the eyewitness
testimony and the Directive of 22nd January 1933 tell us how the
Holodomor was implemented, all foodstuffs were confiscated and the
borders were sealed. The orders tell us why, because they show that the
starvation of the peasantry was accompanied by executions and terror
against a mythical nationalist underground that was hiding grain. I say
mythical because search after search in the later part of 1932 had
failed to uncover significant quantities of bread and a fairy tale had
grown up, despite clear signs of the beginning of mass hunger, about
the farmer hiding bread.
The New Year Telegram seems quite innocuous. It was sent to the
communist chiefs of Ukraine on 1st January 1933 and required them to
make everyone in the collective farms aware that
- if people gave up bread that they had been hiding
in the next round of searches they would not be repressed.
- If they continued to hide bread they would face
the severest methods of punishment detailed in the Law of 7th August
1932, the law of five ears, that is they would be shot.
This may be the most lethal telegram in history [24]. The first point
shows that all bread would be taken from Ukraine. However, the second
point was addressed to those peasants who did not give up their bread,
which in effect meant the vast majority. How would you find out if
people were hiding grain/bread? The only way was to search. If bread
was found during the course of a search you would be shot. But what
would happen if nothing was found?
Most of the villagers in Ukraine knew that as of November 1932 if no
bread was found during a search other food would be confiscated, the
official term for this was natural fines, and the law talked of
confiscating meat and potatoes. However, the evidence is that
everything edible was stripped. The telegram had initiated the mass
theft from Ukrainian peasants of all their food.
Fedir Kapusta, who was born in the Poltava district in 1900,
remembered seeing the brigades of activists gather everything from the
village, potatoes, cabbages, pumpkins. Hryhoriy Moroz, born in 1920 in
Sumy district, remembers the activists removing food that was being
cooked and throwing it out of people’s houses and interrogating people.
‘What are you subsisting on’
‘I have nothing’
‘Then why are you living’
‘Well because I am’
‘Why have you not perished’ - and here the activists would use the word
zdokh which is used of the death of an animal rather than a human
being.
The eyewitness testimony reveals that entire villages were wiped off
the map. Hanna Yermolenko, who was born in 1915, remembers that her
village, Katerynka near Kirovograd ceased to exist after the Holodomor.
She recollects the activists in early 1933 going from house to house
and removing everything edible. She had hidden a few beans in a glove
which she concealed in the ceiling. The activists found what can only
have been a pathetic morsel and beat her up. They then beat
her mother to death in front of her[25].
Teodora Soroka, who was born in 1924, remembers the activists gathering
everything from her house even taking soup off the stove and throwing
it into the yard [26].
The directive of the communist party and the soviet government
prohibiting the departure of starving peasants from Ukraine and the
Kuban, issued on January 22nd 1933, stated that in the Kuban and
Ukraine a massive departure of peasants ‘in search of bread’ has begun
into other regions of the Soviet Union. As we have noted the organisers
of the Holodomor referred explicitly in correspondence to the need to
target Ukrainians but in public pronouncements often used synonyms and
the letter referred to ‘krestyany’ (peasants) as a synonym for
Ukrainian peasants.
It claimed that ‘this departure of peasants, like the
departure from Ukraine last year, was organised by the enemies of
Soviet power, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the agents of Poland,
with the goal of agitation ‘through the peasants’ in the northern
regions of the USSR against the collective farms and against Soviet
power as a whole. Last year the Party, Soviet and Chekist organs of
Ukraine were caught napping by this counter-revolutionary trick of the
enemies of Soviet power. This year we cannot allow a repetition of last
year's mistake.’
The Party and the Plenipotentiary of the OGPU [political police] of
both Northern Caucasus and Ukraine were not to allow the massive
departure of peasants from these regions, or to allow
peasants to move between North Caucasus and Ukraine. The Russian and
Belarusian Parties and the OGPU were ordered to ‘immediately
arrest all "peasants" of Ukraine and the North Caucasus who have broken
through into the north and, after separating out the
counter-revolutionary elements, to return the rest to their places of
residence’. The GPU transport section was given a similar order.
The directive was signed by the Chairman of the Council of Commissars
of the USSR: V. M. Molotov Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Pan-Russian Communist Party: J. Stalin. So we have a telegram which
initiated the stripping of all food from Ukraine the sealing in of
individual villages and the arrest and return of starving peasants
fleeing from Ukraine and Ukrainian speaking regions of the USSR.
The order, the directive to stop starving peasants fleeing and the
eyewitness statements tell us how the Holodomor was inflicted. The
other two documents the operative order No.1 of 5th December which
talked about the ‘organised sabotage of bread collection and theft’ in
Ukraine and operative order No.2 from 13th February which talked about
liquidating the nationalist underground in Ukraine are the pretence,
the wave of the magician’s wand. Of course Stalin who had organised the
stripping of all food knew that peasants were not really Polish spies,
he was concerned that Ukraine might break free and this was a
pre-emptive strike.
An order to exterminate Ukrainians by famine would have
stripped bare the true nature of the party and exposed the lie on which
it was based, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would have been
exposed as a cabal of murderers. He had to create a pretence that
peasants were not fleeing because they were starving but really because
of the evil machinations of Marshall Pidsulski. Operative orders Nos. 1
and 13 were intended to create the impression that there was a network
of spies in Ukraine and indeed the OGPU under Balyckyj did conduct
arrests, searches and executions.
The blood of innocents was spilled to give credence to a lie
but a lie that Stalin feared might become true. Ukraine might break
away. A communist leader speaking in the Kharkiv region in 1934 said
‘Famine in Ukraine was brought on to decrease the number of Ukrainians,
replace the dead with people from other parts of the USSR, and thereby
to kill the slightest thought of any Ukrainian independence.’[27]
Balyckyj, the Chief of the Political Police in Ukraine had given the
game away when he said in front of an Italian Diplomat ‘the
ethnographic material will be changed’[28]. The letter in which these
words are cited makes ugly reading for the Diplomat concerned was a
fascist and an anti-Semite. But we must set that aside and reflect that
he was trying to convey a true picture of Soviet reality to his fascist
masters and that this quote would seem to fit in with two other curious
aspects of the Holodomor.
The people who were to be settled in the regions purged of
much of their Ukrainian population would need food. Some limited food
relief was disbursed to some peasants early in 1933 and this fact is
cited by Wheatcroft and the Holodomor deniers as proof that the
Holodomor was an accident, it is portrayed as genuine humanitarian aid.
In fact the food was ‘loaned’ to peasants who were able to assist with
the Spring sowing campaign and was simply to enable a limited number of
peasants to live for long enough to maintain the continuity of the
agricultural cycle.
Postyshev the functionary in charge of the sowing campaign
who toured Kyiv Oblast in 1933 made it clear that aid distributed in
hospitals was to be targeted on those who could quickly return to work-
the rest were to be left to die [29]. By the summer of that year
millions of Ukrainians would have died and measures to replace them
began. On August 31st 1933 The Council of Peoples’ Commissars of the
Union of the USSR resolved that ‘the resettlement of 10 thousand
families to Kuban and Terek, and 15 to 20,000 families to Ukraine
(Steppe) by the beginning of 1934’ would be organised.
Stalin took care to oversee the work of changing Ukraine’s
ethnography and Kaganovich wrote to him in October 1933 reassuring him
that these families would be resettled by the end of the year. The
resettlement was accompanied by the Russification of media and
education in areas such as the Kuban. The ethnographic material had
been changed.
9) CALLING A SPADE A SPADE?
We have seen that Stalin organised the mass starvation of Ukrainians in
early 1933. Does this constitute Genocide? The words of the Convention
of 1948 are quite clear, genocide is ‘any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such including - Killing
members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part. There are researchers who are aware of the facts
above but argue that the Holodomor was not genocide. The official
position of the Israeli government is that ‘for us the Holocaust is the
only genocide’.
However there are some matters where debate is not appropriate.
Enforced starvation is clearly inflicting on Ukrainian peasantry
‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part’. Genocide is a legal term and academics such as
Ellman and Schneider are placing their own opinions above the letter of
international law.
Lemkin himself, who wrote the convention, in a chapter of an unfinished
history of genocide discovered by Roman Serbyn, spoke of - the classic
example of Soviet Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian
nation. As long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its
people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek
independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart
of Sovietism. It is no wonder that the Communist leaders have attached
the greatest importance to the Russification of this
independent[-minded] member of their "Union of Republics," have
determined to remake it to fit their pattern of one Russian nation.
For the Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian. His
culture, his temperament, his language, his religion - all are
different. [...] Lemkin referred to the mass executions of Ukraine’s
elites its leadership, religious, intellectual, political, its select
and determining parts, are quite small and therefore easily eliminated,
and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the
Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder,
deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation. The attack has
manifested a systematic pattern, with the whole process repeated again
and again to meet fresh outburst of national spirit.
The first blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national
brain, so as to paralyse the rest of the body. [...] Going along with
this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive against the
churches, priests and hierarchy, the "soul" of Ukraine. Between 1926
and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its Metropolitan
(Lypkivsky) and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. [...]
The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers,
the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the
tradition, folk lore and music, the national language and literature,
the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is
perhaps the most terrible of all - starvation. Between 1932 and 1933,
5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death Lemkin’s description of the
genocide in Ukraine in the 1930’s rings true. The view that the
Holodomor was an accident or was part of a wider Soviet tragedy ignores
the wave of assaults on Ukraine’s elite.
10) A
TRAGEDY OF THE ENTIRE SOVIET PEOPLE?
Current Russian historiography points to the instance of famine as a
tragedy of the entire Soviet People. V Danilov and I Zelenin argue,
correctly, that the law of five ears applies to all of the Soviet
Union. However, they ignore the New Year Telegram, the Directive of
January 1933, the orders to liquidate nationalism, and the mass
confiscation of food from rural Ukraine early in 1933. In this view the
Holodomor is somehow cut adrift from the distinct processes operating
in Ukraine and Russia.
It is of course true that the expropriation of grain
affected all bread producing regions of the Soviet Union in 1932.
However the mass and coordinated round of searches in 1933 combined
with a blockade to stop starving peasants fleeing is limited to Ukraine
and Kuban. There were occasional and uncoordinated episodes in other
areas of food requisitioning to a similar degree. But there was no
co-ordinated mass starvation of an ethnic group combined with the mass
murder of its political, cultural and spiritual elite.
If the famine had been a tragedy which affected Russia as much as
Ukraine then we would see demographic evidence that vast numbers of
people starved in both republics. Mark Tolts, a demographer at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, outlines the pressure on Soviet
demographers to boost the numbers of the population and the chaotic
state of demographic data [30]. However, the census statistics show
that the Ukrainian population of the Soviet Union was
31,194,176 in 1926 and 26,421,212 in 1937, it had shrunk by 16%;
whereas the Russian population had grown from 77,791,124 to 93,933,065.
The officials who compiled the 1937 census would pay with
their lives for their professionalism. However, we know that the
collection of demographic data for this period was chaotic. According
to Skrypnyk, Balyckyj had admitted that 8 to 9 [31] million people died
of hunger in Ukraine and the Kuban. Kondrashyn, the leading Russian
researcher of this period, has recently suggested that deaths
in Ukraine and Kuban were higher than in Russia because the area is
more compact [32].
Again thanks to the magic of words the truth vanishes as if
it had never been. The explanation that he gives this single sentence
is a crude attempt to divert attention from the documentary evidence.
We are dealing with a crime comparable in scale to the Holocaust but
one from which the world averted its eyes. Even today academics with
ties to Russian universities are reluctant to acknowledge the existence
of the documents and the implication of the testimonies that we have
discussed.
12)
YOU CANNOT HOPE TO BRIBE OR TWIST
Hilaire Belloc penned a charming little ditty which sums up many
people’s view of the press
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! The British Journalist
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed there’s no occasion to
However it was an American, Walter Duranty, who wrote for the New York
Times, who became the monarch of falsehoods concerning the Holodomor.
Muggeridge described him as ‘the biggest liar I have met in 50 years of
journalism’. However, Duranty’s work became the most authoritative view
of the Soviet Union. He privately admitted that as many as 10 million
people may have died of famine in 1933. In public he claimed that there
was no serious famine in the Soviet Union. He retains, after death, the
honour of the Pulitzer Prize. He was however, merely the lead violin in
an orchestra of liars. Eugene Lyons, a journalist based in Moscow at
the time of the Holodomor, recalls how journalists systematically
discredited both the famine and Gareth Jones
Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in
years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes… we admitted
enough to soothe our consciences but in roundabout phrases that damned
Jones as a liar [33]
Gareth Jones was banned from returning to the Soviet Union because his
articles gave a true account of the starvation conditions he saw in the
winter of 1933. His reward was to have his articles passed over by
publications such as the Economist. The liars and charlatans of the
press corps dined in relative luxury in Moscow while hundreds of miles
South bodies were gathered in carts and tipped into mass graves.
13)
HISTORY ALWAYS REPEATS ITSELF
The first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The dominant orthodoxy
in British and indeed American universities is that the Holodomor was
not Genocide. James Mace who painstakingly collated the eye witness
testimonies, which are one of the key bases of evidence for the
Holodomor certainly felt that he had been hounded out of Western
academe and stated that some academics accused him of falsifying
history.
The most vocal ally of the Russian view, and the most
influential researcher of recent decades, Stephen G Wheatcroft, took a
decision early on in his career to ignore the vast volume of eyewitness
testimony and, with his mentor Davies, did valuable work unearthing
much Soviet archival material but painting a revisionist view of the
Soviet union as a country run in effect by well meaning incompetents
trying to industrialise a backward country at breakneck speed.
The famine was, they argue, the result of cock up rather
than conspiracy. More recently in a work published in 2004 they have
argued that the issue of some grain relief to Ukraine in early 1933
indicates that there was no Genocide[34]. I have dealt with the fact
that the evidence shows some relief was issued to allow the spring
sowing to go ahead a nicety which is entirely absent from their work.
The mass searches preceding this specific and targeted food relief are
ignored.
Rather curiously they sent this book to Stanislav Kulchytskyy, the
leading Ukrainian Holodomor researcher, in 2004 with a note stating
that Conquest had now changed his mind and did not believe that the
Holodomor was Genocide. Kulchytskyy’s response was a detailed
explication of the New Year Telegram and the concept of natural fines
combined with the eyewitness testimony. His work is the major source
for this lecture and builds what seems to be an unanswerable case.
However, his arguments are left unanswered by Wheatcroft who
instead wrote a letter to a wide circulation publication in Melbourne
the Age, published on November 20th 2007, which stated that ‘Most
advocates of the Genocide claim, including the Ukrainian President,
cite the work of Robert Conquest. With respect, they should be aware
that Dr. Conquest no longer supports this claim. He recently told me
that it was no longer his opinion that Stalin purposely inflicted the
1933 famine. Rather, he argued, ‘he (Stalin) could have prevented it
but put Soviet interest other than feeding the starving first, thus
consciously abetting it’[35].
In fact the argument for the Holodomor as Genocide is based not on
Conquest’s point of view but on hundreds of thousands of eyewitness
testimonies and the documents showing that massive enforced starvation
was inflicted on Ukraine in 1933.Wheatcroft ignores the
natural fines issue instead suggesting that the food was requisitioned
for economic interest, an argument that can be thrown into the garbage
along with the pots of stew and the flower seeds all of those
economically valueless foodstuffs which were taken from people in 1933.
You cannot export a pot of Borsch that has been tipped into the mud.
He is, however, incorrect in his characterisation of Robert Conquest
who remains unwavering in his view that the Holodomor was an act of
Genocide. As he wrote in Standby Magazine in September 2008
The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide,
drafted before much was really known about the Terror-famine, opens
by saying that ‘in time of peace or in time of War’ it is a crime under
international law to commit ‘acts with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such’ by
‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’….
It is proven that the mass deaths from starvation were due to the
removal of foodstuffs by the authorities, following decrees from above.
The decrees applied to specified areas, especially the Ukraine, but
also the largely Ukrainian-inhabited Kuban, the Don and later other
north Caucasus regions. There were also blockades against their getting
food from the north (in each case the villages were harder hit than the
towns). There is some dispute about certain points, but not on the
essentials. Stalin starved others besides Ukrainians. But he was
capable of various verbal variations – as when he and his supporters
argued that the Doctors’ Plot of 1953 was not anti-semitic since
several gentiles were also arrested.[36]
I telephoned Dr. Conquest in his office at the Hoover Institute on
February 3rd 2009. He was surprised to discover that his views had been
misrepresented. The letter that Wheatcroft wrote does not actually
articulate any meaningful argument against the Holodomor. If there are
those here who have believed his vociferously expressed claims about
the Holodomor in the past it is time to realise that this Colossus of
Soviet studies has feet of Clay.
13)
LIES DAMNED LIES AND DIPLOMACY
Auden described the 1930’s as ‘a low dishonest decade’ and the
behaviour of the British Diplomatic Corps during this period shows that
they were willing to ignore the deaths of millions of people in the
interest of not upsetting Uncle Joe. As the authors of the Foreign
Office and the Famine note ‘Britain ...was the first European nation to
establish diplomatic relations with Moscow after the revolution, London
knew more, with the possible exception of Berlin, about the situation
in the Soviet Union than any other Western government.’[37].
Sir Laurence Collier, head of the Foreign Office Northern
Department, wrote that ‘we have a certain amount of information about
famine conditions in South Russia [but] we do not want to make it
public, however, because our relations with the Soviet Government will
be prejudiced’[38]. The diplomats kept silent as report after report
dropped onto the desks of their Whitehall offices.
Anyone who writes to the British Government asking them to recognise
the Holodomor as a Genocide receives a similar blandly worded response
composed of a few sympathetic words, the Holodomor was a terrible man
made tragedy, a few comments about how some Minister or minor royal has
laid a wreath in honour of the dead at the Holodomor memorial, and a
statement that there is no consensus among academics about the
Holodomor being a genocide.
In 2007 I obtained the academic material which is used to
underpin the government’s argument that the Holodomor was not Genocide,
the research paper produced by the Ministry’s own internal academics at
the request of the British Ambassador in Kyiv. I have the letter that
his Excellency wrote requesting the research to be undertaken which
suggests, in bloodless corporate language that ‘we need to get our
lines straight’ about the famine, particularly in view of the Ukrainian
government’s wish to see the Holodomor recognised as a Genocide.
Part of the letter has been withheld under Freedom of
Information Act on the grounds that it might damage relations with
Ukraine. The researcher replies to the Ambassador that he has always
sided with those historians such as Wheatcroft and Davies who argue
that the famine was not Genocide. The subsequent paper he produces
includes a rehash of their arguments, an acknowledgement, which
significantly is not referenced, that there is some evidence of a
policy of deliberate starvation of the Soviet Peasantry. The paper
appears to accept Russian views about the lack of a distinct historical
process operating in Ukraine.
The context of Soviet nationalities policy and the final fatal round of
searches are ignored. My lobbying seems to have produced one change in
the official response- the word Holodomor is used. The Government has
in May 2008 promised to work with Ukraine to raise awareness of the
Holodomor. But the research team, and as a result the Ministers, are
stuck with a dated account of the Holodomor which ignores the eye
witness testimony.
The final argument in the paper is that Britain opposes
retrospectively applying international law and that the Holodomor
predates the Convention is clearly untenable. The Convention was
written in 1948 and this approach would rule out the Holocaust as an
act of Genocide. In fact The U.N. Convention on the Non-Applicability
of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity [39]
eliminates the argument that acts of Genocide committed prior to the
Genocide Convention are not subject to prosecution.
In my subsequent correspondence with the Desk Officer for Ukraine at
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office he argued that the famine was not
specific to Ukraine because it also affected the Kuban, a statement
which shows that he was not familiar with the primary sources on the
Holodomor. He also, following one of Wheatcroft’s statements on
Conquest, which I addressed earlier, states in one of his e mails that
Robert Conquest no longer believes the Holodomor to be a Genocide.
At the present time therefore we can expect to see some
government participation in commemorative events but, behind the public
sympathy, the British state will not accept the reality of the
Holodomor. Indeed so far only 14 states have so far recognised the
Holodomor as an act of Genocide and 6 states have recognised it as a
criminal act of the Stalinist regime [40] and the European Parliament
has now condemned it as a crime against humanity.
One other country which seems to be unable to recognise the Holodomor
as Genocide is worth mentioning here. The United States recognises the
Holodomor as a criminal act and in 2006 the U.S. Congress passed HR562
for the construction of a Holodomor Memorial in Washington, DC, which
authorised the Government of Ukraine 'to establish a memorial on
Federal land in the District of Columbia to honor the victims of the
Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932-1933’.
However, according to Morgan Williams ‘the United States
Congress has never officially, upfront, directly, and in a Resolution
for this specific purpose, ever Resolved that the Holodomor is a
genocide… despite heavy lobbying from Ukrainian Americans and Armenian
Americans. Such direct and specific actions through
Resolutions by the U.S. Congress regarding genocides, for many years
and through several U.S. Presidents have been strongly opposed by the
Office of the U.S. President and the U.S. Department of State.’ [41]
But why?? I hope that one day I can return to you with an explanation.
14)
WWW.HOLODOMOR.ORG.UK
In 2007 I established my site holodomor.org.uk to campaign for the
British government to recognise the Holodomor as a Genocide and
succeeded in gaining an offer of publication for my translations of
Tychyna, from Poetry Salzburg Review, two achievements which make me
proud. I would like to thank Jeff Mowatt who made the sight possible
and the editor of Poetry Salzburg Review for displaying a courage that
is rare in the poetry world and being the first small press publisher
to make Ukrainian literature in translation available to a wider
public.
However, it is in a way a sad comment on England’s
perception of Ukraine that we should have to campaign for this
appalling act to be acknowledged and the absence in English cultural
life of both the Holodomor and an awareness of Ukrainian identity and
culture is lamentable.
I will end this lecture by affirming that we can change the
image of Ukraine in the U.K. Although the government is unlikely to
revise its stance on the Holodomor soon because BP needs the vast seas
of black gold locked in Russia’s Siberian regions should campaign
because we have a duty to the past and, most importantly, to the dead
who deserve to have a true account of why they were murdered embedded
in England’s culture. This lecture may be the only lecture given from
John O' Grouts to Lands End in which the New Year Telegram and natural
fines are mentioned.
Elsewhere, beneath baroque stonework or in brick built
seventies polytechnics the misleading views of revisionist historians
will be repeated. There is a danger that the voices of the still living
witnesses will not be heard here in England. But if we campaign and
make sure that the truth is known to a wider public we can expose the
flawed research which ignores the testimony of the victims and the laws
allowing enforced starvation together with the cynicism of a political
elite which values a barrel of Brent Crude more highly than the moral
obligations that make us human.
Those politicians, and diplomats who know of what happened in 1933, but
choose to avert their eyes or keep silent have made a bargain with
Satan, selling their souls for their careers. While dancing
with Stalin on the graves of the dead they have forgotten their
obligations before humanity. The Holodomor was a crime against each one
of us. We have to remember the truth together and resolve that such
acts will not be allowed to re-occur. There is no other path to a
better world.
AUR
EDITOR NOTE: Contact Steve
Komarnyckyj, British Ukrainian Writer, Poet and Translator:
[email protected].
We appreciate the outstanding work Steve Komarnyckyj has been
doing over the past few years to bring the Holodomor to the attention
of the British government and the world. He has led a drive
to get the British government to pass a resolution recognizing the
Holodomor as genocide. He has been very active regarding the
history of the Holodomor and has started the
www.holodomor.org.uk
website and a newsletter. He has also be active in the
program to raise the level of awareness and relief work regarding the
genocide in Darfur.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The quotes from Gareth Jones’ articles are taken from “A
Grain of Truth; the Biography of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones” By Dr
Margaret Siriol Colley, Nottingham 2005
[2] "The Soviet's War on the Peasants," Fortnightly Review, XXXIX, May
1933, p. 564.
[3] Savchenko, Fedir (1970). Zaborona ukrayinstva 1876 r. 2nd ed.
Munich. p 381
[4] Secrety Valuevskoho Tsyrkulyara 1863 Roku. Panchenko Wolodymyr.
Ukraina Incognita. Za Zahalnoyu red L. Ivshynoi. 2nd publication Fact.
Kyiv 2003
[5] Two Conceptions of the History of Ukraine and Russia, Polonska-
Vasylenko, Natalya. AUGB Publishing. London 1968
[6] The account of Ukrainianisation draws on numerous works by
Kulchytskyy and Mace
[7] For an abridged Ukrainian version see “Rostrilyane Vidroddzhennya-
Antolohiya 1917- 1933” Lavrinenko Paris 1959- Kyiv 2004 pp 493- 564
[8] Chas Nazriv. Dobkin Oleksiy. Initial. Lutsk 1998. pp 40- 41
[9] Rostrilyane Vidroddzhennya- Antolohiya 1917- 1933. Lavrinenko, Y.
Paris 1959- Kyiv 2004 pp 24- 25
[10] Bohdan Lepkyj- Poyeziyi. Radyanskyj Pysmennyk Kyiv 1990 p 15
[11] Ukrayinskyj Istorychnyj Zhurnal- 2005- No 2 P 120
[12] The account of the legislative base of the Holodomor, the law on
natural fines etc is drawn from Holodomor 1932- 1933 Rokiv V Ukraini
Yak Henotsyd. Kulchytsky S. Nash Chas.Kyiv 2008
[13] The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence 1931-1936. Yale University
Press, New Haven & London, 2003. Pp. 179-181.
[14] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 pp 282- 283
[15] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 pp 286- 287
[16] Komandyry Velekoho Holodu, Kyiv. 2001. – p.254.
[17] Holodomor 1932- 1933 Rokiv V Ukraini Yak Henotsyd. Kulchytsky S.
Nash Chas.Kyiv 2008. p 285
[18] At a Round Table Discussion of the Holodomor at the Ukrainian
Embassy on June 10 2008
[19] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 p 449
[20] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 pp 376- 378
[21] Tragediya Sovetskoy Derevny. Moscow. 2001 Volume 3. – pp .557-559
[22] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 pp 476- 478
[23] The Ukrainian Weekly, June 24, 1984, No. 26, Vol. LII
[24] Holodomor 1932- 1933 V Ukrainia- Dokumenty i Materialy. Redaktor
Pyrih, R. KMA. Kyiv 2007 p 569
[25] Ukrayinskyj Holocaust 1932- 1933- Svidchennya Tykh Shcho Vyzhyv-
Yuri Mytsyk Kyiv 2005 p 182
[26] with the exception of Hanna Yermolenko all the testimonies are
taken from Holodomor 1932- 1933 Rokiv V Ukraini Yak Henotsyd pp 304-307
[27] V. Danilov et al., Sovetskaia Derevnia Glazami OGPU_NKVD. Vol. 3,
book 2. Moscow 2004 Danilov, V et al P. 572
[28] Lettere De Kharkov- La carestia in Ukraina e nel Caucaso Del Nord
Nei Raporti dei Diplomatici Italiani. A Cura Di Andrea Graziosi –
Torino 1991. P 168
[29] Holod 1932- 1933 na Ukraini Movoyu Dokumentiv
[30] "The Failure of Demographic Statistics: A Soviet Response to
Population Troubles,"
Paper presented at the IUSSP XXIVth General Population Conference,
Salvador-Bahia, Brazil, August 18-24, 2001
[31] This quote was published in the West along with may other sources,
such as Duranty which give high totals for the Holodomor. Kulchytskyy
and others argue for lower totals based on the Census of between 3 and
5 million and on migration statistics which may have been manipulated.
However there was continuous pressure on demographers to inflate
population statistics so the words of the people in charge cannot
simply be dismissed on the basis of demographic evidence. Also the
concept of only counting excess deaths is questionable- the vast
majority of all deaths in the Ukrainian countryside during the
Holodomor, including those within the natural death rate, may well be
attributed to the famine. Even if you are due to die a premature death
by enforced starvation is still murder.
[32] see
http://www.day.kiev.ua/153901/
for Kulchytskyy’s analysis of Kondrashin’s views
[33] More than a Grain of Truth- the Biography of Gareth Richard Vaughn
Jones page 303
[34] R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, _The Years of Hunger:
Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004. xvii 555 pp.
[35]
http://www.theage.com.au/news/letters/decision-a-win-for-science-over-ideology/2007/11/29/1196037070785.html?page=fullpage[37] Carynnyk, Marko (et. all) The Foreign Office and the
Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-33.
Kingston, Ontario, Limestone Press, 1988, pg. 63.
[38] More than a Grain of Truth- the Biography of Gareth Richard Vaughn
Jones page 303
[39] U.N. GAOR, 23rd Sess., Supp. No. 18, at 40, U.N. Doc. A/7218
(1968).
[40]
http://www.mfa.gov.ua/mfa/ua/publication/content/14528.htm[41] In an e-mail of 31 December 2008 to the Holodomor
Commemoration Working Group
==============================================
Mr. E. Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs,
Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer,
Emerging Markets Private Equity Investment Group;
President/CEO, U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC)
Publisher & Editor, Action Ukraine Report (AUR)