ACTION
UKRAINE HISTORY REPORT (AUHR) #8
Kyiv, Ukraine, D.C., Saturday, July 25, 2009
TWO
ARTICLES:
1.
"UKRAINE'S SUFFERING STILL OVERLOOKED BY WORLD"
OP-ED: By Alexander J. Motyl, Special to
Kyiv Post (with famine photograph)
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, July 24, 2009
2. STARVING
CHILDREN PHOTOGRAPH WITH KYIV POST'S
ARTICLE
"UKRAINE'S
SUFFERING STILL OVERLOOKED BY
WORLD"
IS NOT KHARKIV OR UKRAINE OR 1932-1933
Action Ukraine History Report (AUHR), Kyiv,
Ukraine, Saturday, July 25, 2009
===============================================================
1.
UKRAINE'S SUFFERING STILL OVERLOOKED BY WORLD
OP-ED: By Alexander J. Motyl, Special to Kyiv Post (with
famine photograph)
Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, July 24, 2009
Nazi Germany’s greatest war crime is the Holocaust, of course, but the
genocides against Ukrainians and Belarusians constitute a close second.
And yet, while the Holocaust is common knowledge, few know much about
the extermination of Ukrainians and Belarusians — and Germans may know
about this least of all. The tragedy of these peoples’ suffering in the
war has been compounded by the world’s almost complete ignorance and
indifference.
That lamentable condition may be about to change, if only among
professional historians. In a ground-breaking article that was
published in the July 16 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yale
University historian Timothy Snyder describes in excruciating detail
just how Nazi policy was directed at exterminating first the Jews and
then the Slavs. Since Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for almost four
years, they suffered enormous population losses.
According to Snyder: “Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was
either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the
kind can be said of any other European country. … The peoples of
Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most,
since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the
terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in
the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent,
Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.”
The devastation that affected both countries is even greater when one
considers their experiences in the Stalinist 1930s and in World War I.
Ukraine lost at least 3 million people in the genocidal famine of 1933.
Both countries also served as the main killing fields of the Eastern
Front during World War I (1914-18), the Civil War in Russia (1918-21)
and the Polish-Russian War (1919-21).
According to a recent study of the Moscow-based Institute of
Demography, Ukraine suffered close to 15 million “excess deaths”
between 1914 and 1948:
1.3 million during World War I?
2.3 million during the Civil
War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the famine of the early 1920s
4 million during the genocidal
famine of 1933?
300,000 during the Great
Terror and the repressions in Western Ukraine
6.5 million during World War
II?
400,000 during the post-war
famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian nationalist movement
Ukraine and Belarus experienced nearly 40 consecutive years of
relentless death and destruction, starting in 1914 and ending with
Stalin’s death in 1953.
Although Soviet Russia bears a great deal of responsibility for the
killing, the lion’s share falls on Germany.
And yet Germany, which so assiduously remembers its crimes during the
Holocaust, has still to build one monument to the millions of
Belarusians and Ukrainians its armies killed in the 20th century.
How can this blindness be explained?
Partly, it’s a function of ignorance. The German media devote almost no
coverage to Belarus and Ukraine. It is also partly because Germans just
don’t “see” these countries.
Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll’s 1949 novel “The Train Was Punctual”
provides a good example of this cultural mindset. The novel describes a
young German soldier’s return to the front in southern Ukraine. As he
travels eastward from his furlough, he traces his route on a map and
“visits” various cities, towns and villages in Ukraine.
He speaks of Poles and Jews and Russians in great detail, but he
doesn’t mention Ukrainians once, even though they formed the vast
majority of the country and were the people whose farms he and his
comrades probably plundered on a daily basis. Imagine a trip through
the American South without a single reference to the black population.
But why don’t Germans “see” people who are so manifestly there? To some
degree it’s because the “Untermenschen have remained Untermenschen” —
economically underdeveloped peoples with silly cultural practices who
either can’t get their political act together (Ukraine) or are proud to
be Europe’s only dictatorship (Belarus).
The more important explanation is that German elites have traditionally
viewed their neighbors to its east through the prism of great-power
politics. Russia is big and strong and therefore demands respect. Its
ruler may be a dictator, and its policies may be neo-imperialist, but
these matters are easily overlooked.
Former German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder still managed to describe
former President Vladimir Putin as a “true democrat” at precisely the
time that Putin was doing all he could to crush Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution. Poland may be prone to polnische Wirtschaft (the derisive
term for Poles’ inability to do things efficiently), but they’re right
next door and have to be dealt with.
But Belarus and Ukraine? They’re just places with pipelines that carry
Russian gas to German homes and factories.
NOTE: Alexander J. Motyl is professor of political science at Rutgers
University-Newark in New Jersey and can be reached at
[email protected].
===============================================================
2. STARVING
CHILDREN PHOTOGRAPH WITH KYIV POST'S
ARTICLE
"UKRAINE'S SUFFERING STILL OVERLOOKED BY
WORLD"
IS NOT KHARKIV OR UKRAINE OR 1932-1933
Action Ukraine History Report (AUHR), Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, July 25,
2009
KYIV - There is a photograph of two starving children with the article
in the op-ed article entitled, "UKRAINE'S SUFFERING
STILL OVERLOOKED BY WORLD," by Alexander J. Motyl, published by
the Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday, July 24,
2009.
In the print edition the description of the photograph is as follows: "
Ukrainian children, starving from hunger during the Stalin-ordered
famine of 1932-33, find something to eat in Kharkiv Oblast.
An estimated 7 million Ukrainians died as a result of Holodomor, which
is now widely recognized as genocide against Ukrainians (Courtesy).
NOTHING
TO DO WITH KHARKIV OR UKRAINE OR 1932-1933
The truth is the photograph has nothing to
do with Kharkiv, has nothing to do with Ukraine and has nothing to do
with 1932-33. The photograph is a very well-known, widely
distributed, rather famous photograph taken in Russia during the
1921-22 famine. The photograph shows up in many books from
the 1920's and on a series of postcards issued in Paris,
Brussels, and Geneva in 1921-22 to raise money for famine relief in
Russia. I have copies of the original postcards in my
collection.
The set of fundraising postcards depicting famine related images from
Russia in 1921-22, including the postcards with the photograph
used in the Kyiv Post article and said to be from Kharkiv, Ukraine,
1932-1933, can be seen at
http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/famine10.htm.
Is it important that the use of photographs from the 1921-22 famine in
Russia not be used over and over again, as they have in the past 50
years, mainly in the USA and Canada, to depict the Holodomor. It is
really an outrageous error for the Kyiv Post to continue to do
this.
Unfortunately there are no known photographs of the type shown in the
Kyiv Post article that were taken in Ukraine in 1932-1933 which show
naked starving children or adults who are alive or dead.
=========================================================
NOTE: If you do not wish to be on the Action Ukraine History
Report (AUHR) e-mail list please send an e-mail to
[email protected].
=========================================================
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)
1701 K Street, NW, Suite 903, Washington, D.C. 20006
Telephone: 202 437 4707; Fax: 202 223 1224
Ukraine Mobile: 380 50 689 2874
[email protected];
[email protected]
www.sigmableyzer.com;
www.usubc.org