It appears that some begin to discover the truth about one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies only in the epoch of the informational explosion, seventy years after the fact!
Discover is the right word because the 1933 manmade famine was long suppressed in terms of information, from the world and the very people who died a hungry death. The very word, famine, was banned.
The intelligence services of Western states, of course, had the information. But the press was full of trumped-up false eyewitness reports. That was the period of by far the most successful Soviet disinformation. If Stalin could hush up a famine-induced genocide, what could prevent Hitler from making use of this experience and to deny the genocide of the Jews?
Milena Rudnytska, the then Polish senator, wrote in The Fight for Truth About the Great Famine about how difficult it was to put the question of Ukrainian famine on the League of Nations agenda: the delegations of the USSR and the so-called Ukrainian SSR denied everything.
In 2000, the struggle for truth continues.
France’s Albain Michel Publishing House in 2000 in Paris issued a big book of eyewitness accounts about the Ukrainian famine (490 pages), titled Le noir, trente-troisieme. The original Ukrainian text ’33: Famine, Book of People’s Memory, 1991, compiled by Lidiya Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, has been translated into French by Volodymyr Boichuk, Kalyna Huzar-Uhryn, and Oleh Pliushch.
The print run was soon sold out. A reprint is in the making. However, there is a problem with the preface written by Professor George Sokoloff whose name was put on the cover. The point is that Stalin hushed up the famine by all the possible means. This campaign of denial ran through the whole Russian-language literature. It only became possible to break through the information blockade after the inquiry of an international commission into the 1933 genocide, the publication of Vasyl Barka’s novel The Yellow Prince, Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing, Robert Conquest’s world-acclaimed Harvest of Sorrow, and the production of some films.
But undisguised falsifiers are giving way to tendentious relativists who still try, for some reason, to diminish the size of the disaster. Among them is the preface’s author.
Prominent French philosopher and Sovietologist Alain BesanНon (who could have written a more competent preface) said in 1983, “In addition to praying, all we can do for many of those martyrs is remember.”
But even praying was not allowed everywhere. Outside the Evil Empire, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church performed, often jointly, annual Lenten liturgies in memory of the famine martyrs. There March became the month of mourning, for most people died precisely in this month. Bound Brook, New Jersey (USA) had a church built to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy (the remains of Patriarch Mstyslav now rest there).
And what about Ukraine? A fact hard to grasp: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is still in the thrall of Stalin’s policy of silence. It is difficult to imaging that Ukraine’s most numerous church should not remember in its prayers and mourning liturgies the seven million Orthodox peasants who died without confession or unction and were dumped in pits without Christian funeral.
Or has the church forgotten? But the other Ukrainian churches — Autocephalous, Kyiv Patriarchate, and the Greek Catholic — do remember and commemorate this annually.
Does this loss of memory and scorn for our kindred martyred by the famine not affect the moral condition of the current generation?
Prayer and memory. A nation that has lost memory cannot be reborn, the Frenchman BesanНon reminds us.
