The Harvard University recently hosted an international scholarly conference on the consequences of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine. As a participant of the conference, I would like to share some of its conclusions with The Day‘s readers.
THE HARVARD UKRAINIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE
The Harvard University is the oldest and richest American university. It was not accidental that Omeljan Pritsak, the leading historian of the Ukrainian diaspora, decided, in his time, to use the donations contributed by the community to found the Ukrainian Research Institute in Cambridge (near Boston, Massachusetts), which is the site of the Harvard University. The institute became an integral part of this university. This is where research into the 1932-33 Holodomor was launched.
On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor the institute’s staff launched a massive interviewing campaign among the eyewitnesses of the tragedy. Robert Conquest, one of the leading Western authorities on the Soviet history, was invited to the project. In 1986 the institute published his monumental work The Harvest of Sorrow in several languages. James Mace, a researcher at the institute, became Staff Director of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine. In 1987 the activities of this commission forced the leadership of Soviet Ukraine to recognize the Holodomor, which had previously been concealed by the Soviet authorities for decades.
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
A quarter of a century later, after the initial stage of the Holodomor research, known in historiography as the “Harvard project,” the administration of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) passed a resolution to organize a high-level scholarly conference. This proposal was sent to Andrea Graziosi, an Italian professor and a former researcher at Harvard, who had won wide professional recognition for his fundamental research on Soviet history.
Gaziosi and the staff of the institute did the groundwork for the conference for one year and managed to gather together authoritative specialists from nine countries. The American delegation consisted of George Grabowicz and Roman Szporluk, former HURI directors, Michael Flier, the then director of the Institute, Aleksandr Babyonyshev, Mark Kramer, Terry Martin, Serhii Plokhii, and Lubomyr Hajda, all professors at Harvard, and other specialists on Ukrainian history-Brian Boeck (DePaul University), Oleh Wolowyna (University of North Carolina), Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University), and Timothy Snyder (Yale University).
Ukraine was represented by researchers from the Institute of Ukrainian History at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences: Hennadii Boriak, Valerii Vasyliev, Oleksandra Veselova, Liudmyla Hrynevych, Hennadii Yefimenko, Heorhii Kasianov, and Stanislav Kulchytsky, as well as Yuri Shapoval of the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies. Conference participants also included Roman Wysocki (Poland), Karel Berkhoff (Netherlands), Jacques Vallin, France Mesle, Nicolas Werth (all France), Felix Wemheuer (Austria), Andrea Graziosi (Italy), Roman Serbyn (Canada), and Oleg Khlevniuk (Russia).
In 1983 two of the above researchers, Aleksandr Babyonyshev (known in the scholarly circles as Sergei Maksudov) and Roman Serbyn, were the participants of the first ever conference on the Holodomor in Montreal. Nearly all of the historians from Europe, who came to Harvard, were approximately their age. However, the Harvard University and the Institute of Ukrainian History were represented in equal shares by the older and middle-aged generations. This ratio is not accidental. Harvard takes steps to ensure future research on this topic in Ukraine and other centers of world research.
The conference was organized according to the standards of Western science. Its participants submitted the texts of their presentations in advance via email and the organizers had them translated into English, if necessary. Therefore, scholars were able to frame questions so as to spark discussion; answers to these questions were in the focus of attention. The audience, consisting primarily of graduate students, was captivated by the highest-level intellectual polemics. The strong and weak sides of each presentation were judged by moderators and discussants: Nicolas Werth, one of the authors of the famous Black Book of Communism (published in Ukrainian in the summer of 2008), Oleg Khlevniuk, an authoritative researcher of the Kremlin’s archives, Roman Serbyn, a professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal, demographer Oleh Wolowyna, and George Grabowicz, the editor in chief of the noted Ukrainian journal Krytyka. The final assessment of the conference was pronounced by Graziosi and Werth in their presentations.
THE NATURE OF THE HOLODOMOR
There is no need to retell the contents of the conference presentations. All of them will be published in the English-language journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies and on HURI’s Internet site. I would like to dwell on the controversial issues that have become the source of serious misunderstandings between the political leaders of Ukraine and Russia. When the president of the Russian Federation refers to “the so-called Holodomor” and bans events commemorating it in his country, this gives rise to purely moral collisions, which neither of the two countries needs. If we cannot find understanding with the Russian side on this relatively simple issue, we have to enlist the support of international community.
In this case I do not mean the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. This is, after all, one of Harvard’s special-purpose institutions that lobby the national interests of certain countries. The Harvard University is an organization with a tradition of pluralism. So here I mean the totality of specialists from different countries who have developed an interest in the issues surrounding the Holodomor.
I believe that the main contribution to the denial of the Holodomor was made by those who exploited the tragedy for their own purposes under the disguise of “sincere Ukrainian patriots.” They did their utmost to represent the Holodomor as an act of ethnic cleansing, and then it did not take much effort to put the blame on the Russian people rather than Stalin or even his totalitarian regime. How can Russians accept these accusations if most of them believe that the Ukrainian people does not exist as a separate entity and Ukrainians are, in fact, Russians, only with a different path of historical development? The prevalence of such unfortunate notions is the consequence of centuries-long state propaganda, and we need to acknowledge this. However, it is both irrational and disgusting to fight for our own identity by blaming Russians for the Holodomor.
One of the conference sessions was marked by confrontation between Szporluk and Maksudov. The latter represents a Harvard structure that lobbies other interests — the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Szporluk convincingly proved that the Stalinist regime fought against Ukrainians who were perceived not as an ethnic community but rather as representatives of the position whose essence was the defense of a separate national identity and state rights that guarantee it.
I have known Maksudov since 1990; our paths have crossed in various countries at discussions of the Holodomor issues. At one point I made use of his professional knowledge of demography-we published a joint article in the Ukrainian Historical Journal on human losses during the Holodomor, even though our estimates differed. I had a long and friendly discussion with him on the sidelines of the conference at Harvard.
The two of us now represent the oldest generation of former Soviet people. We had different upbringing and our life paths went different ways. When he, as a dissident close to Andrei Sakharov, was forced into exile, I published essays collectively entitled Lenin’s Party is People’s Strength and took no less pride in them than I did in my scholarly monographs. Over the last quarter of a century I made a long journey healing my own historical consciousness, and now I am proud that I have done more to reconsider our past than some Western prominent specialists. However, Maksudov had to make his own journey. I became convinced that he is not aware of our national liberation struggle in the early 20th century because he claims that our national statehood was a gift from the Bolsheviks to Ukrainians. How can a person with such limited knowledge be persuaded that the Holodomor was a genocide?
It is our own fault that Russians do not know Ukrainian history and, hence, are unable to properly assess such key events as the Holodomor. This situation has to be rectified. Shapoval’s recent article “Contact” in The Day (#35, Nov. 11, 2008) discusses the books published by the Ukrainian-Russian historical commission headed by Valerii Smolii, an academician of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, and Aleksandr Chubarian, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In Russia they published the 1069-page-long Russian-language Ocherki istorii Rossii (Outline of Russian History), while we published the 800-page-long Ukrainian-language Narysy istorii Ukrainy (Outline of Ukrainian History) in Kyiv. The Ukrainian historians painted a picture of their people’s past that is absolutely new to the Russian readers who were raised on the works of Nikolai Karamzin, Sergey Solovyov, and Vasily Klyuchevsky. That is why I am proud to have been the leader of this authoritative body of scholars.
A person who reads this book on Ukrainian history to the end will, no doubt, be convinced that the Ukrainian people has always had a colossal state-building potential. This brings the readers close to the understanding of the place that the Ukrainian people had among the “titular nations” that were made the foundation of Soviet statehood. Now the reader will understand why in Stalin’s time the Kremlin was afraid of Ukraine’s colossal human and material resources, its geopolitical position at the border with Europe, and the constitutional rights, which the Bolsheviks were forced to grant to the Ukrainian National Republic they had conquered.
THE DEMOGRAPHY OF LOSSES
One of the conference sessions was devoted to the demographic consequences of the Holodomor. In the focus of the discussion were the calculations made by the French demographers Vallin and Mesle. Both were unable to come to Kyiv on September 38-26 for the international conference organized under the aegis of UNESCO, where, among other issues, the same issue was discussed. At this conference the Institute of Demography and Social Studies at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences presented its own calculations. It estimated the human losses in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-33 at 3.4 million people and indirect losses due to a lower birth rate, at 1.1 million people. No one has calculated the losses in the Kuban and other districts of the Northern Caucasus Territory. The only existing estimate is that of Conquest who puts the direct and indirect human losses in this region at one million people.
In Harvard, Vallin presented his joint research with Mesle, Sergei Adamtsev (Moscow-Paris), and Serhii Pyrozhkov (Kyiv). They calculated the losses based on the natural movement of people in the Ukrainian SSR between the 1926 and 1939 censuses. Because the calculations were made in cooperation with the Institute of Demography and Social Studies, they were nearly the same as those presented at the conference in Kyiv.
Mesle presented the recently obtained data on Ukraine’s hypothetical population size within its current borders if it had not suffered human losses from the terror by famine, other Stalinist repressions, the Second World War, and, finally, present-day depopulation. By comparing the real and hypothetical number of citizens for each year of birth (from 0 to 90), the French researcher studied the impact of the demographic catastrophes on the total population size.
It is a known fact that a person’s premature death affects the subsequent generations: his or her children and grandchildren are not born. It turns out that the losses caused by the Holodomor are still a factor in the dynamics of Ukraine’s population size. Our country’s cumulative population, according to Mesle’s calculations, could be 79.5 million people if there had been no Holodomor and war. There is no other country in the world that would have suffered greater human losses in the 20th century.
What are the figures that should be referred to as the estimates of the Holodomor’s demographic consequences? We should not, perhaps, limit ourselves to direct or cumulative losses in the Ukrainian SSR of the time. In his speeches the Ukrainian president acknowledges the figure of 10 million people. In answer to Konrad Schuller, a reporter for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who asked why this figure was triple the other estimates, Viktor Yushchenko referred to the calculations in an album published by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
This publication offers two versions of the calculations, which, however, produce more or less the same results. If we equate the population growth in the Ukrainian SSR with that of the Soviet Union (17 percent), the population size in Ukraine would have had to reach 36.5 million by 1937, a 5.3-million increase since the 1927 census. However, the 1937 census showed that there was a 10.1-million discrepancy between the projected population size and the real figure. If, however, Ukraine’s population growth is equated with that in the Russian SFSR (21 percent), Ukraine would have had 37.8 million citizens by 1937, whereas the census of that year showed only 26.4 million, which was 11.4 million down from the projected figure.
Both calculations appear to be reasonable, but they are based on hypotheses rather than facts. The high population growth in the Russian Federation in 1927-37 is partly attributed to the fact that Ukrainians were forced to register as Russians at the time of the 1937 census. In the Krasnodarsk Territory a mere 170,000 Ukrainians, who had come from Ukraine, were registered. The indigenous population of the Kuban and other areas of the Northern Caucasus Territory, who had survived the Holodomor, registered as Russians.
Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish genocide and ethnocide. In order to estimate population losses caused by the Holodomor, it is appropriate to use, above all, Mesle’s calculations. They show in the most vivid way the scope of the horrible sufferings inflicted on the Ukrainian people. It is important that this information is understood by our fellow countrymen and the international community.
The conference at Harvard was a serious discussion about the immediate and long-term consequences of the Holodomor in Ukraine. This was Graziosi’s intention, which echoed James Mace’s concept of Ukraine as a “post-genocidal society.” The discussion revealed numerous blank sports in this chapter of our history — these are being tackled by the emerging generation of scholars.
