The Armenian Nairi Publishing House is soon to publish Stanislav Kulchytsky’s Why Did He Destroy Us? Stalin and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33, which is part of The Day’s Library Series, on the initiative Oleksandr Bozhko, a translator, writer, journalist, and Ukraine’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to Armenia.
Bozhko plans to hold a joint Armenian-Ukrainian conference in the Institute of History at Armenia’s Academy of Sciences that will be dedicated to the launch of the book. At the conference historians from both countries will share their experience in studying controversial pages of history — both nations have gone through difficult experiences and suffered the genocidal atrocities.
In what follows we offer for your attention Kulchytsky’s complete letter addressed to the Armenian reader.
Dear friends,
I have been very pleasantly surprised to learn that my book Why Did He Destroy Us? Stalin and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33 has already been translated into Armenian. Anyone whose book is being published in a foreign country would be happy to receive suchlike news. However, in this case it is not about the author’s ambitions.
In 2008 my book was translated into Romanian, which also made me happy, although in a different way. When Oleksandr Bozhko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Armenia, told me in a telephone conversation about this news, he added: it would be great if this book began with your address to the Armenian reader, especially considering your ethnic roots. He had paid attention to the brief biographical information placed at the end of the Ukrainian version: my mother’s name is Maria Karapetivna — Maria is an international name, whereas only an Armenian can have this patronymic name.
Oleksandr Bozhko, a writer, journalist, and translator from Armenian, who became Ukraine’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to Armenia after we regained independence, has asked me to write a foreword for you. So I would like to tell you about myself, the topic of this book, and the book itself.
I belong to the fully official category of citizens, called “children of the war,” who even enjoy certain minor material privileges. At the same time, I can say I belong to the unofficial, albeit quite real, category of “children of the empire.”
For several centuries my ancestors on the mother’s side lived close to the border of the Ottoman Empire, in the Armenian colony of Akerman (now Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky, Odesa oblast). They preserved their religion and, owing to my grandmother Zartar’s efforts, I was baptized in the Armenian Apostolic church unbeknownst to my ideologically-minded parents, who studied in the Odesa Institute for Water Transport Engineers.
In 1905 my mother’s parents left Akerman and moved to Odesa. They moved into an old house on Tyraspolska St., where my uncle Illia was born in 1905 (he was killed near Sevastopol in 1942), followed by my mother in 1910. This is also where I spent my childhood and teenage years.
In my office I keep a portrait of my grandfather painted in oil by a fairly skillful painter back in Akerman. He died a few years before I was born and I know little about him. He worked as a typesetter in a small printing shop, and his April 1933 death certificate identified the cause as lead poisoning.
Now I know that people died of starvation not only in the countryside, but also in cities. Most vulnerable were those who worked in not-so-important enterprises, for example, in printing shops, because they were cut off from the centralized food supply system. After studying many hundreds of testimonies, I now know that the registering clerks tried hard to make up causes of death that were not linked to the famine. I remember the horror with which my grandmother spoke of 1933, never explaining why she was so afraid. In Stalin times it was forbidden to speak about the famine; any mention of this subject was qualified as anti-Soviet propaganda. In subsequent decades, up until 1987, the famine was a taboo. So what kind of death did my grandmother Karapet meet?
In those distant times when my ancestors on the mother’s side left Armenia, my forefathers on the father’s side left the Ukrainian village of Kulchytsi near Sambir and moved to some place in ethnic Poland. I only know that one of them, who had been totally Polonized, participated in the Polish rebellion of 1830 and was exiled to the Caucasus. After many decades his family moved to Odesa, where my father Vladyslav was born. Judging from his name, and my own, too, the memory of the Polish roots was kept in the family; however, it was completely Russified.
I know that my ancestors on the father’s side took great pains to conceal their noble descent and Polish roots. When I was about to get a passport, I wanted to be registered as a Pole. My mother got very scared and obtained some papers that said that my father was Russian.
Concurrently with the Holodomor, Stalin’s henchmen Pavel Postyshev and Vsevolod Balytsky organized the destruction of Ukrainian and Polish intelligentsia charging it with involvement in the imaginary counterrevolutionary organizations — the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Polish Military Organization. They also deported dozens of thousands of Poles from border regions of Ukraine to Kazakhstan. My mother and I were “family members of an enemy of the people,” because my father was repressed in 1937, the year when I was born. I received my passport in the same year that Stalin died, and then the designation “enemy of the people” still carried its full weight. Now I can picture how horrified my mother was when I wanted to become officially registered as a Pole.
A few words on the topic of the book are in place. The Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban, which was Ukrainian-speaking at the time, is an episode of the all-Union famine of 1932–33. However, this episode is special in that it was not so much about people starving to death as about murder by famine. If millions, rather than individuals, are killed, this murder is called genocide.
Naturally, just like many of my compatriots, I knew about the existence of the famine, which was not acknowledged by the state. However, I did not know in what way it was different from the all-Union famine. Nor was I aware of the causes of this latter famine. I simply could not fathom that the accusations of an engineered famine made against the Soviet authorities could be true. I saw the surrounding world the way I was taught in the Soviet school. I was unable to absorb the experiences of my family’s two previous generations as they kept silent in order to safeguard my peace and their safety.
Many remember that in the late 1980s the Soviet Union, the “country with the unpredictable past,” shocked the world with its recent history as it was revealed. Then the mass media was killing, on a daily basis, people’s faith that our past was not so bad after all. It is only in recent years that we have seen collections of top-secret documents that show the overpowering pictures of millions of starving children, women, and elderly people in the throes of death.
Working with top-secret documents in the archives, I naively thought that I knew everything about the interwar period in Soviet history. I wrote and defended my 1976 thesis on this era, specifically on Soviet industrialization. However, when I studied the documents in the “special folder,” to which I gained access in the mid-1980s, this turned my worldview upside down. Without losing the spiritual connection with the Russian people and their culture and without forgetting about my Armenian and Polish roots, I had, for the first time, an acute sense of belonging to the long-suffering Ukrainian people. Together with this feeling came the realization of my terrible guilt: as a member of a group of lectors commissioned by the CC Communist Party of Ukraine, I had toured all oblasts telling about the achievements of the Soviet state. Since then, for a quarter of a century now, I have had only one goal: to understand what have happened to all of us since 1917 and share this understanding with others.
Let me also say a few words about the book. It is an attempt to show what really happened in 1933 and also explain why it happened. It is made up of articles that were carried by the Kyiv-based newspaper Den’. This daily is intended for the serious reader and is published in Ukrainian and Russian, while the most interesting articles are included in The Day, its weekly English-language digest. The newspaper has a website and pays close attention to historical topics. Larysa Ivshyna, the editor in chief, has been publishing thematically arranged collections of articles on burning issues in Ukrainian history in book format.
In closing I would like to touch upon the discussions among Ukrainian and Russian politicians concerning the Holodomor’s qualification as genocide. I am sure that these discussions arose only because both sides are viewing the Holodomor through the customary lens of the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.
I have the Polish translation (published in Krakow in 2005) of a wonderful book by the French scholar Ive Ternon Armenians. The Story of Forgotten Genocide. I have read a lot on the Ukrainian Holocaust, i.e., the death of 1,500,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. I witnessed certain outward signs of this Holocaust in Odesa, and these childhood memories have forever become engraved on my memory. Finally, there is the Holodomor, which I have been studying for a quarter of a century now.
Despite all the dissimilar features of the first two cases of genocide, they have something in common: they are subsumed under the wider notion of ethnic cleansing. Many of my colleagues put the Holodomor in the same category without giving even a thought to the fact that in this case one would have to explain for the benefit of what people the territory was being cleansed.
Some politicians go even further: whether overwhelmed by emotions or acting in a cold-blooded fashion and pursuing their own end (these are a miserable minority), they identify the people with the political regime and accuse Russians of genocide against Ukrainians. The absurdity of this accusation is unbearable for those Russians who do not separate Ukrainians from themselves. The voices of the extremists on both sides are heard especially clearly. After all this, is it possible to reach mutual understanding between historians and politicians in Ukraine and Russia on the nature of the Holodomor?
The Holodomor does not have anything in common with ethnic cleansing. In my book I am trying to prove that millions of lives were sacrificed at the altar of Stalin’s government. The dictator was afraid he would lose his personal power if a social explosion occurred in Ukraine, something similar to the one that took place in the first half of 1930. This kind of explosion was imminent.
The Soviets indeed had the authority of workers and peasants, as they claimed. However, in the conditions of strict government centralization, their spread through all the layers of society caused the party and government nomenklatura, the entire multimillion-strong state party, and the people itself to become a plaything in the hands of the dictator. This is the main conclusion I make in my book.
Oleksandr Bozhko, Ukraine’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to Armenia:
“It is very important for us to convey information on Ukraine and the things it lives by to Armenian society, because Armenians have limited opportunities in this respect. They learn about Ukraine primarily through Russian TV channels. Naturally, their perception of Ukraine’s political, economic, and cultural life is somewhat inadequate. The same pertains to the interpretation of our history.
“In Soviet times all the questions linked to the interpretation of history were determined by the center, regardless of whether it was about Armenia or Ukraine. After our nations regained their independence, there was a need to know more about each other, in particular about the tragic pages in the history of both nations, such as the 1915 events in Western Armenia or the Holodomor in Ukraine.
“Working in Armenia, I saw on many occasions that for want of access to objective information, this nation, which is friendly to us, is unable to grasp the scope of our national tragedy and its causes. When Stanislav Kulchytsky’s book, which was prepared for publication by Den’, got into my hands, I immediately thought of publishing it in Armenian. Students of history can, of course, learn about the Holodomor at least from the Internet. However, it is important to give the public at large an opportunity to benefit from an unbiased presentation of the facts that were kept hidden from us for so long. This is especially relevant because we lived in one state and are not indifferent to each other as nations.
“I have known Kulchytsky as an authoritative historian for many years. I like his approach to interpreting historical events, especially in the question of the Holodomor, which has drawn the attention of the world community largely owing to his selfless work.
“The acknowledgment of the Holodomor became the subject of persistent ideological and informational struggle. As an ambassador, Ukrainian citizen, and a person who has studied the Ukrainian-Armenian relations for a long time, I was interested in having the book Why Did He Destroy Us? Stalin and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33 published in Armenian.
“The embassy was greatly assisted in this undertaking by the Armenian writer Feliks Bakhchinian. He eagerly accepted the proposal to translate Kulchytsky’s book into Armenian.
“It turned out that the author’s mother, Maria Karapetivna, is a descendant of the Armenians who lived in Southern Ukraine. So it seems logical that the author included an address to the Armenian reader. In this foreword he touches upon the parallels between the tragic events in the history of our nations that should never happen again. This is another goal we are pursuing with this edition. Humankind has gone through many hard experiences, but unfortunately, it has failed to draw lessons from all of them.”
