President Viktor Yushchenko has undertaken the extremely complicated task of trying to obtain international recognition for the Holodomor of 1932-33 as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people and immortalizing the memory of its victims. During the presidency of his predecessor Leonid Kuchma, the Holodomor was quietly broached once a year. These days President Yushchenko talks about it on an almost daily basis.
Personally, I completely understand our head of state’s concern. When I was preparing for publication the manuscript of the book Vriatovana pamiat. Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv na Luhanshchyni: Svidchennia ochevydtsiv (Rescued Memory: The Holodomor of 1932-1933 in the Luhansk Region: Eyewitness Accounts), I recorded and then transcribed hundreds of accounts provided by my fellow countrymen. So I know with every certainty that our society will never be civilized or democratic without this historical memory.
From these Holodomor eyewitness accounts emerges a hair- raising picture of a true genocide that was perpetrated against the Ukrainian peasantry, when whole families (and families in those days were large) and entire villages starved to death after the local authorities confiscated all their foodstuffs. Even though the goal of this genocide, which was carried out in the form of deliberately starving people to death- hence the term Holodomor-was to destroy only part of the Ukrainian peasantry, it had grave genetic and nation-destroying consequences. Considering the difficulties of the current state-building process, the question today is: can this devastating ethnic blow of 1933 have an irreversible effect on the Ukrainian nation?
As a Holodmor researcher, I contact various individuals and try to figure out their attitude to the subject. I encounter very few people who share my views. Among these few are moral individuals with native intelligence (some who have an education and some who don’t). These are people who were affected by the Holodomor and their children and grandchildren, who heard about the Holodomor from their parents and grandparents. Most people, including intellectuals, have a vague idea of this tragedy simply because of the lack of data. This is probably why they regard President Yushchenko’s Holodomor campaign as a purely political, even tiresome, project.
Among students, who lack national consciousness and are oriented toward consumer values, I occasionally meet young people who cannot conceal their psychological discomfort when they simply hear the word “Holodomor.” Local bureaucrats from the presidential vertical have learned to camouflage this psychological discomfort because they want to hang onto their positions.
Quite often I encounter individuals (mostly people from the older generation) who are literally nauseated by words like “Holodomor” or “genocide,” who cannot curb their aggression toward any person with a different point of view, including our head of state, who, in their opinion, invented this Holodomor business simply to curry favor with the Americans and “Banderites.” This category of individuals consists of poorly-educated people, who have been thoroughly brainwashed by communist propaganda. These people are still enslaved by Soviet propaganda myths and are very susceptible to modern anti- Ukrainian myths.
Strange as it may seem, I have observed quite a few individuals among them who come from those villages or raions that were the most severely affected by the Holodomor. I don’t think that all their parents belonged to the ruling Bolshevik circles, the ones who were confiscating everything edible from their fellow villagers, thereby saving themselves from death by starvation. This behavior on the part of my interlocutors from the above-mentioned category must have been motivated by their parents’ fear of starvation, and this fear has been handed down the generations. I wonder if the ideologues and organizers of the Holodomor against the Ukrainian peasantry knew that it would have such promising consequences.
There is another category that may be singled out from among my fellow countrymen: local officials who are not directly subordinated to the president (representatives of local self-administrative bodies) and regional journalists who are close to them. With rare exceptions, which do not change the general picture because of their paucity, the representatives of local councils of all levels are principally opposed to anything President Yushchenko says or does simply because his political coloration is different, even when his actions and statements are for the good of the very people whom these bureaucrats serve.
As for the local media, most of these people are either hostile to all things Ukrainian about which the president speaks or supportive of everything that is international (read: Russian). Even if they hold different viewpoints from their colleagues, they are forced to write and broadcast what their bosses in regional or district councils or the local oligarchs who own these media tell them to. As a result, everything pertaining to the Holodomor is presented by the local media in a manner that has nothing to do with the Ukrainian state-building point of view, or is passed over in silence.
I will illustrate this trend with an example from my experience. Practically all the journalists in Luhansk oblast were invited to the launch of my book Rescued Memory . Few of them attended: obviously, some of them were ordered by their bosses to ignore it. For 40 minutes I talked about my difficult but interesting work on the book. I cited mind-boggling facts, shared eyewitness accounts, and offered my conclusions. There was nothing remotely related to my presentation in the local media, and not a word about my book.
A female journalist asked me a number of provocative questions along the lines of: “Can you prove that it was an act of genocide against the Ukrainians?” Even so, she did not write a single line on this topic. Instead, our two television channels, LOT and LKT (run by the regional state administration and regional council, respectively), seemingly in cahoots, broadcast only one insignificant phrase made by the TV presenter. For those who attended the book launch, this was a mockery, as was LOT’s sarcastic announcement on its Web site: “Lost memory’ (Why not call it amnesia?”)
I know of cases where journalists working for newspapers that are the official organs run of raion councils, after receiving free copies of my book, told their colleagues that they would never use the facts and figures in it. Instead, certain local newspapers graciously devote their pages to contributors, so-called “veterans of the Great Patriotic War,” who try with all their might to prove that the 1932-33 Holodomor was not an act of genocide against the Ukrainians, declaring that “all peoples of the Soviet Union suffered from the famine.” Interestingly, a similar opinion is advanced by Russian politicians and scholars.
Until recently, the members of local councils have totally ignored such measures as laying flowers at monuments to the victims of the Holodomor in Luhansk oblast, unveiling monuments, or launching commemorative exhibits. Neither have they taken part in thematic roundtables. But they gladly appeared on television talk shows, where they could deny the existence of the Holodomor.
The most active local council members hold events whose content absolutely contradicts the substance of those measures that have been initiated by the president. Not so long ago, Arsen Klinchaev and several activists from the Party of Regions laid a cornerstone in the downtown oblast center, where a “monument to the victims of the OUN-UPA” in Luhansk oblast was to be erected. Whereas the local authorities are taking their time allocating a plot for a Holodomor monument, there is absolutely no problem allocating one for this kind of monument: the best site and no red tape! People who have seen the design say that it is painfully reminiscent of the one intended to commemorate the Holodomor victims, to be installed in the city of Luhansk. Is this not another grimace on the part of those who have neither conscience nor honor, who simply pretend that they are living in a democratic society?
District-level members of the Party of Regions have even outdone their oblast colleagues (the Regionals numerically outnumber members of other parties on all levels in Luhansk oblast). In Svatove raion, where at least half the population perished during the Holodomor, there is already a monument to the Holodomor victims and another one to the victims of the OUN-UPA. Some woman from Svatove is said to have been sent on a Komsomol-related business trip to Ivano-Frankivsk oblast after World War II and was “tortured to death by the Banderites” there. This subject is extremely popular with the oblast and raion media, while any attempt to objectively discuss the Holodomor is taboo.
In the last few months there have been interesting transformations taking place in the local Party of Regions organizations. According to reports from certain raions, some Regionals are taking part in the measures that have been initiated by the president, specifically in the ceremony to unveil a monument to his fellow countrymen who starved to death. I don’t think that these people are doing this consciously, in keeping with their ideological convictions, let alone carrying out some party routine. We all know that the Party of Regions is known for its rigid discipline, and Kyiv would probably never tolerate such independent actions. Perhaps these are harbingers of certain changes in the Verkhovna Rada.
In telling readers of The Dayabout my fellow countrymen’s attitude to the Holodomor topic, I have omitted another category: the future citizens of Ukraine. Some high school teachers, who are aware of my work and its subject matter — directly or through their acquaintances — are organizing meetings for me with their students. I have already delivered a few lectures and been pleasantly surprised by their interest. Not a single student has looked disinterested. No one has denied the fact of the Holodomor. I am sure that these students, if they have teachers who realize the importance of historical memory for the rising generation, will grow up to become true citizens of Ukraine.
At the same time, I have serious doubts about the prospect that our students will turn into such citizens a few years from now. After all, in Luhansk oblast there are many teachers who will never look at our history through Ukrainian eyes, nor will they ever allow their students to do so. Eventually, their initiative will be taken up by university and college lecturers, who differ little from their colleagues.
If most people of middle age and older find it hard to change their views in regard to Ukrainian history simply because their world perception was formed under the Soviets, then the independent Ukrainian state must make every effort to ensure that the younger generation is fully and objectively informed about Ukrainian history. Otherwise Ukraine as a state will not have a future. I am convinced that our president’s statements and edicts alone are not enough; nor are the not very energetic endeavors of the newly-established Institute of National Memory.
The question is: who will win? Either it will be the surviving remnants of imperialist forces, the successors of those repressive bodies that committed heinous crimes against Ukraine in 1932-33 (whose latter-day successors are ensconced in Ukraine’s government and all nongovernmental organizations), or the Ukrainian state, which will finally succeed in organizing and systematizing the work of dealing with the problems of historical memory and, above all, conveying it to the younger generation.
Iryna MAHRYTSKA is an associate professor at Vladimir Dahl Eastern Ukrainian National University and chairperson of the Luhansk oblast branch of the Association of Holodomor Studies of Ukraine.
