It is not enough to call the event that took place recently in Chernihiv an extraordinary one. The organizers of the roundtable “In Memory of James Mace” — about the Holodomor of 1932-33-was a momentous event in the life of both Chernihiv oblast and Ukraine.
Before the roundtable began, visitors had a chance to view an exhibit about the genocidal Holodomor of 1932-33, called “We Accuse!” which was organized by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory in one of the halls of the Chernihiv Oblast Council building. The hundreds of documents, photographs, and eyewitness testimonies that filled dozens of stands impressed the visitors. There were chilling excerpts from Soviet documents, one of which was signed by Viacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, who led the Extraordinary Commission for State Grain Deliveries in Ukraine: “The question is as follows: if we have grain, the Soviet power will exist. If there is no grain, the Soviet power will die. Who has grain at the moment? The reactionary Ukrainian peasants and the reactionary Kuban Cossacks. They won’t give the grain of their own will. We have to take it.”
Four raions in Chernihiv oblast have already learned the truth of the words “take it” from the exhibit. And people in every corner of Chernihiv oblast are going to learn it, declared Serhii Laievsky, the head of Chernihiv-based V. V. Tarnovsky Oblast Historical Museum.
The American historian and political scientist James Mace, who at one time collaborated with The Day, devoted his life to revealing the truth of Molotov’s words. Thanks to his research, the world finally heard about the Holodomor in Ukraine.
In 1982, at an international conference on the Holocaust and genocide, he said: “In order to centralize the full power in Stalin’s hands, it was necessary to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian history in the way the people understood it, and to destroy Ukraine as such. The calculation was simple and extremely primitive: if there is no nation, there is no country, and as a result there are no problems.”
Proof of the prestige of the Chernihiv gathering was the participation of well-known Ukrainian historians, writers, poets, and journalists as well as a number of state and regional officials, including Prof. Vladyslav Verstiuk, the deputy head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, Vira Soloviova, the head of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Publishing House, Natalia Sushcheva, the director of the Stozhary Production Center, journalist, and author of the documentary film The Candle of James Ernest Mace, Tamara Demchenko, assistant professor at the Department of Ukrainian History and Archeology at Shevchenko State Pedagogical University in Chernihiv, Volodymyr Boiko, the head of the Chernihiv Center for the Re-qualification and Professional Development of State Officials, Local Authorities, Employees of State- run Companies, Institutions, and Organizations (the initiator and organizer of the event), Natalia Romanova, the head of the Chernihiv Oblast Council, and Heorhii Chernysh, the first deputy head of the Chernihiv Oblast State Administration.
In her opening remarks, Romanova paid tribute to the memory of James Mace and mentioned the post-genocidal syndrome, which he coined, a syndrome that led her own father to keep silent about the Holodomor almost until his death. There was hardly a single Ukrainian family that was untouched by this terrible tragedy of the 1930s, a tragedy of the century-of the nation’s entire history. She called upon the students present at the gathering-future historians-always to listen to their conscience and convey the truth about those fearsome years. Other speakers recalled those times and their researcher — the great American Ukrainian James Mace. Below is a selection of some speakers’ remarks.
Prof. Stanislav KULCHYTSKY, deputy head of the Institute of Ukrainian History at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine:
“James Mace has already become part of our history. Three nations suffered most in the 20th century: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. It is difficult to say which of them suffered the most. It was Mace who was destined to become the researcher of the Ukrainian people’s tragedy. Thanks to the special features of American democracy and the astuteness of political activists in the Ukrainian Diaspora, it became possible to establish a commission of researchers (jurists and historians) at the US Congress, who set about studying the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. Why was it that James Mace became its executive head? The answer is that he was moving toward this his entire life. He was the only native American who was not interested in Russian studies, but chose to study Ukraine. Already at university he began studying Ukrainian National Communism.
“There were dozens of similar commissions in the US Congress, so when a new one was formed, nobody attached any importance to it. Without access to the archives and the secret Soviet documents about the deaths of millions, hardly anyone could do anything. But Mace managed to promote this topic. One can write a whole book about the way he did it. The commission’s final session and the report to Congress took place in 1988. Three volumes of eyewitness testimonies were published in 1990. Afterwards, the Ukrainian Holodomor was no longer a secret.”
Natalia DZIUBENKO-MACE, Ukrainian writer and James Mace’s widow:
“I cannot be the individual who will judge James and the degree of his importance. He remains my husband. I have not crossed the boundary where he becomes a symbol and a memory. The appearance of James Mace in my life was too much of a shock. Imagine: I am the granddaughter of an “enemy of the people”; my grandfather was tortured to death somewhere in Vorkuta. Nearly the entire family on my father’s side starved to death. I was born in a system of fear, when everyone was afraid of talking about the famine of 1933. But I knew everything since my childhood. James’s appearance was the return of me. It seemed that it was not he who had arrived in a foreign land but I who returned home, to my Fatherland, where I can talk freely, where there is no fear, and where one does not have to break down. James Mace knew how not to break down.”
Ivan DRACH, poet, Hero of Ukraine, and former Member of Parliament:
“James was a person who knew how to do much and knew much, but he remained wondrously beautiful, pure, and sacred, because he felt best of all when he was among our people. He will always remain with us because he is ours, he is Ukrainian. So, love Oklahoma for James’s sake!”
Larysa IVSHYNA, editor in chief of The Day:
“In 1998, when James started to work at The Day, I began to understand history in a new way through his understanding of our post-communist country and post-genocidal society. He started to present his materials in the information space without knowing what the reaction would be. I saw from our readers’ letters that at first people did not believe that you could talk about these things that way. We can see now how much work Ukrainian historical science has achieved in the past 10 years. And it is important not simply to string together all the horrors that our society experienced, to show the picture of the Apocalypse, catastrophe, and cannibalism, but to think about the causes: what happened in the country before, why this came to the Ukrainian land. None of today’s politicians are eager to say that the mistakes of politicians in the past, the collapse of the Ukrainian National Republic, and the absence of statehood opened the gates to this terrible catastrophe. I think that often one does not speak about this because many mistakes are being made today. I hope that catastrophes on this scale are impossible in our country, but the tragedy of not having a state or of a state that is weak and not able to defend the rights of its citizens is a tragedy for many Ukrainians today. And James was a scholar who not only succeeded in proving the historical facts, he also revealed the causes. Afterwards, he wrote much about the general state of Ukrainian society. He taught Ukrainians how to enter the present world more quickly. James said that history is very cruel, but that it always gives chances. But there cannot be dozens of them at each turning-point.”
After the tributes to James Mace ended, the participants watched the premiere of the documentary film The Candle of James Ernest Mace created by the Stozhary Production Center.
