Two scholarly conferences in New York and one in Washington have been held to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Holodomor.
A November 8 symposium was held at the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Greenwich Village, the charming neighborhood only a stone’s throw away from New York’s traditional Ukrainian neighborhood. Primarily aimed at the Ukrainian-American community, Prof. Taras Hunczak presided over a morning session in English, in which I outlined the argument of why the Holodomor should be considered genocide and Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley (Great Britain) gave a presentation on her uncle, Gareth Jones, who had done everything he could to tell the world the truth about 1933 at the time. The afternoon session in Ukrainian consisted of Natalia Dziubenko-Mace focusing upon her work as literary editor for the book Holod ‘33. Narodna knyha memorial (The Famine of 1933: A People’s Memorial Book), compiled by the late Lidiya Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, followed by Ukrainian State Archive on Social Associations (former Party Archive) Director Volodymyr Lozytsky and Kyiv Oblast State Archive Director Volodymyr Danylenko on archival materials connected with the famine.
On November 10 a larger conference was held at Columbia University opened by Prof. Mark von Hagen, featuring papers by Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations Valery Kuchinsky, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Hennady Udovenko, along with myself, focusing on international recognition of the Holodomor. A second panel consisting of Drs. Lozytsky and Danylenko, Prof. Yury Shapoval, and Leonard Leshchuk examined newly released archival information, while the final session on the Famine-Genocide in Memory and the Arts had me speaking on oral history, Prof. Larissa Onyshkevych of the Shevchenko Society on self-censorship in Soviet historical fiction on the famine, and a paper submitted by Roman Krutskyk of Kyiv Memorial, who did not attend. That evening an exhibition organized by the Ukrainian Museum of New York for Ukraine’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations was opened at the UN.
On November 13 the Ukrainian Embassy to the United States, the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center, Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and the US-Ukraine Foundation sponsored a conference in Washington’s Smithsonian Institution complex on the Ukrainian Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933. Prof. Shapoval presented a masterful survey of the archival documents he has done more than anyone else to unearth, documents that demonstrate that the efforts to take grain and combat “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” were concentrated on Ukraine and the Kuban, the population of which was about two-thirds Ukrainian at the time. Following his presentation, I could only try to add details he had been forced to leave out for lack of time due to translation. Then Prof. Abbot Gleason of Brown University spoke of the need to redefine the concept of genocide and asked questions that seemed to him necessary to determine whether the Holodomor could indeed be considered genocide. Prof. Shapoval and I answered them in the discussion. Later panels dealt with the issues of the international reaction to the Holodomor at the time along with the use of famine as a weapon and its lessons for the prevention of genocide, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing.
In honor of Dr. Colley’s presence and efforts, The Ukrainian Weekly reprinted my article, “A Tale of Two Journalists” from The Day, No. 22, July 15, 2003, unfortunately without reference to The Day. We urge our colleagues to be more attentive next time.
The writer of these lines moved to Ukraine ten years in utter professional defeat. After over a decade of researching what Ukrainians now call the Holodomor of 1932-33, colleagues in the field that had only recently been Soviet studies would tell me to my face that I had falsified history, misused evidence, and every door that seemed to crack open was slammed shut without warning. Upon moving to Ukraine, I was also not exactly received with open arms either. Former historians of the former Party were only beginning to digest what was being unearthed from the archives, and many were suspicious that I had come here with the presumption to try to teach them something about their country. To everybody’s surprise, including perhaps my own, I survived and even became something of a fixture on Ukraine’s intellectual scene.
Upon receiving invitations to American conferences on the Holodomor I accepted with some trepidation. I knew what I had left and was uncertain of what would await me. Fortunately, I was most pleasantly surprised. Larissa Onyshkevych of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York worked closely and ably with academic institutions not affiliated in any way with the Ukrainian community. Columbia University of the City of New York, the venue of one conference, could have been moved to greater sensitivity on the issue by the fact that there is now a project in the Ukrainian community to raise $5 million for a New York counterpart to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, but this cannot be said of the Kennan Institute in Washington, where no such grandiose projects are in the offing.
The field of former Soviet studies has changed almost beyond recognition in the last decade. Ten or twelve years ago the rising academic stars were those who were attempting with all their might to discredit the idea that there might have been something that it makes sense to call totalitarianism and to prove that any crimes that might have been committed during the Stalin period had been grossly exaggerated by Cold War ideology. Even after independence, Ukraine was widely seen as a temporary phenomenon not to be taken serious. The years of open archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union and interaction with those here who have been using them have convinced all but the most diehard of Sovietophiles that truly terrible things in the Soviet period crippled cultures and claimed millions of lives. It has also led a significant number of scholars to disregard the nineteenth century stereotype that they were peoples without histories, enshrined in Soviet doctrine of the historical friendship of peoples, and recognize that even without full statehood people continue to have their own histories. In the Soviet case this means that while just about all nations suffered in one way or another, they suffered in different ways, for different reasons, and with different results. The idea that Ukrainians — and not only they — were victims of genocide in the Stalin period is at last beginning to get a fair hearing from the very same people who dismissed any such notion out of hand only a few years ago. And just about everyone has recognized that, for all its problems, independent Ukraine is here to stay. The rest of the world is now getting used to this and trying to understand this country that few expected to appear.
There are, it seems, progress and even justice in this world, often difficult and never inevitable, but it does happen. From the distance of seventy years, it gives us a feeling of satisfaction that we could do something for those whose memories we revere.
