The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (PA OSCE) proposed to acknowledge the fact of famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine in a resolution last week. The document reads that the PA OSCE pays homage to the memory of millions of innocent Ukrainians who perished in 1932-33 as a result of a mass famine (Holodomor) caused by ruthless and deliberate actions and policy of the totalitarian Stalinist regime.
This event coincided with Russia’s Internet ( www.inosmi.ru ) proposal to take part in the new project “Russia- Ukraine: A Dialog of Cultures” (The Day has an experience of fruitful cooperation with this Web site). The new project is intended as a press club of sorts, involving various authors. Not so long ago, the project was launched and the first topic on the agenda was a discussion of the causes and consequences of the PA OSCE resolution on the Holodomor in Ukraine; www.inosmi.ru titled the discussion “Russia: A Deadly Enemy of Ukraine?” In the course of debate Russia’s experts broached several subjects, including Ukraine’s attitude to the resolution; Russia’s possible reaction; whether Russia should deal with the Holodomor on its own territory; why a number of Ukrainian politicians and experts believe that today’s Russia should assume responsibility for the famine in Ukraine. The Day offers Ukrainian experts’ opinion.
Stanislav KULCHYTSKY , historian:
“It is very interesting to observe what is going on in the heads of our contemporaries during the transition from communism to something that has no name. In any case, it is not capitalism because Europe built a capitalism-based social state long ago, and we have opted for Europe. The Holodomor problem is a kind of test that demonstrates the quality of historical memory and the extent to which our neighbors have reconsidered the history of the Stalin-era USSR.
“For example, Andrei Levkin has a very good attitude to us. He says that the OSCE has acknowledged the Holodomor, and this is not bad, but it has not recognized it as genocide — that is not bad either. Yet if it had been recognized, there would have been nothing anti- Russian in this, according to him. But the final conclusion is absurd: a nation cannot be built on the basis of predominantly sad events. So shall we conceal the Holodomor? But how can you conceal it if millions died and every family lost someone? A nation should be built on the basis of a genuine history.
“I can follow Levkin’s train of thought. Like everybody in Russia, he thinks that the Holodomor is the universally known USSR-wide famine in the early 1930s, which was caused by collectivization, the dispossession of the kulaks, and the export of grain. The millions of Ukrainian victims are simply an empty abstraction for him, all the more so as many Ukrainian journalists exaggerate the number of victims by three to four times.
“I have no doubt that the Stalinist policy of ‘acceleration’ resulted in millions of victims all over the Soviet Union, and this kind of policy should be called genocide. Perhaps one day Russia, together with us, will condemn this policy in front of the international community and stop repeating that there was not only a famine but also the Dnipro Hydropower Plant.
“But what we are talking about is the Holodomor, which resulted from the terror by famine. And terror by famine (‘destructive blow’ in Stalin’s terminology) means the confiscation of all food reserves in Ukrainian and Kuban villages, which were already starving after the requisition of the 1932 harvest. This means the confiscation of potatoes, onions, beets, etc., which had nothing to do with the state grain procurements, the export of grain, and the Dnipro power plant. It is linked to terror, and it is one of the many ugly faces of terror that were used in the course of communist construction in various regions of the USSR, and it was the key method of public administration until Stalin’s death.
“Let’s first examine the subject of the debate and only then find out why the terror by famine was applied to a limited area — the Ukrainian and Kuban countryside. That this policy was genocide is crystal clear. What else can one call the creation of conditions that are incompatible with life?”
“The confiscation of all food, the ban on the movement of the famine- stricken population, and the information blockade — all this is genocide.
“Why this policy was applied to Ukraine and the Kuban is another question. We are prepared to speak on this subject and furnish all the necessary documentation to Russian scholars and the United Nations.
“Natalia Narochnitskaia heads the Foundation for Historical Prospects. Is it worth debating the historical retrospective with her? She will not accept any evidence, no matter how convincing it may be.
“Narochnitskaia is a Russian patriot, which is good. But in all circumstances, one must distinguish between society and the state. Unfortunately, Russians by and large confuse the people with the state authorities. There was a Soviet-era slogan: ‘The people and the party are united.’ In pre-Soviet times, the concept of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality reigned supreme. The state symbols of today’s Russia combine the pre-revolutionary emblem and the Soviet anthem. Therefore, Narochnitskaia regards accusations against Stalin, who headed a totalitarian state, as accusations against the Russian people, without sparing any epithets.
“When you read Narochnitskaia you become terrified. In her opinion, all the borders are disputable. What will happen if people with her way of thinking end up leading the Russian Federation? Perhaps they already have? Statesmen cannot allow themselves to make the kind of statements that Narochnitskaia is making. One day, something like Tuzla will happen and all hell will break loose. Who shall we turn to, with just one submarine in our possession? That same Russia guarantees the nuclear security of Ukraine. So let’s think about NATO.”
Yurii RAIKHEL , The Day columnist:
“The OSCE resolution should be regarded as a step in the right direction — toward recognition of the Holodomor and the sufferings of the Ukrainian people during the years of Stalin’s dictatorship. Nevertheless, this is only the first step, to be followed by a lot of work in order to inform the world community of one of the greatest tragedies that took place in the last century.
“Unfortunately, the process of attaining this recognition is running up against excessive and deliberate politicization, first of all, on the part of Russia, but not just Russia. As the recent Bucharest roundtable debate on Stanislav Kulchytsky’s book Why Did He Destroy Us? Stalin and the Ukrainian Holodomor showed, the Holodomor problem also interests our closest neighbors, who also suffered from communist domination, albeit on a smaller scale. So the Ukrainian state and the entire Ukrainian society still have much work to do. Unless the past is thoroughly studied and the right conclusions are drawn, it will continue shooting into the future.
“Many of the problems that Ukraine faces today have arisen because no moral lessons were drawn from the past. The past is still being exploited by certain political elements both inside and outside the country, and this has a poisonous effect on the mindset of many of our compatriots. This concerns not only the Holodomor but also the UPA problem and, in more general terms, World War Two and Ukraine’s role in it.
“Russia’s reaction to the resolution and, in a broader sense, to Ukraine’s message to the international community about the Holodomor does not appear to be quite adequate, on the one hand, but quite logical, on the other, with due account of the political realities inside that country. The attitude of official Moscow and pro-Kremlin circles to the Holodomor, the Katyn tragedy, and the deportations of Baltic residents in 1940-1941, reflects a radical change in Russian domestic policies from the democracy of the 1990s to growing authoritarianism and an attempt to revive the empire. This kind of thinking rejects the existence of any acute problems in the past.
“On the contrary, an empire can only have a radiant past, which lays the ideological background for Count Uvarov’s three-factor formula. They cannot admit the act of genocide against the Ukrainians because this will immediately raise the question of responsibility for the famine in the Volga region, the Kuban, Stavropol, the Don region, and the Central Chernozem Oblast. This will trigger a chain reaction, with Stalin ending up not as a successful manager but as a criminal who escaped a trial, which Fedor Raskolnikov had promised him in an open letter. The entire Russian ideology of today will thus be undermined.
“An empire is great, and great ones never apologize because, both in the past and in the future, the destinies of its subjects are of little account. The imperialist mentality does not accept in principle a situation where huge Russia should apologize to territorially small Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. The same goes for Ukraine. This is why Russia does not research, as a matter of principle, the famine of the early 1930s.
“A number of Russian historians noted, with a trace of envy, that their Ukrainian counterparts have done so much in their research on the Holodomor and introduced into academic circulation a huge number of previously classified documents. The opposite thing is going in Russia. What used to be unclassified is now becoming secret. Here is an eloquent detail: the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office has classified the findings of the latest investigation into the Katyn execution. Also secret are famine-related documents. Russia needs to study the famine problem as much as Ukraine, if not more. But this will not happen until the overall democratization of public life begins. Unfortunately, there are no such prospects in sight.
“The second problem: for some reason Russia’s ruling circles suspect that, in the event that the Holodomor is recognized, there will be claims for damages. This is not mentioned often, but it is at the back of people’s minds. But an empire never pays anybody anything — it only takes. It would be a good idea to declare once and for all at the official level that Ukraine does not consider today’s Russia responsible for the Holodomor, and to state that the demand that it be recognized as an act of genocide is of moral — not material — importance, as a way of condemning the Soviet totalitarian regime.
“The opinion of some of our political scientists who say that Russia bears responsibility as the legal successor to the USSR should be declared erroneous and even harmful in the current situation. Otherwise, this will not lead to the payment of damages, but instead will further complicate our bilateral relations. Moreover, the lifting of such demands would have a positive effect on Ukraine’s international image and make it difficult for the Russian authorities to hinder Ukraine in the international arena.
“The third problem is non-recognition of the Ukrainians as a separate nation. If Ukrainians are considered part of the Russian people, as Natalia Narochnitskaia does, then the Holodomor was organized by the Russians against the Russians. Yet she considers Stalin’s satrap Vlas Chubar a Ukrainian. The current Russian government was forced to admit that the famine was an excess, but it categorically denies that it was specifically aimed against Ukraine. Moscow is perfectly aware that if the truth about the Holodomor finds its way into public awareness, this will have a shattering effect on the idea of the three branches of the Russian people and will thus render impossible Moscow’s new reincarnation as the Third Rome. This explains Russia’s very painful and inadequate reaction to the recognition of the Holodomor.”
Yurii SHAPOVAL , historian:
“Naturally, the OSCE resolution is only the first step on the path that will surely bring Europeans to an understanding of what the 1932- 1933 Holodomor in Ukraine really was, the specific features of our nation’s tragedy, and what made it different from what the other Soviet republics were experiencing at the time.
“Ukraine is still not being allowed into the European field of historical memory. Some Western experts fear that Ukraine wants to ‘overshadow’ the Jewish Holocaust, others ‘worry’ about Russia, which controls the West-bound gas pipeline. Everything is mixed together: fundamental ignorance of what happened and outright venality (if the Holodomor topic can spoil relations with the Kremlin, why on earth do we need the Holodomor?). In this situation, Ukraine should do more and even redouble its informational efforts.
“In general, the current situation very much resembles the years 1932- 1933. Stalin’s Russia was successfully pulling the wool over the West’s eyes, declaring there was no famine in the USSR, while the West “was happy to be deceived,” to quote Pushkin, trading with Moscow at dumping prices. In this context, we should highly value the adoption of this resolution, after which (possibly) the Europeans will know at least something about what really went on and consider why it was Ukraine that suffered the heaviest human losses.
“Even today’s Russia of Medvedev and Putin is not an abstract notion, and I firmly believe that there are different reactions there. Since the official ideology has now embarked on a course of rehabilitating Stalin’s Russia, current Russian diplomacy (which has adopted Maxim Litvinov and other talented diplomatic lackeys of Stalin as models) has done a brilliant job of thwarting Ukraine’s efforts to bring the truth about the Holodomor to the attention of the world community and discrediting President Viktor Yushchenko as a ‘Russophobe.’
“For example, The Day’s report on the debate quoted a Mr. A. Pushkov, whom I do not know, as saying that ‘the European Parliament refused to unequivocally condemn Russia, as Yushchenko would like it to do.’ My question is: where and when did Yushchenko say or demand PUBLICLY that ‘Russia be condemned unequivocally?’ Which Ukrainian leader has ever allowed himself to make any jibes against Russia, demand damages for the Holodomor, or insult the current Russian leadership (for example, by declaring that Kursk and Voronezh oblasts plus the Kuban are our lands, which we gave to Russia, or other stupidities of this kind)? Nobody has ever made such statements. Now look at the Russian leadership, from Putin (who in his time congratulated Yanukovych twice) to Luzhkov.
“I do not know one serious expert in Ukraine who would speak in the terms that Narochnitskaia uses in the above-mentioned article: ‘to single out Ukrainians here as specially selected victims is not only historically wrong, it is simply indecent and repugnant.’
“Ms. Narochnitskaia, it is ‘indecent and repugnant’ not to know historical facts, for example, to declare Vlas Chubar the initiator of the famine. Yes, he headed Soviet Ukraine’s Council of People’s Commissars until 1934, but he had no power to make decisions, and in 1932 Stalin accused him of ‘spinelessness,’ ‘corruption,’ and ‘opportunism.’ Like other Soviet Ukrainian leaders, he tried to play a double game in the ‘field of tension’ between the Kremlin’s tough demands and the horrific local realities. Ukrainians did not make a SINGLE important decision that resulted in the famine apocalypse.
“This is not the first time that I hear what Narochnitskaia is saying about Ukraine, and I am sincerely ashamed of her. I wish that she would, first of all, remain silent and read up on history a little and only then speak. She is also offended because ‘all the blame for the revolutionary Marxist project is being laid at the door of today’s Russia.’ The trouble is not that somebody is laying the blame but that today’s Russia is DEFENDING the Marxist project, the dictatorship, and the lies of the communist regime. It does not believe that Ukraine is capable of living without ‘a huge meganation,’ as Ms. Narochnitskaia mindlessly phrases it.
“That is why discussions of the Holodomor are in fact debates about whether Ukrainian statehood can or cannot exist and about the fact that Ukrainians have shown that they are capable of living in a democracy without — God forgive me — ‘a huge meganation.’ Yes, for us Hitler and Stalin are monsters and tyrants, who cannot be excused. Yes, the Holodomor practically wiped out the Ukrainian nation, mowed down the most sound-minded and independent part of it. Yes, as a foreign diplomat reported in 1933, trainloads of Russians were brought into the Ukrainian SSR. We are still feeling the consequences of this and a lot of other things.
“But nobody is suggesting that the Russians be shipped back home. We are not building a nation, as Levkin says, ‘on the basis of predominantly sad events.’ We stress that even in those terrible conditions that the Ukrainians endured and did not forget who they are and where their roots lie. The Russians, too, remember their roots. Good for them! The only question is why they are choosing once again to deny the Ukrainians the right to their memory.”
Yurii SHCHERBAK , Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine:
“The OSCE resolution is an important step for the UN and the European international organizations in reconsidering the Ukrainian tragedy of 1932-1933. Although (so far) the resolution does not directly recognize the genocide of the Ukrainian people, what about the phrase ‘as a result of the mass starvation brought about by the cruel and deliberate actions’ of the Stalinist regime? Those ‘cruel and deliberate actions’ are in fact the basic description of the policy of genocide against religious, ethnic, and other (political, social, etc.) population groups. If you add the anti-retreat units on the Russian- Ukrainian border, increased repressions against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and the beginning of de- Ukrainization in Ukraine, there will be no doubts left about the genocide of the Ukrainian people, the premeditated and cruel killing of millions of people only because they were Ukrainian.
“This is the policy of occupiers in an occupied country, which is condemned by the International Court of Justice. The reaction of official Russia is as hypocritical as it is mindless. A country that proclaims itself the successor to the criminal Stalinist regime (in contrast to Germany, which carried out de-Nazification and condemned the Hitler regime) must, in my opinion, repent the sins of Russian communism (the sins of Ukrainian, Georgian, and Kazakh communism are the same) and bid farewell to the past. Until this happens, as long as Russia continues to take pride in its own Hitlers and Goebbelses, this syndrome of acute social schizophrenia will persist.
“There was a fair attempt to cleanse Russia (and the entire ex- USSR) of the bloody legacy of communism in 1989-1991. At the time I was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Interregional Parliamentary Group headed by Andrei Sakharov, a great son of Russia, and Boris Yeltsin. We cooperated fruitfully with Russian democrats, such as Yurii Afanasiev, Aleksei Yablokov, and Galina Starovoitova. Our assessments of the past coincided. Unfortunately, other, neo-imperialistic and chauvinistic, winds are blowing in Russia today, and you cannot hear the voices of Sakharov’s followers: the impression is that Sakharov is remembered and venerated more in Ukraine than in Russia, where he lived, struggled, and died.
“Every nation has the right and duty to pay tribute to the memory of the victims of the red tyranny. Nobody forbids Russia to treat as communist genocide the war against the peasant uprisings in 1920s, when the troops of Mikhail Tukhachevsky poisoned Russian peasants with gas, or to condemn the mass extermination of the Don and Kuban Cossacks, and other crimes.
“It is a matter of conscience and spiritual catharsis for a nation. No charges are being leveled at Medvedev and Putin’s Russia, which bears no political or economic responsibility for the crimes of the Georgian Stalin, the Russian Molotov, the Jew Kaganovich, and the many Ukrainian henchmen of Stalin’s clique — it is only a question of moral dimension. Does anybody in Russia really want to wield a monopoly (which looks like the monopoly of a hangman) on the right to remember or forget the millions of victims of communism?
“Until the Russian leadership and Russian society give an unequivocal answer to this question, there will be different interpretations of our common tragic history.”
