On Feb. 18 Professor James Mace, the noted US researcher of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, would have turned 55. He defended his doctoral dissertation “Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine in 1918-1993” at the University of Michigan. He taught at the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, and Illinois. He was executive director of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, under the aegis of the US Congress and the President of the United States.
The result of this selfless work was three volumes of transcripts of oral testimonies by eyewitnesses and the commission’s “Report to Congress.” The commission’s findings state that the famine of 1932-33 was manmade, deliberately engineered by the CC CPSU; most importantly, that it was an act of genocide.
James Mace moved to Ukraine in 1993 and married a Ukrainian woman. He worked for The Day from 1997 to 2004. As a rule, he marked his birthday at the editorial office. On these occasions people brought flowers and funny little gifts, but this did not interfere with the newspaper’s work. We realized that we were dealing with an extraordinary personality. Above all he was our friend and comrade in arms in the difficult field of journalism, a cheerful, open-hearted, friendly, and critical-minded man.
We always carefully prepared for his birthday, just as we did this time. We offer our readers a collection of comments and reflections by students of Ostroh Academy. Articles by Oksana Pachlowska, lecturer at La Sapienza Rome University, and the writer Natalia Dziubenko-Mace, Jim’s widow, will appear in upcoming issues of The Day.
A few words about memory and gratitude are in order. We cannot remain silent. On Nov. 13, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada held Government Day hearings during which communist MP Petro Tsybenko, addressing pensioners’ problems, said that the government has no money for veterans but has found money to erect a monument to James Mace. We remind readers that our state has done little to perpetuate his memory. It has not done the main thing: his books remain unpublished. In fact, if not for the book about Mace that was published with funds raised by journalists of The Day, his works would have never reached readers.
There are no more copies left of Day and Eternity of James Mace. Has the state arranged to issue another edition? We know nothing about such an initiative. Therefore, Comrade Tsybenko’s fears are overstated. Also, setting the dead against each other is indecorous, to put it mildly. Did these veterans’ problems emerge just now or did they appear when the communists came and stayed in power for 70 years? Of course, their problems must be solved, just as it is necessary to perpetuate the memory of all those who were tortured to death and otherwise destroyed, just as it is necessary to express gratitude to an individual who did so much for Ukraine. Fortunately, our society understands this. What Ukrainian students have to say on the subject is proof of this. The future is with James Mace.
Daria SHVAIA, third-year student (Culturological Studies):
For some reason we often hear that the world is too small. We seem to lack space or air, or maybe it’s simply a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Yet few have considered the possibility that we are too distant from each other and that this world is not so small. Man feels like a grain of sand in a boundless desert of parallel and adjacent dimensions. Small wonder that some people find themselves lost “between two worlds.”
Fortunately, sometimes it is the other way around. James Mace was one of those who did not remain “Between Two Worlds” (the title of one of his articles for The Day) but found a place in each of them. I am amazed at what a single individual can accomplish for a nation, especially when this nation is not his own — not geographically, mentally, or culturally. Only the word “feat” can describe James Mace’s activities in Ukraine and beyond its borders, his constant care for this land.
Mace raised the matter of the Holodomor of 1932-33 on an international level even when Ukraine did not recognize that horrific event as an act of genocide. In studying this problem, he did not confine himself to the boundaries of dry and banal theorizing but tried to do his best to ensure that the international community and the Ukrainian people (however paradoxical this may sound) would disperse all the myths concerning those pages of our history. Without a doubt he succeeded to a certain degree.
I am not sure that our nation perceived Mace as he deserved (in fact, he realized the reason: the post-Soviet and post-Holodomor syndrome is still affecting our mentality). Yet I am sure that at least several students fortunate enough to have attended his classes, several ordinary citizens who read his articles, and some of those who simply leafed through the book Day and Eternity of James Mace from The Day’s Library Series will not leave his cause unfinished. After all, we cannot live “between two worlds” at home.
Iryna NAUMETS, third-year student (Documentation and Information):
In Ukrainian culture James Mace is a figure that prompts us Ukrainians to revise our love of Ukraine. The question that immediately springs to one’s mind is: “How could a Cherokee Indian from the US have developed such an interest in Ukrainian history, such passionate concern for the cruel historical battles fought over the Holodomor?” He was destined to unravel a tight knot of modern history at a time when Ukrainians had almost forgotten about it. In his published doctoral dissertation Mace clearly explained the failure of national-patriotic ideas and the process of Ukrainization by their incompatibility with the communist ideology. In 1982, when he addressed an international conference on the Holocaust and genocide in Tel Aviv, Mace was the first Western researcher to call the manmade famine in Ukraine genocide.
James was frequently surprised by the fact that not all Ukrainians wanted to know their history, that some of them were avoiding it, hiding from it. Why? He said that history would catch up with them anyway. There is no denying the truth of this statement because the future of a people is built on the foundations of its history. Remembering one’s history means remembering one’s parentage. James Mace, like no one else, succeeded in reminding people about this. While at the head of a US congressional commission set up to investigate the causes of the Holodomor, he searched through the archives, accumulating historical data.
Without a doubt his collaboration with Robert Conquest at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 1983 resulted in what may be described as an encyclopedia of facts on those heinous periods in Ukrainian history. Levko Lukianenko, Chairman of the Association of Researchers of the Holodomors, said that Mace had 200 hours of tapes containing Holodomor eyewitness accounts. Of course, while reconstructing history, Mace was able to feel that he was a hero in it; he succeeded in returning to those events and living through them wholeheartedly. This means that he was forced to think in Ukrainian, to grow to love the Ukrainian people, share his destiny with that nation, share a part of himself with it.
James did this. Through his work and desire to restore the Ukrainian historical heritage he became an example of an American with a Ukrainian heart.
Farewell, beloved person, please forgive us!
I fly to you like a tear...
Ukraine! Light an eternal candle
For widows and orphans,
Light a candle!
These lines from a poem written by his widow Natalia Dziubenko-Mace were carved on her husband’s gravestone. They best convey our awareness that Ukraine lost not only an historian, journalist, and university professor, but above all one of its faithful and loving sons.
Yulia SKORODA, second-year student (Documentation and Information):
Not long ago I obtained a copy of Day and Eternity of James Mace from The Day’s Library Series. I cannot say that I just happened to get one. I had heard that sometime in February they would be marking the 55th birthday of a man who had performed the feat of a lifetime for the sake of Ukraine, a man who had no Ukrainian roots. James Mace — the name kept nagging at my mind. I had heard something about him. I was ashamed. I decided to fill in my intellectual gap. It is as interesting to discover people as it is to discover countries and cities.
Every man is a new world, a planet in the universe. Mace was a journalist and historian, a planet that had materialized once in the United States and then shed its light on Ukraine. This was a strange phenomenon, something that has yet to be comprehended; Mace, a foreigner, becoming so deeply concerned for the destiny of Ukraine and its lasting problems, including the Holodomor of 1932-33. Was he interested in it as a historian? He was, to an extent. The next question: “Was the pursuit of professional interests worth leaving one’s homeland?” I think that James would have said that Ukraine was his homeland, and done so much more sincerely than many people who were born and grew up here. He worked and lived for Ukraine until his dying day.
I remember the first Saturday of November 2005: the square in front of St. Michael’s Cathedral, where dozens, hundreds, and thousands of candles were burning. It is a dazzling sight, especially when you come across it unexpectedly. I wanted to visit Kyiv and walk up Andriivsky uzviz. My younger sister was burning with countless other plans. It was the Day of Remembrance for the Holodomor Victims in Ukraine. Honestly, I couldn’t remember anything about the event, but I promise that now I know and will never forget. Now I know that James Mace personally helped enter this date in our calendar, so that no one can every again deny that the Holodomor took place in Ukraine.
Oksana PRASIUK, fourth-year student (Documentation and Information):
James Mace was not Ukrainian by background, but after encountering Ukraine’s unparalleled tragedy for the first time, he could not remain indifferent. He sincerely shared the misfortunes of our long-suffering land, the tragedy of the Ukrainian nation, the scope of which was unprecedented in world history.
Holodomor: even now many of us whisper rather than say this word out loud, as though they are ashamed of describing the greatest tragedy to befall our people or scared to sound politically incorrect or insufficiently loyal. James Mace was among the first to investigate the Great Famine of Ukraine in 1932-33, who spoke out loud about it as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, aimed at exterminating this nation. He regarded this great tragedy of the Ukrainian people as the root of all our current economic, political, and social woes.
Decades later, the sufferings of millions of fathers, mothers, and children who starved to death are a painful echo in our people’s minds. Mace also heard this echo. He placed on the altar of truth his academic career and cloudless life in the US; he stayed in Ukraine because he felt himself a part of its tragedy. He found like-minded people who joined his efforts, with whom he shared his ideas, whom he loved. This gave him the strength to struggle on; now he had a podium from which to address the younger Ukrainian generation and teach them to respect their people’s past while combating the ghosts emerging from past realities.
Making his way through obstacles of indifference, misunderstanding, and bureaucracy, Mace continued to refute the myths about the Holodomor in a simple and consistent manner. He revealed the truth about those horrible times to Ukraine and the rest of the world. But was he heard at the time? Can we heed him now?
Iryna PIVEN, second-year student, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Languages:
Writing about a man whose works have found such a vivid response in my heart is a strange and unusual experience. I read them after his death. It is strange to write about a man who made someone else’s tragedy his own, who worked to reach his goal in such a selfless, devoted manner. It is strange to realize that his objective lay in exposing all the facts, hitherto kept secret by the authorities, about crimes that were perpetrated not against his people, not against his country. But no, James Mace, of all foreigners, fully deserves the right to be called a Ukrainian. He became one through his research and keen sense of justice that brought him so close to sharing the pain suffered by the Ukrainian people; that made him actually feel that pain.
As an honest intellectual and impassioned journalist, Mace started researching the history of Stalin’s repressions and the Holodomor in 1981, and from that time he dedicated the rest of his life to this quest. He wrote that Ukraine is a country that experienced one of the greatest tragedies in the history of civilization. That was why he was assigned the post of executive director of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine and entrusted with drawing up a report to the US Congress in 1986. It turned out to be a bombshell, an eye-opener for the civilized world on the scope of Ukraine’s tragedy. After that James continued working on the subject, unearthing fresh evidence, coming up with new, devastating facts. Besides the questions of the genocide and the Holocaust, Mace enthusiastically campaigned for the rights of the Ukrainian language, which he spoke while he lived in Ukraine. He always said that so long as Ukrainian remained a second-rate language for Ukrainians, this nation would never be united.
James Mace was often asked why he, a typical American, as Mace called himself, called his research into the genocide of the Ukrainian people his vocation. Was it only because genocide touched a nerve in him, an American Indian, so that he worried and cared so much about Ukraine’s future? After reading a number of articles and other publications by this journalist, one becomes keenly aware of his spectacular personality, his ability to swim against the current. Even when the rest of the world remained silent, Mace did not. He said, “American citizens demanded research and this was my destiny.” Mace spent too many years on his research work, so Ukraine became the greater part of his life. “Your dead have chosen me,” he wrote. This phrase is still very much on my mind. It explains his vocation and increases my respect for him.
I am very sorry that I was not familiar with Mace’s creative legacy earlier. He was a man who determined his own fate, a man who kept silent about nothing, who concealed nothing. His works cannot leave any reader indifferent, the more so because this man assigned first place in his life to a foreign country; he accomplished a feat and dedicated it to Ukraine.
Natalia ANTONIUK, third-year student (Faculty of Law):
Yevhen Sverstiuk once said: “That James Mace is unrivaled is obvious; he is a godsend to Ukraine. But we will realize all this only after he is gone.” His words are extremely significant and perhaps most relevant today. Words of truth voiced several years ago are being comprehended only now. This is the way it always is: we appreciate what we had only after losing it forever. For Mace this meant simply the beginning of a large and enduring project, something they wanted to sink into oblivion. What he did for the Ukrainian people — the nation, in his own words — is invaluable.
Who was James Mace? Perhaps for many Ukrainians he was simply a person who became the subject of active discussions only in the last two years. There are even plans to erect a monument to commemorate the 55th anniversary of his birth in Kyiv. Or perhaps he was the proverbial rich American uncle, who invested in new projects in our state. Sad but true: we know little or nothing about James Mace. This is a problem not only for our government but us.
This prominent scholar deserves our gratitude for being among the first to raise the issue of the 1930s Holodomor. He was not afraid to show the causes of the Ukrainian Holocaust; he mustered the civic courage to declare to the rest of the world that we Ukrainians are not a terra incognita, not a Third-World country, not a godforsaken people. James Mace was the first to challenge the universally accepted German concept of Ukrainians as the Naturvolk — natural, less civilized people. He wanted us to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide and could not understand why we were not willing to do so. He was always alarmed by the fact that for some inexplicable reason the Soviet-engineered famine was no longer troubling Ukraine; that it was regarded as a matter of course. All the works that Mace gathered to convince the West (not Ukraine!) can be described as a huge archive of oral Ukrainian history. We know that there was nearly no documented confirmations of a famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.
This brilliant individual can be venerated only for the fact that he was one of a handful of foreigners working in Ukraine who dared declare himself a patriot of Ukraine. He did so when red flags were still fluttering over all official buildings. His ethnic background should be defined as “American Indian Ukrainian.” It must have been the martial spirit inherited from his forefathers that spurred him into action, trying to prove the truth to one and all. He wanted to preserve at least our nation and not allow it to vanish the way his own people were dying out. James Mace determined his life priorities; he decided to investigate the Holodomor the Ukrainian way. He considered himself a true son of Ukraine. He said he couldn’t study that tragedy through half-measures, just as he couldn’t be 50 percent Ukrainian.
Today we can only say thank you to this man. Perhaps the long-suffering law recognizing the famine of the 1930s as an act of genocide would not have been passed if we hadn’t had James Mace. I have only one question. It is rooted in the following lines of a well-known song: “Would he want to be a Hero of Ukraine/ In a country that has no use for heroes?”
Maksym KARPOVETS, third-year student (Culturological Studies):
I think James Mace is a unique figure in his understanding of contemporary world problems and Ukraine’s place in them. Reading his concepts, articles, and simply his reflections on what was happening in the world at the time, you get a better understanding of things you never considered before or which you simply ignored. You will agree that we are a selfish nation: everyone thinks about himself, lives within his four walls, and does not pay attention to what is happening around him. Mace destroys this shell, trying to show how every individual is vulnerable, suffering, and feeble; that only a human being can help another human being, not otherwise. This is the essence of Mace’s humanism.
In fact, James Mace was an example of his own humanism. It is hard to overestimate what he did for Ukraine and its future. I am still unable to grasp the strength of the spirit and dedication of a man who risked his academic career and prestige for the sake of his struggle to make the world understand the problems of our state and raise them to the international level; problems that we Ukrainians were hiding from others. Mace deserves not only gratitude and respect from sentient citizens in our country but understanding, something that he talked about so often, which just as often was ignored.
What have I personally gained by reading Mace and becoming aware of the scope of what this man accomplished? Above all I am awestruck by his dedication, his belief that what he was doing was right. After all, faith, such a usual thing one would think, is rejected by the postmodern information society. It is as though faith is totally unnecessary; as though all that matters is strict determinism and methodology. This is unfortunate. Mace always believed in himself and in what he was doing. And, in my opinion, this could only sow grains of hope in the hearts of journalists, politicians, thinkers, and ordinary, average citizens.
We must do everything so that Mace’s thesis “We saved everything we could, but sometimes it is difficult for us to understand for whom” acquires a different character, so that we will always understand for whom and against whom we are trying to save this difficult but so very beautiful world.
