4. DEBATES ON THE 1932-33 FAMINE AT THE CONFERENCE
The organizers of the conference (see The Day, “The Ukrainian and Russian Intelligentsias Today: Prospects and Difficulties of Dialogue”) opened the debate with a paper presented by Prof. V. Kondrashin of Penza University, who is regarded as the number-one expert on the subject of the famine. He analyzed scholarly findings and historical publications on this question. The next speakers were Prof. V. Marochko and I, representing the Institute of Ukrainian History at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NAN), which has been studying this subject for two decades. We were followed by V. Zima and N. Ivnitsky (from the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences: RAN), T. Nadkin (Mordovian University), and N. Rogalina (Moscow State University (MGU).
It became instantly clear that the Russian side was not familiar with the situation that had developed in Ukraine in the early 1930s. This was explained not only by the unpopularity of the 1930s as a subject of Russian historical scholarship but also by the fact that the history of Ukraine is ignored. Polemicizing with Kondrashin, Marochko pointed to his lack of knowledge on the topic. This lack of knowledge seemed all the more surprising since Kondrashin has spent many years studying the famine in the Volga region and the North Caucasus, territories that adjoin Ukraine. In Kondrashin’s opinion, the famine in Ukraine was no different from the one that took place in other regions of the Soviet Union.
A few days after the conference, I was supposed to catch a flight to New York City to attend the annual conference organized by Columbia University’s Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). I had intended to use my report for the ASN at the Moscow conference. It was written in traditional academic style, with all required references, but after Solzhenitsyn’s interview was published and the Duma issued its statement, I realized that a different kind of text was required.
I was aware that my new version, hastily written, was very emotional (even diplomats get emotional when the subject of the Holodomor is raised). Nevertheless, I presented the paper. I am convinced that the way I presented it will also help my fellow countrymen grasp its meaning quicker, considering that many of them refuse to accept the Holodomor as an act of genocide. I also believe that the arguments in my presentation will make all those who support the idea of enhancing responsibility for denying the Holodomor, as laid down in an article of the Law “On the Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine” (Nov. 28, 2006) think twice. Much work remains to be done in order to convey the truth of this horrible tragedy to our fellow citizens, our neighbors, and the international community. That was why I asked The Day to publish the complete text of my paper at the Moscow conference.
5. REPORT
The title of the session was “The Famine of 1932-33: ‘Genocide against the Ukrainian People’ or a General Tragedy of the Peoples of the USSR?” This question contains the answer because of the quotation marks around the words ‘Genocide against the Ukrainian People.’
I will not object either to the way the topic was formulated or the built-in answer. It isn’t about the Holodomor! In addition to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932 also took place in Ukraine, and it was caused by the same reasons as those that caused the famine of 1932-33 in other regions of the USSR. The famine that occurred in the winter of 1931-32, following the confiscation of the 1931 harvest, killed 150,000 Ukrainian peasants. This is horrible, but if Russian scholars refuse to recognize as an act of genocide the famine that resulted from the state grain deliveries, I won’t argue with them.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is sincerely convinced that precisely this kind of famine is the point in question. A few weeks ago he gave an interview in which he stated that the Ukrainian government “is treating the horrible famine of the 1930s in a distorted fashion by calling it a genocide against the Ukrainian people...This provocateurial outburst about ‘genocide’ started forming decades later, secretly at first, in decaying chauvinistic minds maliciously opposed to ‘Muscovites,’ and now it has infiltrated the ruling circles in today’s Ukraine.”
Objections concerning two points are in order here. First, we do not call the famine of 1932-33 a genocide but the Holodomor, which affected two regions where the average percentage of Ukrainians exceeded (the Ukrainian SSR) or roughly amounted to two- thirds of the population (e.g., the Kuban region). It was only in these regions that the famine turned into death by starvation, with a mortality rate that was dozens of times higher than in other regions. There is no use discussing Kazakhstan because the mechanism of its famine was different.
Second, so-called Muscovites have nothing to do either with the Holodomor in Ukraine or the 1932-33 famine in the USSR. I admit that quite a few people in Ukraine accuse Moscow rather than the Kremlin of the Holodomor. Solzhenitsyn is also irked by a bill passed by the Verkhovna Rada, in which the Holodomor is qualified as genocide, as well as by his lack of knowledge about the crux of the matter.
It is a shame that this topic disunites us, and doubly unfortunate that people listen to us but do not hear. I have had proof of this on more than one occasion. Last year, Yurii Shapoval and I were invited to take part in a famine roundtable at the editorial offices of Russia’s popular periodical Rodina [Fatherland] after the publication of Andrei Marchukov’s scandalous article. Afterwards, the journal published only excerpts of my article, which was a devastating critique of Marchukov, who simply ignored all my arguments.
This year a female journalist from a Moscow newspaper visited me and asked me several questions. She left with a copy of my book on the Holodomor in Russian. Then she dropped out of sight.
Here is a third example. A television film crew from Moscow visited my institute on March 28. They used up a whole video cassette on my interview, but they consistently avoided the topic of the mechanism of the Holodomor.
I hope that this time things will be different. I would like to use the allotted time primarily to state the Holodomor mechanism in a telegraphic manner. This mechanism is actually quite simple. It is not about the confiscation of grain. The 1932 harvest yields were confiscated earlier and the countryside was starving. The point in question is that all foodstuffs were confiscated from starving villages.
To understand what this means, one must picture the USSR without groceries, only with distribution stations where people can get bread after producing ration cards. There were no ration cards in the countryside. Peasants without adequately run private farming plots ought to have been allowed to buy food through free trade. Those who didn’t have money starved to death, like the 150,000 Ukrainian villagers in the first half of 1932. After all foodstuffs were confiscated, the bazaars disappeared. There were only TORGSIN (Russian acronym for “Trade with Foreigners”) hard-currency stores, branches of which the Soviet state set up in various raions. People who had gold or silver escaped death by starvation with the aid of these TORGSIN stores. Those who had...
People look us straight in the eyes and say that these are all inventions. They want us to show them a document about the confiscation of all foodstuffs. They know that the archives contain only thousands of documents about the Soviet government’s assistance to the famine-stricken population of the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban region.
But let’s not be hasty. In November 1932 Stalin dispatched extraordinary grain delivery commissions to Ukraine and the North Caucasus, led by Molotov and Kaganovich, respectively. Resolutions of the CC CP(B)U and the Radnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR, written by Molotov and initialed by Stalin, were issued on Nov. 18 and 20 with sinister clauses about punishing those who were falling behind their grain delivery quotas by fines in kind: meat and potatoes. On Jan. 1, 1933, Stalin ordered the CC CP(B)U to let the Ukrainian peasantry know through the village Soviets that those who voluntarily gave up their grain to the state would not suffer repressions. Those who did not would suffer the consequences of the resolution adopted on Aug. 7, 1932 (known as the “five-ears-of-wheat” law).
There was nothing in Stalin’s message except these two points. How is one to interpret a sensational document, such as the Communist Party general secretary’s message to the peasantry in one of the Union republics? It must be interpreted literally. The first clause is an obligation not to apply repressions and the second one threatens such repressions. The connection between the points is unequivocal: in order to repress a person, it must be established that this person is concealing grain from the state. How can this be done? At the time, there was nothing better than searches. Stalin’s telegram became the signal for mass searches. Now just try to interpret this some other way.
Published GPU reports on pits filled with grain and concealed in the countryside indicate that there were many such pits, but the amount of grain they contained were of no significance on the state level. Only kilograms, dozens of kilograms of grain, were found. From this one must conclude that Stalin knew about the lack of grain in the Ukrainian countryside.
There are documents about meat and potatoes, but none about levying fines in kind for beans, beets, cabbage, and everything else. Are we required to produce precisely these documents? Ask away!
Holodomor survivors recalled how teams led by NKVD troops seized all foodstuffs from the peasants. Therefore, the New Year’s telegram accurately points to the man who gave the signal to launch a repressive campaign that was aimed at confiscating all non-grain foods under the mendacious pretext of the struggle for grain.
In Ukraine a consolidated volume of the National Book of Memory, entitled The Holodomor of 1932-1933, is being prepared for publication. It contains excerpts from both published and unpublished eyewitness testimonies that state that all foodstuffs were confiscated, so people had to make do with food substitutes. The place of residence of a given eyewitness is indicated on a map. These points on the map embrace the entire Ukrainian territory and are proof that the organizers of searches received identical oral instructions.
Remember Aleksandr Yakovlev’s report at the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR in 1989? At the time, the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was still a secret, although Gorbachev, who was a member of the Presidium, had signed a document to the effect that he was familiar with this instrument when he became general secretary. He remained silent, but Yakovlev convincingly proved the absolute conformity of Stalin’s actions with this secret protocol in a copy that was published in the West. It became clear that the secret protocol was not a myth produced by Western propaganda. We will also prove that the order about confiscating non-grain foods from the peasants of Ukraine is not a myth either. A geographic map along with Holodomor eyewitness accounts will serve as evidence in any court.
Stalin described his state grain delivery tactic as “spurring on,” and this tactic was applied for three years in a row, from 1930 to 1932, inclusively: first, take away all the grain and then provide food assistance to the starving populace. This tactic may one day be called genocide. However, the deaths resulting from excessive state grain deliveries can be justified in a pinch: the Soviet Union was selling grain abroad in order to obtain hard currency with which to buy factories, without which it would have lost the war. This is stated in the Duma’s declaration of April 2.
But deaths that were caused by the confiscation of non-grain foods cannot be justified by anything. The creation by a state of conditions that are incompatible with physical survival is a formulation from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Holodomor mechanism includes not only the confiscation of foodstuffs but also a blockade: the Soviet state did not want starving people appearing in other regions, so the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban region were blockaded. There was also an official ban on the word “famine,” which was in place until December 1987. The ban on using the word “famine” in absolutely top-secret party documents ruled out any initiative on the part of the organs of power. Famine could be mentioned only in “special files” — in other words, it could be combated only with the permission of the center. Such a struggle unfolded in early February 1933, when the state began feeding the starving through collective and state farms.
Stalin’s food confiscation project lasted just one month: January. But it created a new situation in the countryside and prevented a social explosion. Now the state had become a benefactor, hand-feeding the starving.
I still have time to respond to Solzhenitsyn’s reference to the role the “Muscovites” played in the Holodomor.
The Soviet Union was based on the dictatorship of the centralized state party, but it was constitutionally built on the ethnic principle. Every Union republic could secede from the USSR; this possibility was envisaged by the various constitutions. Everyone knows what the concept of “titular nation” means. This concept did not exist outside of the USSR because a titular nation is an ethnic nation, and there are no ethnically pure states. In a letter to Kaganovich, dated Aug. 11, 1932, Stalin admitted he was afraid that “... we may lose Ukraine once things get worse.” In 1932 the situation was going from bad to worse; an economic crisis was beginning and its external manifestation was the 1932-33 famine. Not coincidentally, the USSR would fall apart along the Union republics’ borders, not in 1932 but in 1941. Why so late? The years 1933 and 1937 are an adequate explanation of this.
I would like to make another remark concerning the ethnic principle in the structuring of the Soviet state. The Russians constituted the titular nation, but they stood lower in the political hierarchy compared to the titular nations of the Union republics. The Russian Federation did not have its center in the form of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia. There was no such party in Russia; it would have become a threat to the Kremlin, what with the excessively centralized All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Nor did Moscow have a full-fledged central government of the Russian Federation.
There was nothing coincidental about Russia’s political humiliation. After this ended as a result of Gorbachev’s constitutional reform, a confrontation began in Moscow between two centers of power, which undermined the USSR.
On Nov. 27, 1932, at a joint plenary meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Central Auditing Commission of the AUCP(B) Stalin threatened to inflict a “devastating blow” against “individual collective farmers and collective farms” that were sabotaging the state grain deliveries. A sequel to this threat was expressed in the New Year’s telegram to the Ukrainian peasantry.
Why was that “devastating blow” dealt to Ukraine and the Kuban region? Almost one-half of the raions in the North Caucasus were Ukrainized, stressed a resolution of the CC AUCP(B) and the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) of the USSR (Dec. 14, 1932). The totally Ukrainized Kuban region would have had to be annexed to the Ukrainian SSR. This would have meant increasing the dangerously large human and economic potential of Ukraine within the USSR. Even in the straightjacket of a Soviet republic, the citizens of Ukraine, by their very existence, were creating a threat to the Kremlin rulers.
Mass terror was an inalienable component of communist construction that was taking place within this multinational country. Therefore, everything stated above helps one to understand the ethnic component of this terror.
Terror could acquire various forms. We don’t have to discuss only the Holodomor. The destruction of Ukraine’s half-million-strong Communist Party was taking place at the same time. Stalin described it, in the above-mentioned letter to Kaganovich, not with words but with this devilish interjection: “500,000 members, ha-ha!” Half of this party membership would be destroyed in five years. At the same time, they were destroying Petliurites, people who had taken an active part in the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-20. The Kremlin’s objective was to turn the Ukrainian titular nation, along with the state, into an obedient ethnographic community.
Solzhenitsyn knows better than most what terror is. Why, then, can he not consider what happened in Ukraine at the time as terror? I think that this is also our fault. We say that Stalin destroyed the Ukrainians with famine but not just by famine, and we are right. But it is also necessary to bear in mind that we are conveying this message to non-Ukrainians who misunderstand us.
I am deeply convinced that there are two totally different kinds of genocide: an ethnic purge and terror, including terror by famine. By calling the Holodomor the Ukrainian Holocaust, we are forcing Russians and our own citizens to arrive at the conclusion that this was an ethnic purge. I understand those who describe the Holodomor as the Ukrainian Holocaust; they are using a familiar concept that already has the status of genocide. But this is dangerous because it prompts one to conclude that Moscow, not the Kremlin, is responsible for the Holodomor. After all, an ethnic purge is a purge of a territory to make way for another nation — it is easy to guess which one. Terror is another matter.
There is another aspect in the “Kremlin’s defense,” if I may express myself this way. Stalin destroyed Ukrainians en masse, but only in Ukraine and in the Kuban region, and within a strict timeframe. Genocide was that “devastating blow” that was dealt in January 1933, killing 3.5 million people. It was the destruction of a part, not the whole, in order to teach that whole a certain standard of behavior. This was terror, not an ethnic purge. This terror has nothing to do with “Muscovites” — to use Solzhenitsyn’s vocabulary — nor Georgians (from whom Stalin sprang) or Jews (Kaganovich was a Jew). Let us break away from the embrace of politicized journalists and face the truth.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Summing up the famine debate, Prof. Dmitriev declared that the famine in Ukraine was the same as in other regions, so the issue of genocide was out of the question. Chats in the lobby during the conference revealed differences of opinion ranging from all-out support of our position to sympathy for Ukrainian scholarship, forced to follow in the wake of official politics. One of my Moscow colleagues suggested that we put an end to all political aspects of the Holodomor problem (i.e., Holodomor as an act of genocide) and proceed to carry out joint research projects, the way it is being done by Russia and Poland in regard to Katyn.
The analogy with Katyn attracted my interest. Katyn is an undeniable Stalinist crime that has been brought to the attention of the international public a thousand times over. But the victims of the Holodomor surpass the number of Katyn victims by more than an order of two. However, if you disregard the quantitative aspect and apply the criteria of the UN genocide convention, how can you not notice Stalin’s pragmatism that he once expressed in regard to a single repression (“No man, no problem”)?
Katyn is an undeniable fact; it cannot be submerged in something else, the way the Holodomor is being portrayed as part of the famine that gripped the entire Soviet Union. What is Russia’s attitude to this Stalinist crime?
After I arrived in Moscow, I came across Yu. Bogomolov’s blog in the Internet periodical RIA-Novosti, entitled “Katyn: The Cornerstone of Confrontation?” Bogomolov wrote that Andrzej Wajda’s new production, Katyn, finally made its way to Moscow and was screened for the creative intelligentsia first at the House of Cinema and then at the Writer’s House. The blog contained a variety of viewer comments, including the two below:
“This film should be distributed all over the country and played by all federal channels on prime time (Radical Liberals)”;
“Never, under no circumstances should the soul of the Russian people be burdened with this guilt complex, especially now that Russia is rising from its knees and on the eve of another anniversary of the Great Victory (National Patriots).”
Is there any doubt as to which of the above views will triumph in Russia? Should we forget everything that happened to our families and friends in order to become part of the all-Russian people?
