Remember the Holodomor
YOUNG, CATHY
Remember the Holodomor The Soviet starvation of Ukraine, 75 years later. BY CATHY YOUNG This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrifi c chapters in the history of the...
...When joining collective farms was voluntary, few signed up, and many who did soon left...
...Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy...
...One of the most vocal opponents of the Ukrainian government’s view is former Soviet dissident Alexander Babyonyshev (writing under the pen name Sergey Maksudov), now an ?migr...
...Supporters of Ukraine’s position also deny that it is “Russophobic,” pointing to Yushchenko’s explicit statements that the Holodomor was a crime of the Soviet Communist regime, not the Russian people...
...Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of “exiled nationalists...
...Cathy Young is a contributing editor to Reason magazine...
...It is nonetheless true that Stalin’s fateful decision to blockade faminestricken areas, issued in January 1933, was initially directed at Ukraine and Kuban...
...A backlash from the left was quick to follow...
...Ukrainian-Russian relations began to deteriorate after the “Orange Revolution” of late 2004...
...Unfortunately,” Aleksandrov summed up, “the millions of victims of collectivization will be used in Ukraine only for political manipulation and the creation of Russophobic myths, while Russia will consistently try to erase their memory in order to preserve the legitimacy of the current regime, which cannot exist without appealing to Soviet historical tradition...
...Yet, he wrote, the Kremlin cannot fully confront this crime since that would confl ict with its quest to build a state ideology that incorporates the “positive value” of the Soviet period...
...The regime then instituted a policy of ruthless confi scation of grain that left no food for the peasants...
...By the time Coplon wrote, however, the Soviet regime was dying...
...widespread cannibalism...
...Which view is accurate...
...It so happened that the wealthiest peasantry was in Ukraine...
...BY CATHY YOUNG This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrifi c chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, “murder by starvation...
...There is no question that the famine caused deaths beyond Ukraine...
...In an address at the Harvard Ukrainian Institute on November 18, Werth said he now believes there is suffi cient evidence to support the “national interpretation” of the famine...
...And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right...
...This has prompted French historian Nicolas Werth, coauthor of The Black Book of Communism, to reconsider his view of the Terror-Famine as ethnically neutral class warfare...
...Congress passed a resolution declaring the Holodomor a genocide...
...Among the fi nds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to fl ee in search of food...
...a 2007 statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry accused “certain political circles” in Ukraine of insulting the memory of non-Ukrainian famine victims...
...Even as the political mood in Russia began to emphasize the alleged positive aspects of the Soviet past, Yushchenko promoted a view of Soviet-era Ukraine as a “captive nation” under a foreign boot...
...In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill proclaiming the Holodomor a genocide and making Holodomor denial “unlawful...
...Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty...
...A starkly different view was offered by journalist Yulia Latynina on the website EJ.ru...
...It is generally believed that about half of the victims were in Ukraine and the predominantly Ukrainian-populated Russian region of Kuban...
...Meanwhile, it seems that the only time Russia’s government remembers the Russian victims of the Terror-Famine is when it needs them to counter Ukrainian claims about “the so-called Holodomor...
...in many regions, villages that failed to meet the quota were also forced to surrender all other foodstuffs...
...Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes...
...This year, President Dmitry Medvedev declined an invitation to Holodomor Remembrance Day ceremonies in Kiev in a petulant letter that dismissed “talk of the socalled Holodomor” as an “immoral” attempt to give a shared tragedy a nationalist spin and also took a swipe at Ukraine’s desire to join NATO...
...Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora...
...families in recalcitrant villages forced out of their homes and left to freeze...
...Thus, an article by St...
...Ukraine—which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23—seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian “genocide...
...The millions of others who perished included Russian peasants and close to a third of the population of Kazakhstan...
...When villagers realized that collective farming meant backbreaking labor for the state at slave wages, many staged work slowdowns...
...a month later, the European Parliament voted to recognize it as a “crime against humanity” but stopped short of the G-word...
...Some independent Russian commentators accuse both governments of playing politics...
...The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confi rmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission...
...It so happened that Stalin was afraid of Ukraine’s independence and undertook special efforts to break Ukraine...
...Scholars still disagree both on the scope of the famine and on its ethnic “specificity...
...Coplon sneered at “the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism” and dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime...
...An escalation of rhetoric followed...
...This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies...
...imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis...
...There is also no doubt that the famine was man-made...
...In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada...
...Since then, the pro-government Russian press has published dozens of articles assailing Ukraine’s stance on the Holodomor as an insidious antiRussian ploy...
...professor at Harvard, who studied the Terror-Famine in Soviet times when it was politically dangerous...
...As a result, grain production targets were not met at a time when Moscow relied on grain exports to fi nance industrialization...
...The post-Soviet leadership of both Russia and Ukraine was willing to acknowledge the TerrorFamine, though differences soon emerged on whether it should be regarded as a Ukrainian genocide or equal-opportunity mass murder...
...Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S...
...Latynina noted that while Stalin’s terror affected every segment of Soviet society, specifi c groups were sometimes singled out—among them the Ukrainian peasant class in the early 1930s...
...Recent articles detailing the Soviet regime’s war on the peasantry, based on Soviet archives, describe a living hell: government agents going door to door confi scating food...
...Stalin was destroying the peasantry by herding it into collective farms,” she wrote...
...Petersburg-based scholar Kirill Aleksandrov on the Gazeta.ru website on November 17 argued that the TerrorFamine was not a genocide in the classic sense but a “stratocide”—mass extermination based on social class— directed at the peasantry...
...Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions...
...These horrors were by no means limited to Ukraine...
...The scholarly and political debate will doubtless continue...
...Perhaps, as Russian historian Boris Sokolov has argued, a proper condemnation of Communist terror requires a new category: mass murder not motivated by ethnic hatred...
...Yet Werth concluded with a pointed plea to remember all the victims of the Communist war on the peasantry...
...men and women tortured to make them reveal hidden stockpiles of food...
...Russia under Vladimir Putin was sliding deeper into authoritarianism and anti-Western nationalism, while Ukraine, led by President Viktor Yushchenko, sought closer ties to the West...
...Recognition of the Holodomor as genocide is complicated by several factors...
...This evidence, in his view, includes the fact that the Holodomor coincided with a Soviet campaign against Ukrainian nationalism, with purges and executions targeting Ukraine’s political and cultural elites...
...Forcible collectivization was met with peasant rebellions, ruthlessly suppressed, then with quiet resistance...
...Last September, the U.S...
...Moreover, many of the people who carried out the exterminationist policies were ethnic Ukrainians...
...The ethnic component of the TerrorFamine in Ukraine was not driven by a nationalist animus against Ukrainians but by Stalin’s paranoia about Ukrainian nationalism and alleged ties to Poland...
...Most Soviet peasants resisted the collectivization that began in the 1930s...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 12
