1987: A LOOK BACK: The famine commission at work (12/27/87)

1987: A LOOK BACK

The famine commission at work

The U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine was kept busy this year with two more regional hearings recording survivors' testimony in Phoenix, Ariz., and Philadelphia, and teachers' workshops/seminars in Rochester, N.Y., Detroit and Hartford, Conn.

In addition, commission staffers and public members participated in a presentation on the genocides of the Jews, Armenians and Ukrainians held at a conference of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and discussed a planned famine curriculum in Philadelphia's school system.

Several curriculum guides were prepared with the assistance of the famine commission's public members and staffers, and the one written by Dr. Myron B. Kuropas, a public member, and funded by the Ukrainian National Association was widely circulated.

This year the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine also released its first interim report to the U.S. public. The 172-page government document included complete transcripts of all CUF meetings and hearings that took place from the organizational meeting on April 23, 1986, through the November 24, 1986, regional hearing in Warren, Mich. A second interim report will be released in 1988.

In November, the commission's staff director, Dr. James E. Mace, spoke at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century" held in New York by the Institute for the Study of Genocide affiliated with John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In his paper, titled "Collaboration in the Suppression of the Ukrainian Famine," Dr. Mace reported that "in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities" the dispatches of Walter Duranty, the Times' Moscow correspondent at the time of the famine, always "reflect(ed) the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."

Dr. Mace's paper uncovered this information in a declassified State Department document - a memorandum written by a U.S. Embassy staffer in Berlin based on his conversation with Mr. Duranty. Dr. Mace also reported in his presentation that the U.S. government knew a great deal about the famine but "chose not to acknowledge what it knew or to respond in any meaningful way."

New York Times executive editor Max Frankel at first would not comment on Dr. Mace's findings, stating that he would not do so without seeing the document in question. After being sent a photocopy of the memo plus Dr. Mace's paper, Mr. Frankel relayed a response to The Weekly via his secretary: Dr. Mace's revelation "doesn't seem to qualify as news. It's really history, and belongs in history books."

Dr. Mace's response to the non-response was: "The New York Times does claim to be the newspaper of record. It would seem that the least they could do is to set their own record straight."

In other developments, at the end of the year, the Commission on the Ukraine Famine reported that it was running out of funds, and Dr. Mace estimated that an additional $172,000 in private donations was needed just to keep the commission's office operating until its legislative mandate expires on June 22, 1988. Still more money is need to publish the commission reports and the 2,500 pages of survivor testimony. The Ukrainian National Association became the first community institution to respond to the commission's appeal by donating $10,000 to this very worthy and historically important cause.

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