Turning the pages back... May 24, 1988 (05/24/98)

Turning the pages back...

May 24, 1988

On May 24, 1988, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, by a voice vote of two-thirds of the members, to extend until June 1990 the mandate of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. The bill had already been approved by the U.S. Senate.

In April 1988, the Famine Commission had released its initial report, which included interviews with survivors (more than 2,000 pages of oral histories), that detailed the horrific loss of life in Ukraine during the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and conclusively established the role of the Soviet government in engineering this genocide. For months, the release of the report had been preceded by disinformation (often conflicting) in the media that claimed, that either there was no famine - or that there was, but it was a result of a bad harvest - or that there was a famine, but very few people died - or that the so-called famine was actually an anti-Soviet myth created by Ukrainian nationalists in the West (a claim made by the Village Voice in a January 1988 article) - or that there was a famine, as a result of a bad harvest, but only 1-2 million people died, and that those same Ukrainian nationalists in the West purposefully exaggerated the figures to 5-7 million dead (or even more!) in order to compete for attention with the Jewish Holocaust - or the famine really wasn't a famine, rather it was a bit of clever anti-Semitic propaganda - or there may have been a famine, but it wasn't Stalin's planned policy to destroy the Ukrainian people, it was a planning mistake, since some people of other nationalities died, too.

Even though this type of disinformation and propaganda appeared freely in English-language publications in the U.S. and Canada prior to the report's release, Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.) noted after the bill's passage, "the realities of the genocide and the role of the Soviet Union's policy should be made known to everyone," and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said, "more work needs to be done to bring the full dimension of this chilling tragedy to light. The work of the commission is especially timely given greater discussion under way in the Soviet Union of the so-called blank spots of history, including a tentative, but increasing discussion of the famine."

Sources: The Ukrainian Weekly, April and May issues, 1988.