LETTER TO THE EDITOR (04/25/99)

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Famine now topic of scholarly attention

Dear Editor:

I noted with interest Victor Rud's critique (April 11) of my article (speech) on the Ukrainian Famine.

I will say at the outset, as I remarked to the organizers of the talk in Calgary, that I have never claimed to be an expert on this subject. It falls within the realm of one of the areas in which I specialize, i.e., Stalinism, but I have not conducted archival work in Kyiv, Moscow, etc., as would be the normal prerequisite, in my field, before delivering lectures.

However, I think Mr. Rud's letter merits a response because he makes several questionable assertions. If I read him correctly, he maintains that because of the tragic nature of the events of 1932-1933, it is misguided, even "pernicious" to get involved in the argument about their causes. If this were the case, historians could safely withdraw their interest from many of the events of this particularly bloody century. In reality, it has almost always proved useful to search for causes.

Mr. Rud asks whether I would require a document signed in triplicate by Stalin. In fact, Stalin signed personally thousands of such documents during the purges, which is why no such debate has arisen over the events later in the decade. In addition, he often committed his views to paper. His letters to Molotov, for example, are a far better indicator of his motives than, say, the memoirs of Khrushchev, written decades after the event and with a desire for self-vindication. Thus, it would not be so far-fetched to seek such a document or evidence of motivation from Stalin's correspondence.

The comparison with the Jewish Holocaust is, in my view, facile. There is an obvious document at hand here, namely Hitler's "Mein Kampf," in which his views and intentions toward the Jews are made quite plain. Anti-Semitism was one of Hitler's main (likely the main) guiding force behind his actions, and such a policy was always overt. By 1944 the Nazi occupants of Eastern Europe had devised ways to kill Jews as quickly and clinically as possible, and Jews were shipped from occupied Europe to death camps in the east. Genocide.

And that brings me to another point. Is Mr. Rud saying that the Soviet authorities were so subtle that they would seek to eliminate national or ethnic groups by starving them to death, en masse? One would have to make the argument here that his victim was Ukrainians per se, rather than peasants (racial rather than demographic motivations). But is this what he means?

The Stalinist regime rarely showed such forethought, in Ukraine or elsewhere. In the period 1937-1941, NKVD executions were a daily affair. In June 1941, Ukrainian political prisoners were simply massacred by the NKVD prior to the Soviet retreat from Halychyna. When Stalin wanted to remove people, they were executed, in the thousands or - and the case of the Crimean Tatars at the end of the war is a case in point - deported from their native land.

I did not realize that there was a "subliminal message" in my talk, but if there was, it was not even close to Mr. Rud's explanation "for the uninitiated" (Who are they by the way? The Weekly readers who are not as perceptive as Mr. Rud?) that "Ukrainian deaths were the unfortunate, but unintended, by-product of other state activity." State repression, in my view, was the cause of the Famine. It seems to me that as millions died, and Stalin chose to allow this to happen, such slaughter and callousness is in every way as culpable and detestable as a deliberately engineered and premeditated genocide of a group en masse.

Whether Mr. Rud likes it or not, there is currently a scholarly debate on the causes of the Famine that has spilled over the pages of journals such as Slavic Review and is manifest at academic conferences. My comments also elicited a lively debate among an audience of Ukrainian Canadians in Calgary, though I would posit that none of them found my remarks to be pernicious. That such debates continue is not and never has been an indicator that the scale or the horror of the Famine is being belittled. Rather it shows that the Famine is, at long last, at the forefront of scholarly attention.

This is not "the wretched persistence of selective morality." It is that perennial but elusive quest of historians: the search for objectivity and truth. Emotionally I am probably as close to Ukrainians as it is possible to be to a group that is not one's own. The consequences of the Famine, like those of Chornobyl, continue to move me personally, as they do Ukrainians worldwide. But I still have to present views that appear to fit the evidence. If this "scholarly detachment" appears unfeeling, then believe me, it isn't.

David R. Marples
Edmonton

The writer is professor of history at the University of Alberta.

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