NEWS AND VIEWS: Looking beyond charges of complicity: a campaign for a meaningful apology (12/29/02)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Looking beyond charges of complicity: a campaign for a meaningful apology

by Alexander Kuzma

After years of growing reconciliation and mutual understanding, it has suddenly become fashionable again, at least among some diaspora pundits to drive a wedge between eastern and western Ukrainian émigrés. Once again we are hearing western Ukrainians assuming an air of moral superiority and condemning eastern Ukrainians for their failure to resist the Stalin purges and for their "silence" in the face of the Great Famine.

One of the more shameful examples of this divisive new tendency has been the flurry of letters attacking Alla Heretz for her plea for some circumspection and compassion with regard to the families that survived the Great Famine of 1932-1933.

It is awfully easy for our well-fed patriots and suburban warriors to strike a pose of moral superiority while reclining in their easy chairs, sipping cognac by the fire and toasting their good fortune on Thanksgiving. It takes no courage (moral or physical) to look back and pass judgment on the terrorized and starving peasants of small towns and villages across the frozen backwaters of the Donbas and the Ukrainian heartland for their "complicity" in the disappearance of their neighbors and family members.

Unless they experienced first-hand the brute force of Stalin's collectivization and resisted it, Dr. Myron Kuropas and Dr. Jaroslaw Sawka are in no position to blame the victims or condemn the survivors. None of us can know what choices we would make if a gun were put to our head, and none of us can honestly speculate on how we might have resisted the most monolithic and terrifying police state the world might ever know.

As the grandson of western Ukrainian émigrés, I can take pride in my family's involvement in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) without belittling the sacrifices and the unique collective trauma that our eastern countrymen and their forefathers endured. My late uncle Bohdan Kuzma took part in some of the early "pokhidni hrupy" (expeditionary teams) of guerrilla fighters who infiltrated the eastern lands, looking for kindred spirits who would be willing to fight the Soviets and the Nazis. Even after the ordeal of the Great Famine and all its attending horrors, Bohdan still found plenty of people willing to take part in the independence movement. Years ago, while visiting Luhansk in the easternmost reaches of Ukraine, I was shown a burial site where local UPA fighters had been massacred. I have never since doubted that more eastern Ukrainians would have resisted Stalm if it had been humanly possible.

We "zakhidniaky" forget that one of the reasons why Stalin singled out Ukraine for his most brutal repression - eventually indulging in an orgy of full-blown genocide - was exactly that fierce, indomitable spirit of the eastern Ukrainian regions that resurfaced time and again. Beginning with the Zaporozhian era, it was viciously punished by a succession of Muscovite tyrants, from Peter I and Catherine, then reinforced by the ukaz (decree) of 1837 that prohibited the Ukrainian language. It smoldered through a period of back-breaking serfdom, reinvigorated by the defiance and imprisonment of Taras Shevchenko. Rekindled by the revolutionary movements of the early 20th century, it survived the destruction of the Central Rada government, the civil war, the uprisings of Symon Petliura and Nestor Makhno. That spirit resurfaced during the spectacular cultural revival of the 1920s that was finally crushed in the desolation of the purges and the Famine-Genocide.

The oppression that Halychyna experienced under the Poles and the relatively genteel colonialism of Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Empire was nowhere near as excruciating as the punishment meted out by Stalin, and we know it.

We will probably never know the names of the thousands of stubborn farmers from Cherkasy to Sumy to the Kuban who spat in the face of their Bolshevik expropriators before their land and their lives were taken from them. Our ignorance of their heroism is no excuse for maligning their families and neighbors simply because they chose survival over suicidal defiance in the face of hunger and atrocities that remain beyond our imagination. To blame these victims is itself cruel, hypocritical, inhuman and shameful.

We need to remember that in the period of 1932-1933 all of eastern Ukraine resembled a vast, virtual death camp, with sealed borders, a starving population and gangs of heavily armed Bolshevik thugs extracting every last scrap of food from the populace.

No intelligent or self-respecting Jew would have the temerity to condemn a survivor of Auschwitz for failure to do more to resist the Holocaust, and survivors would certainly be accorded respect, even if they did not join the Warsaw uprising or actively resist the Nazis. Unless they actively collaborated with the NKVD, or built their careers on the bones of their neighbors, survivors of the Famine deserve no less respect.

Pointing the finger at one another and playing the politics of division and one-upmanship has long been a losing proposition for Ukraine and for the diaspora. More importantly, this tendency distracts us from the real enemy and the real task at hand. If Dr. Sawka honestly believes that he would have acted more honorably in the face of Stalinist terror, then let him at least show the courage to challenge the powers that be in the American media that are still actively engaged in covering up this genocide.

As an insightful editorial in The Ukrainian Weekly suggested recently, The New York Times remains a principal player in the denial of what U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer has called "The Ukrainian Holocaust." In the code of journalistic ethics, there is no crime greater than the crime of "Holocaust denial." Yet The Times refuses to renounce the Pulitzer Prize that Walter Duranty secured by lying about the mass starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Now, here is a silence worth breaking. Here is an adversary worth holding accountable for a gross transgression that is real, not imagined. Here is an apology worth winning, once and for all.

The Ukrainian community needs to muster its resources, its Ivy League scholars and its community activists to rise to this occasion. We cannot let the year 2003 go by without a very public mea culpa from the New York Times for killing the story of the greatest genocide of the 20th century. This ongoing cover-up is in itself a very big newsworthy story, and if The New York Times stands by its Famine denial, then it should be brought to shame by every lesser newspaper and media outlet in America. The costs of such a campaign would be far from exorbitant; the evidence has been compiled and is irrefutable. Now it comes down to a matter of direct dialogue with the those who pledge to provide "all the news that's fit to print." The anniversary of the Great Famine will require modest audacity, quiet pressure behind the scenes and, finally, if necessary, noise.

It is time to start meeting with editorial boards across the country and focusing an unremitting laser beam of public attention on this issue. As long as America's most prestigious newspaper can get away with the journalistic crime of the century, then no ethnic group in the world will ever be safe from the threat of genocide and ethnic cleansing. A formal apology from The New York Times (preferably in bold print accompanied by a multi-page photo spread and historical retrospective on the Famine) would be a serious and historic achievement worth savoring.

If we can dream it, we can make it happen.

As we prepare to mark the 70th anniversary of the greatest tragedy in our people's history, it is time for Ukrainian Americans to stop taking cheap shots at one another and to get down to more serious business. Dr. Sawka can start by organizing a heart-to-heart talk between the most articulate and respected members of Detroit's Ukrainian community and the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press.

Alexander Kuzma, a community activist from Connecticut, is executive director of the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund.

| Home Page |