James E. Mace, Famine researcher from U.S., dies in Kyiv at age 52 (05/09/04)

James E. Mace, Famine researcher from U.S., dies in Kyiv at age 52

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Dr. James E. Mace, broadly regarded as the individual whose scholarly research gave the world the first detailed documentation on the horrors of the artificially induced Great Famine of 1932-1933, died unexpectedly in Kyiv on May 3. He was buried at the renowned Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv on May 6 after funeral services held at the Sobor of St. Volodymyr. He was 52.

Prior to the funeral, more than 1,000 people gathered for a viewing and memorial service at the historic Teacher's Building in downtown Kyiv to pay their last respects to a man who had adopted Ukraine as his home and had learned to speak Ukrainian fluently, albeit with the Western drawl of a native Oklahoman.

Among the many political and academic leaders present were National Deputies Viktor Yushchenko, Stepan Khmara and Mykola Zhulynskyi, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy President Viacheslav Briukhovetsky and poet Lina Kostenko.

Most everyone who addressed the mourners agreed that the late history professor had an uncanny ability to read the Ukrainian mindset and understand it.

Larysa Ivshyna, the editor-in-chief of Den, the newspaper where Dr. Mace worked as English editor and wrote a weekly column, told The Ukrainian Weekly that his greatest contribution was in identifying the affliction that Ukrainian society currently suffered.

"James understood us, he understood that we are a 'post-genocidal society' - a word that he coined," explained Ms. Ivshyna.

Dr. Briukhovetsky, rector of NUKMA agreed. The academic noted that perhaps what drove the young native of Oklahoma who claimed Indian ancestry to commit his life to uncovering the dark truth about the Ukrainian Famine was that he had felt a correlation between the events of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and what had happened to his own Indian nation in the 19th century.

"He truthfully and accurately told us the uncomfortable truth about ourselves," commented Prof. Briukhovetsky. "A great person has left us at a very young age. Academics only begin to do their best work at this age, but what he accomplished in his short life most scholars do not do in 100 years of work."

During the memorial service, speaker after speaker echoed Dr. Briukhovetsky's and Ms. Ivshyna's thoughts. But it was the poet Ms. Kostenko who gave the most stirring account of what Dr. Mace meant to Ukraine.

"I remember once, when he was derisively asked why he had bothered to come to Ukraine, he answered, 'Your dead have called me,' " recalled Ms. Kostenko. "Only the soul of genius could have understood that, maybe because his ancestors were Indian and he understood that Ukrainians have often felt as if bound to a reservation."

Speakers at the memorial service also noted that Dr. Mace had other accomplishments to his credit than simply the work of the Famine commission that he had directed in the 1980s.

National Deputy Zhulynskyi explained that it was Dr. Mace who had initiated and led the fight to have a memorial built in Kyiv in honor of the Great Famine's victims, which was quickly constructed just prior to 60th anniversary commemorations in 1993.

Volodymyr Polokhalo, editor of the respected academic journal Politychna Dumka for which Dr. Mace worked when he first came to Ukraine, said the American was quick to go in his journalism where others had not dared.

"He was objective, honest and competent. When he began to write about corruption in Ukraine, people didn't want to read that, to acknowledge that it existed in Ukraine," explained Mr. Polokhalo.

Work with Famine Commission

In the end, however, history will remember Dr. Mace for the work he did in bringing the facts of the Famine-Genocide to the attention of the U.S. government and public, work Dr. Mace began at the relatively tender age of 34, when he became staff director of the United States Commission on the Ukraine Famine. From 1986 to 1990 he led a detailed effort to document the tragedy of the 1932-1933 artificial famine in Ukraine as it had developed in the countryside of eastern and central Ukraine. Perhaps most importantly, he guided an oral history project of eyewitness accounts by survivors.

In 1987 it was Dr. Mace, speaking at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century," who first cited a declassified U.S. State Department document, that suggested there was an agreement between The New York Times and the Soviet government to cooperate in disseminating information on what was occurring in the Soviet state in the early 1930s.

Written by a U.S. Embassy staffer in Berlin and based on a conversation with Walter Duranty, The New York Times Moscow Bureau reporter who helped Stalin cover up the mass deaths in Ukraine by denying in his dispatches that any problems existed in Ukraine, the memorandum noted: "in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities," Duranty's dispatches always "reflect(ed) the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."

Dr. Mace wrote the Report to Congress, which documented the findings of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. The report officially recognize the Great Famine of 1932-1933 as an act of genocide by the Soviet leadership.

Dr. Mace was also responsible for the commission's three-volume Oral History Project, released in June 1990, which he compiled and edited with Leonid Heretz.

Born in Oklahoma

Dr. Mace was born on February 18, 1952, in Muskogee, Okla. After completing undergraduate studies at Oklahoma State University, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he obtained his doctorate in 1981.

Dr. Mace first came to the attention of Soviet scholars in 1983 as a post doctoral fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University after he published his seminal study "Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933."

In 1986, he prepared with Oksana Procyk and Mr. Heretz a second work on early Soviet Ukraine, this time concentrating on his field of expertise. The work was titled "Famine in the Soviet Ukraine 1932-1933: A Memorial Exhibition, Widener Library, Harvard University."

Shcherbak pays his respects

In his remarks during the memorial service at the Teacher's Building in Kyiv, former Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Yuri Scherbak noted that possibly no other person could have succeeded at receiving the attention and obtaining the same results that Dr. Mace did in his work as the staff director of the U.S. Famine Commission.

"He knew the system, he knew how to talk to people. He knew the language of politics," explained Dr. Shcherbak.

The former Ukrainian ambassador completed his remarks with a jab at the current Ukrainian intelligentsia, which Dr. Mace often derided: "With his heavily accented but fluent Ukrainian, a language that he loved, Jim should be an example to those born here who can barely say a word in Ukrainian."

Dr. Mace, who had lived in Kyiv for over a decade, was a professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, an editor of the Kyiv newspaper Den (The Day) and a member of various scholarly organizations at the time of his death.

He is survived by his wife, Natalia Dziubenko-Mace, and one son, William, from a previous marriage.

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