NEWS AND VIEWS: When it comes to the Famine-Genocide, Ukraine appears to be both blind and deaf (12/11/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS

When it comes to the Famine-Genocide, Ukraine appears to be both blind and deaf

by Lubomyr Luciuk

Millions perished. How many? No one knows. There is an ongoing scholarly debate over this statistical welter, of as much lasting merit as medieval deliberations over how many angels might be able to stand on the point of a pin. It will never be settled conclusively because the men who gathered data for the 1937 Soviet census, then produced detailed reports demonstrating a significant decrease in the USSR's population since 1927, were murdered, their findings suppressed.

Stalin's regime was not about to admit that famine swept Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933, transforming a fertile land once known as "the breadbasket of Europe" into a Golgotha, a place of skulls.

Moscow's men, and their minions in the West, insistently denied there was any famine. Proffered relief supplies were refused. The few truthful accounts of what was happening, told by courageous reporters like Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, were denounced as anti-Soviet propaganda. And, tellingly, the Soviet government continued to export grain even as people starved.

The scale of this atrocity is perhaps best conveyed by quoting the dean of the famine-deniers, The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty. Speaking privately to British Embassy officials in Moscow, September 26, 1933, Duranty confided that as many as 10 million people had died directly or indirectly of famine conditions in the USSR during the past year.

But was this famine an intentional act, directed against Ukrainians? A recently discovered telegram, marked "Secret" and dated January 23, 1933, originally sent from Moscow to Kharkiv, then capital of Soviet Ukraine, and copied to the administrative centers of Russian-populated territories bordering Ukraine, is revealing. Signed by Stalin on behalf of the Communist Party, and by Molotov, as chairman of the USSR's Council of Commissars, it refers to a "massive departure of peasants" from Ukraine into adjacent Russian lands "in search of bread." It next orders party officials and the OGPU (the political police) to prevent this exodus. As for those who somehow managed to exit Ukraine and Ukrainian-populated areas in the North Caucasus, they were to be arrested, and, after "anti-Soviet elements" were weeded out, the rest were to be returned whence they came. And so starving people were deliberately sent where food could not be found.

Olena Tuz, then a 6-year-old living in the Zhytomyr region, recalled with horror: "People ate people, mothers ate their own children. They didn't realize what they were doing, they just were hungry." Last weekend she attended a Kyiv rally hallowing the memory of the many millions of victims of what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, the Famine-Genocide. Relatives and survivors lit 33,000 candles, symbolically representing the number who died every day in the spring of 1933, at the height of the famine. They heard President Viktor Yushchenko call upon the world to recognize that the Great Famine, which killed one-quarter of the population of Soviet Ukraine, was a Soviet-sponsored genocide.

That is not likely to happen, largely because of what Ukraine has still not done. While this year's official memorial service was reportedly the most moving and well-attended, a proposed Institute of National Memory has not been established. Scholarly work on the crimes of communism in Ukraine remains uncoordinated, unsupported. By and large, contemporary Ukrainian society remains uneducated, perhaps even unwilling, to become better informed about what happened.

Furthermore, presidential statements about the causes of this catastrophe, while accurately focusing responsibility on Stalinism, avoid calling for the prosecution of those who served the "Man of Steel." More than a few of those enablers are still alive, drawing pensions, living cheek by jowl with their former victims in Ukraine and Russia, even in Canada.

Imagine someone saying Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust (true) but then stating that is all we need do about the Nazis (false). Yet, those who orchestrated what was, arguably, the greatest act of genocide to befoul 20th century European history are not being identified, much less brought to justice.

Before age inevitably takes away the last of these murderers, and those who survived them and can still bear witness, Ukraine must establish a Commission of Inquiry into Soviet Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes, as the Ukrainian diaspora has repeatedly called for. Until that is done, the rest of the world will never understand what the Holodomor was, or why it happened, much less accept that it was an act of genocide. No number of candle-lighting ceremonies, requiem masses, or symbolic resolutions in this or that Parliament will ever suffice.

Traditionally, justice is depicted as a woman who carries a scale, to weigh the evidence, and a sword, to punish the guilty. She is blind but she is not deaf. Today's Ukraine is both.

Lubomyr Luciuk, Ph.D., teaches political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, and wrote a foreword to a documentary collection, "The Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine" (Kashtan Press, 2005, compiled by Yuri Shapoval).

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