Hearing on memorial's design reveals public's feelings about Famine-Genocide (09/17/06)

Hearing on memorial's design reveals public's feelings about Famine-Genocide

by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Vasyl Tokarev said he remembers his village in the steppes of the Donetsk Oblast in 1932 preparing for an expected food shortage the following year.

Extra supplies of apples and acorns were stored, and in 1933 Soviet government tractors arrived to provide needed seeds, which were all sown, said Mr. Tokarev, a Red Army veteran.

"It was not a Holodomor," Mr. Tokarev said. "We did not feel any government influence to provoke a famine. It was natural conditions."

Shevchenko laureate Pavlo Movchan was incensed by Mr. Tokarev's claims of the Soviet government's benevolence in 1933, and offered his own second-hand accounts which he remembered from childhood.

During the famine of 1946 and 1947, Mr. Movchan described how his neighbors had pointed out to him the women in the village who had eaten their children during the Holodomor.

"We were afraid of those women who ate their children in 1933," Mr. Movchan said. "Everyone was afraid of them like lepers."

In a German prison camp, a young man who survived the 1933 Famine by eating wild herbs he found in forests taught Mr. Movchan's brother how to distinguish which were edible, and which were poisonous, he said.

As Ukraine prepares to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1932-1933 Holodomor with the construction of a world-class memorial, the one thing that may be lacking is unanimity among Ukrainian citizens on the Famine-Genocide.

Whether out of their anomalous personal experiences, loyalty to the Communist ideology, allegiance to their Russian ethnicity or culture, ignorance of the facts, or simple denial, a sizeable minority of Ukrainian citizens isn't convinced the Holodomor was an artificial genocide hatched by Joseph Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian identity.

A September 6 public hearing in Kyiv to consider the architectural merits of the finalist models for the planned Holodomor complex in the Ukrainian capital instead became an emotional venting session replete with shouting, crying and raucous debate over whether an artificially induced famine had taken place.

A passionate group of elderly Red Army veterans who converged at the building of the National Union of Writers insisted there was no such thing, while others refuted them with facts, documents and second-hand accounts.

Petro Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president's brother, told the 30 or so members of the audience that he researched statistics regarding his home village, Khoruzhivka, in the Sumy Oblast.

He found that about 1,000 residents had either died or disappeared in 1932 and 1933, compared with 461 who died or never returned during the second world war.

"Our people killed their own people more than the fascists did," he said.

"Petro Andriyevych, like your brother, you absolutely don't know history," shouted Boryslav Yatsko, a Red Army veteran and activist who fights against revisionism of Soviet history within Ukraine and for preserving the Soviet memory.

"Famines occurred in every era, all over the world, and you're saying this was the only one," Mr. Yatsko continued.

"There were many famines, but this was a planned genocide," Mr. Yushchenko shouted in response.

"Then what was the Kuban?" Mr. Yatsko retorted, referring to the region in the Russian Federation where 1 million are estimated to have starved to death.

A Kuban famine survivor, 85-year-old Vitalii Koshechkin, stood up to tell the audience that it wasn't only Ukrainians who died from the spontaneous famines, and any memorial should honor all the people of the USSR. He and Mr. Tokarev were the only two witnesses to the 1932-1933 Famine to speak at the hearing.

Mr. Koshechkin cited documents that reveal that a top Ukrainian Communist official, Hryhorii Petrovskyi, traveled to Moscow in 1933 to plead with Joseph Stalin for relief - a request duly ignored.

He read a letter from the Organization of Red Army Veterans of Ukraine accusing President Viktor Yushchenko of exploiting the Holodomor to promote his own political agenda.

"You are abusing your position as president and trying to make from this human tragedy your own policy, which doesn't reflect the needs and necessities of the people," Mr. Koshechkin read.

"You forget that history is going to ask you a question: why, in peacetime, without famine, the population of Ukraine was reduced by 7 million people," he said, referring to Ukraine's population plunge since 1991.

The antagonism of Red Army veterans reveals that Ukraine's real problem lies in its citizens' lingering inability to confront its tragic past, Petro Yushchenko said.

Revealing his deep Orthodox Christian convictions, Mr. Yushchenko said the Holodomor occurred because "We blew up cupolas and crosses. Leading up to these events, we went down road of theomachy."

Instead of debating the details of memorials and museums, the nation must repent of its past before God, he said.

"To this day, we are playing with projects," Mr. Yushchenko said. "Again, it's our fault. Nobody in the whole world, no other country, no other nation would have allowed this. This is our ignorance, our absence of spirituality. It's even worse than ruining churches in the 1920s and 1930s," he stated.

A more pragmatic stance was expressed by American Morgan Williams, a long-time advocate for a Holodomor complex, who spoke on behalf of the worldwide Holodomor working committee that he chairs.

He urged Ukrainians to begin work immediately so that a Holodomor Memorial Historical Complex is ready by the 75th anniversary commemorations.

The memorial's artistic symbols have to be bold and dynamic enough to be internationally recognized, and its museum and research institution should become the world's foremost source of archives and study on the Holodomor.

"It should not just represent the victims of this tragedy," Mr. Williams told the audience. "It also should represent the crime that happened. It must be a strong symbol against a system that took the lives of millions of people."

Mr. Yatsko criticized Mr. Williams for flying to Ukraine to lecture Ukrainians on how to live. He accused Americans of plotting to distort random famines as genocides.

"Did you know the term for the Holodomor in 1933 came from America?" he shouted. "That's where it was created and spread throughout the world."

While no one pointed it out during the meeting, it is well-known among Holodomor researchers that the Donetsk Oblast escaped the genocide as among the least impacted regions.

It's estimated that the oblast suffered less than a 15 percent population decline during those two years, compared with 25 percent or more population drops in the neighboring Luhansk and Zaporizhia oblasts.

And no one informed Mr. Yatsko that the Kuban region of Russia had a particularly high ethnic Ukrainian population, which some suspect is a reason it was targeted.

In the middle of his impassioned words, Mr. Movchan, assistant chair of the jury reviewing proposals for the Holodomor complex, offered his assessment of Ukraine's position on the Holodomor, perhaps most aptly summing it up.

"The whole world will be laughing at us if presidents, government representatives from all over the world arrive to honor the Babyn Yar victims on September 25, and we, the nation of cannibals, are still discussing what kind of monument we need to have and whether it should it be there at all," Mr. Movchan said. "Then I believe we will only have foreign monuments and foreign tributes [to the Holodomor's victims].

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