In his recent article, Oleh Wolowyna (July 1-July 8) argues the imperativeness of Ukrainians embracing in unison the conspicuously precise number of Holodomor victims which the group of demographers which he was a part of arrived at. Using figures significantly higher than his team’s is “counterproductive” for efforts to present a “credible basis for the Holodomor narrative,” he writes.
Ironically, literature on all other genocides tends to give a range of victim estimates, and no scholar considers the wide range as reason to question their narrative. Figures for the Armenian Genocide range from 800,000 to 1.5 million, the Cambodian – 1.5 million to 3 million, the Rwandan – 500,000 to 1 million, the Holocaust – 4.5 million to 6 million, etc.
Leaving the statistical debate aside to experts, the arguments that Dr. Wolowyna presents nonetheless deserve attention.
It’s inaccurate to say that the 7 million figure is derived from a misreading of statistician S. Sosnovyi’s 1942 article. That and similar figures appeared in western Ukrainian and émigré newspapers yet in the 1930s based on confidential conversations with Soviet Ukrainian officials. Visiting correspondent Henry Lang of the Yiddish-language Daily Forward reported that Mykola Skrypnyk (a leader in the Communist Party [Bolshevik] of the Ukrainian SSR) and Vsevolod Balitsky (NKVD chief during the Famine) mentioned 8 million deaths. Those figures must have been circulating, for even Walter Duranty of The New York Times revealed privately to the British Embassy in Moscow that he heard 10 million may have died. Former Soviet specialists calculated 5 million to 8 million in articles that appeared during the wartime German occupation, and it was among eastern Ukrainian survivors and authors that 7 million became standard. In the first larger works of émigré authors Sosnovyi’s computations were carefully analyzed by scholars such as the economist-statistician Dmytro Soloviy, who generally concur that statistical calculations point to approximately 7 million deaths.
Dr. Wolowyna seems to denigrate the reliance on two or three censuses as the starting point for the 7 million figure, but the number given for the Jewish Holocaust is also based on demographic comparisons (the 6 million figure is attributed to Adolph Eichmann).
The deduction of deaths that would have occurred had there been no famine needs review. Where’s the logic of not including the number that would have died anyway even though, most likely, the two-thirds of them who lived in rural areas died from starvation?
Dr. Wolowyna dismisses Volodymyr Serhiychuk’s call to count “different kinds of [related] deaths,” but he ignores the fact that Holocaust counts include not only Jews executed or gassed to death, but those who died from diseases and starvation in concentration camps and ghettos, participants of uprisings and partisan groups.
Holodomor-related documents were destroyed not only in 1941; deaths ceased to be recorded in local registries in the spring of 1933, so the copied-for-Moscow reports are themselves incomplete. Unrecorded were hundreds of thousands of newborns whom mothers couldn’t save.
Figures provided by German diplomats have value, since Germans had then a strong presence in Ukraine and the Kuban, and German officials, businessmen and specialists actively interacted with managers of Soviet machine and armament factories and administrators overseeing the augmented grain exports to Germany. The Weimar government wavered about purchasing bread confiscated from people doomed to starvation.
Few of the Western authors Dr. Wolowyna mentions actually engaged in scientific calculations of the number of Holodomor victims, but scholars who did, like Prof. Serhiychuk, apparently fail the test.
Ihor Mirchuk of Easton, Pa., is the author of the informational sections on the Holodomor in the workbook “Genocide: Never Again” of the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The workbook can be found online.