Memorandum To Economic And Social Council Of The United Nations (11/30/46)

Memorandum To Economic And Social Council Of The United Nations

FROM UKRAINIAN CONGRESS COMMITTEE OF AMERICA

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, representing more than seven hundred fifty thousand Americans of Ukrainian descent and mindful of its obligations to the government of the United States, to the United Nations and to humanity as a whole, respectfully submits this memorandum on conditions in the land of their fathers to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in the hope that the Economic and Social Council will take steps to insure that the Ukrainian people may be granted those rights and privileges guaranteed to all men everywhere by the Atlantic Charter and may enjoy the blessings of the Four Freedoms.

Despite the Iron Curtain with which the authorities of the Soviet Union have surrounded Ukraine, we have received from many sources sufficient details of the restrictions on the Ukrainian people and on all aspects of Ukrainian life and culture to justify our appeal to a body that has been created to provide for the establishment of justice and the preservation and development of human rights throughout the world. The cynical announcements of the authorities of the Soviet Union, which confirm the existence of a state of tension in Ukraine, increase our anxieties and render still more pressing and justified our confidence that the Economic and Social Council established by the United Nations to aid it in its work must recognize that there exists in Ukraine a situation which is fraught with danger to world peace and to the fulfillment of all those beneficent purposes for which the United Nations was constituted.

Ever since the occupation of Ukraine by Russian troops in the seventeenth century, the Ukrainians have struggled to maintain and develop their culture and to protect their way of free life against Russian repression and interference. It would be out of place to burden the Council with the details of this long continued effort. It reached its culmination, however, when the Ukrainians formally declared their independence in 1919 and established an independent Ukrainian Republic, into which there voluntarily entered the Republic of Western Ukraine. This historic act, it should be borne in mind, was in accordance with the principle of self-determination proclaimed at that time by Woodrow Wilson. Moreover, it is also worth noting, the Ukrainian National Republic, as it was called, was from the very outset founded upon principles of freedom and democracy, and with specific guarantees of equal rights to the national minorities of Ukraine.

It was immediately attacked by the Communist dictatorship centered at Moscow and was eventually overthrown, and the new Moscow-appointed rulers set up the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and commenced their task of remodelling Ukrainian life and thought, regardless of the cost to the Ukrainian people in lives, in spirit and in material possessions.

Year by year the Ukrainians have been subjected to an ever more ruthless and tyrannical regime. In 1931-1933 an artificially created famine carried away millions of Ukrainian lives, because the Soviet government determined to wipe out the national resistance of the Ukrainian people, together with their individualistic land holding and to drive the peasants into communal farms. Millions more of the population were driven into exile in Siberia and the far north, where they perished in great numbers. So ruthless has been this policy that the Soviet census shows that between 1926 and 1939 there was an actual decrease of the number of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union of over 3,000,000. When we consider the known fertility of the Ukrainian people of the Soviet Union and realize that during these years of oppression there is shown such a marked decrease instead of increase, we can estimate the number of deaths by starvation, deportation and execution that have marked the progressive increasing severity of Bolshevik misrule. Any increase in the population of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic has been openly brought about by the compulsory immigration into the Republic of non-Ukrainian labor to work in the factories and other installations that have been built under the orders from the Kremlin. All this has been done with the definite idea of eliminating from Ukraine its original native population in the hope that the Soviet authorities can thus destroy the last vestiges of Ukrainian national life.

Still more far-reaching have been the attacks on Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian intellectual leaders. In the early years of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, when the Soviet government was still endeavoring to win favor by making certain concessions, Ukrainian scholars were invited to return to Kiev to resume their work in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It was not for long. As soon as the Soviets felt themselves strong enough to act, Communists were forced into the Academy and the older leaders were arrested and removed. Professor Hrushevsky, the leading student of Ukrainian history, was confined near Moscow until his health was definitely broken for his true interpretation of Ukrainian history. The leading writers and scholars of Ukraine, whether Communists who had a share in the setting up of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and who hoped that it might be possible to develop Ukrainian culture with a Communist trend, met the same fate, for the rulers of the Kremlin were determined to produce a Soviet culture that would be Kremlinesque in essence and only Ukrainian in language, and the slightest adherence to the traditional forms of life, of culture and of literature was enough to make one a suspect.

In accordance with this policy, the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was deprived of its national character and transformed into a mere territorial adjunct of the Soviet Union. Work on specifically Ukrainian subjects was largely dropped and even the language was revised to bring it nearer to Russian patterns. Attempts were made to rewrite the history and literature to prove that the past leaders of Ukrainian culture had never desired anything but to serve as the tools of Moscow. These attempts have been continued to this very day, as witness the current American press reports.

It may be objected that all this was done before World War II. It is a futile argument, for when in 1939 the Red Army, then acting in agreement with the Nazis, invaded western Ukraine, the Soviet leaders commenced in Lviw and in all the other towns and villages of western Ukraine the same ruthless purging of the population, the same attacks on all Ukrainian intellectuals and the Ukrainian religious beliefs.

At the conclusion of World War II, when the Red Army was enabled to return to Ukraine after the defeat of the Nazis, the tyranny and disregard for elementary human rights redoubled. The Soviet retreat gave the leaders the opportunity to deport still more millions and to devastate the country behind them. The Soviet return gave them still more opportunities to deal further blows by labeling anyone whom they wished collaborationist with the Nazis and behind the Iron Curtain to continue their inhuman tasks. The sacrifices made by the Ukrainians in their struggle against the Nazis have availed them nothing, but have rather given to their conquerors new apprehensions as to the still remaining vigor of the Ukrainian people and have roused them to new efforts of anti-Ukrainian endeavor.

Once more the Soviet papers are demanding stiffer punishments for persons guilty of the crime of Ukrainian nationalism. Once more they are persecuting all persons who can be accused of holding the ideas of Professor Hrushevsky and his students. Once more they are removing from office in the Communist administration all persons who have any appreciation or respect for the past of Ukraine or who are trying in any way, no matter how small, to maintain anything of the old freedom of Ukrainian democracy or of the Ukrainian mode of life. They are executing them or deporting them from the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the orders of the Kremlin at the very moment when they are falsely pretending that Ukraine is a free nation entitled to be represented at the United Nations.

In the very same way, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been totally suppressed and brought even more fully under the control of the Kremlin-appointed Patriarch of Moscow. All traces of the autocephalous tradition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Ukrainians has been stereotyped on the Kremlin model.

In western Ukraine, where there existed the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite, still more drastic changes have been made and still more bitter religious persecution has been shown. From the first entrance of the Communist Soviet Army in 1939, arrests and deportations have been the custom of the day. After the reentrance of the Red Army on its western march these were redoubled. All the bishops were arrested and several have died in prison. The other clergy have been decimated by arrests, deportation and execution. Finally there was set up by the Soviet authorities an uncanonical body of renegade priests who were unqualified on legal or canonical grounds to act for the Church, and they formally asked that the entire organization be accepted into the Church dominated by the Patriarch of Moscow and that all connections with the Pope should be broken. Thus by a reign of terror and a denial of the most elementary human rights to the population, the people of western Ukraine have been deprived of the spiritual help which they have received for nearly four hundred years.

The same process has been repeated in Carpatho-Ukraine, which was removed from Czechoslovakia by the same highhanded methods and in defiance of treaties voluntarily entered into by the Soviet Union during the World War.

With such conditions prevailing in all parts of the Ukrainian lands, we need not be surprised that the Ukrainians who have found themselves in displaced persons camps do not wish to return. Some of them succeeded in escaping from the onward march of the Red Army in 1939 and in 1944. Others were brought from Ukraine under German domination to serve at forced labor in Germany and have been released by the victory over Germany. By whatever means they have reached their present location, they all agree that life in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is intolerable and they prefer death to a return within the Iron Curtain where death or a still worse fate awaits them.

Among these displaced persons are representatives of all walks of life. Along with laborers and farmers, there are priests and scholars, lawyers, doctors, writers and artists. They represent the main hope for the Ukrainian people in all fields of endeavor, and if Ukrainian culture is to be preserved after the Soviet holocaust, these men and women need the sympathetic help of your Council and possibilities for carrying on their work. Their importance to the life of their people is shown by the energy with which the Soviet Union is seeking to secure control of them and thus to prevent the truth of Ukrainian conditions from becoming known to the world at large.

The decisions of the Yalta Conference have been proved a ghastly mockery for all refugees from Soviet tyranny and misrule. The efforts made to return these unfortunate beings to certain death or deportation have produced already a long series of episodes that bring out in a lurid light the unspeakable conditions prevailing in Ukraine, and it is but common humanity and decency to urge that attempts to return them behind the Iron Curtain should be definitely stopped and that redoubled work should be undertaken to find them suitable homes where they can live with human rights and privileges and do their work.

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, therefore, respectfully requests that the Social and Economic Council of the United Nations institute without a delay an international investigation of conditions within Ukraine to determine by unbiased methods the exact condition under which the Ukrainian people are living and to make that report public.

It requests also that the Council, when it has secured this information, take steps to insure that the fundamental rights of man shall be reintroduced into Ukraine and that religious and all other forms of persecution shall be brought to an end.

It requests that there shall be set up by the Council a court of human rights to which oppressed individuals and groups shall have the right to appeal and that this court be empowered to carry out its decisions.

It requests also that the United Nations scientific and educational organization give attention to the proper study of Ukrainian culture and to the securing of proper conditions for life and work of the surviving Ukrainian scholars and writers and other intellectuals.

It likewise requests that, in adjudging the case of these unfortunates who as Ukrainian patriots fear to return to Soviet misrule, there be drawn no artificial distinctions between "displaced persons" and "refugees," for in essence they are the one and same persons, to be treated alike.

It requests finally that the spectre of return within the Iron Curtain be removed from before the eyes of all displaced persons who do not wish to return home, that all matters of direct and indirect coercion shall be stopped, and that new homes be sought for them where they can live and develop freely for the welfare of humanity.

Finally, it feels that the adoption of such measures will benefit not only Ukraine but the United Nations in all branches of its work, and will inspire in peace-loving people everywhere that confidence which alone can lead to just and lasting peace and to the general well-being of a war-weary world.

Ukrainian Congress Committee of America
Respectfully submitted by Stephen Shumeyko

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