Shevchenko Scientific Society hosts conference on Holodomor (11/30/03)

THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FAMINE-GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE

Shevchenko Scientific Society hosts conference on Holodomor

by Dr. Orest Popovych

NEW YORK - On November 8, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh) held its second scholarly conference this year dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor - the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide. The program featured four speakers from Ukraine and one from Great Britain. It was chaired by Dr. Taras Hunczak, professor of history and political science at Rutgers University, himself a prolific writer and lecturer on the subject of the Holodomor.

The symposium opened with an English-language presentation by Dr. James Mace of Kyiv, professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, associate editor of Politychna Dumka and former staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, who spoke on the topic "Why Was It Genocide?"

The term "genocide" was coined by Rafael Lemkin, a jurist who formulated the International Convention on Genocide and lobbied successfully to have it adopted by the United Nations in 1946 and 1948. Underlying these conventions is the belief that all groups of the human race contribute to human civilization and if any one of them is destroyed or partially crippled, all of humanity is impoverished, said Dr. Mace.

Genocide is defined as an attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, with the objective of altering the national character of a given region by criminal methods. Genocide may be perpetrated either by outright killing of the members of the victimized group, or by the intentional creation of such conditions that would lead to the group's complete or partial destruction.

According to Dr. Mace, in 1932-1933 the Soviet regime showed a pattern of intent to destroy the Ukrainian population. Unreasonably high grain procurement quotas, that were impossible to meet, were imposed on Ukraine's farming communities, whereupon the "delinquent" districts would be blacklisted and had their foodstuffs confiscated by bands of armed Communist activists, while their population was prevented from leaving for other areas. To say that such measures were not intended to create a famine is incomprehensible, said Dr. Mace. The political rationale for engineering the Famine-Genocide was revealed in the August 11, 1932, letter from Joseph Stalin to Lazar Kaganovich, in which the Soviet dictator warned that Ukraine could be "lost," unless it was made to be the "most inalienable part of the Soviet Union." According to Dr. Mace, the only way to accomplish this was to take the national content out of the Ukrainian SSR, or to de-Ukrainize Ukraine.

The scheme involved the decimation through Famine of Ukraine's peasant population, which represented the bulwark of the Ukrainian nation. This was followed, however, by the liquidation of the leadership of the Communist Party of Ukraine and much of the patriotic intelligentsia. Significantly, the mass murder was accompanied by an assault on the Ukrainian language as well. You didn't have to change the Ukrainian orthography to help collectivization, commented Dr. Mace. Not coincidentally, the engineered Famine was extended also to the Kuban region of Russia, which at the time was 80 percent Ukrainian-speaking, where it was accompanied by the prohibition of the Ukrainian language in print, schools and administrative offices.

The Famine-Genocide and its cover-up in the USSR until the late 1980s accomplished the de-Ukrainization of Ukraine, the evidence of which is plentiful today. It led to the anomaly where today patriotic Ukrainians are a minority in their own country. Thus, it was genocide against the Ukrainian people, concluded Dr. Mace.

Next to speak was Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley of Great Britain, who offered an affectionate account of the brief but notable life of her uncle Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist and foreign-affairs adviser to Lloyd George, the former British prime minister. Jones had visited rural areas of Ukraine at the height of the Famine in 1933. The title of Dr. Colley's talk, "Gareth Jones: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness," reflects the fact that upon his return from Ukraine Jones published a number of articles revealing the truth about the horrors of the Ukrainian Famine, at a time when most Western journalists preferred to parrot the Moscow propaganda line, which altogether denied the existence of any famine.

Using his first-hand observations of the Famine, Jones published in The New York Times a rebuttal to the notorious lies on the subject by its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, while in the Manchester Guardian he criticized that paper's pro-Soviet stance in its editorial support for the Famine deniers. Subsequently, Jones was accused by the Soviet authorities of espionage and denied a visa for re-entry.

In 1935, while traveling through China, Jones was kidnapped and murdered on the eve of his 30th birthday by "bandits" near the Mongolian border. Considering that this happened in an area where the interests of China, Japan and the Soviet Union clashed at the time, Jones' murder may have been politically motivated, opined Dr. Colley. Her book "Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident" (2002) tells a fascinating story of Jones' travels through the Far East, up to his tragic demise.

The Ukrainian-language part of the program featured three speakers from Kyiv: Natalya Dziubenko, a writer, spoke on the "Holodomor: Eyewitness Testimony," focusing primarily on the compilation of accounts of the Famine survivors that was published in 1990 in a book titled "Holod. Narodna Knyha-Memorial" (Famine. A Memorial Book of the People). A total of 6,000 survivors were polled for this publication, of whose testimonies 1,000 were incorporated in the book.

According to Ms. Dziubenko, the impetus for this belated project in Ukraine came from the unique study which was conducted in the 1980s for the U.S. Congress by a group headed by Dr. Mace (to whom she is married), in which some 200 Famine survivors were interviewed. Although the polling for the 1990 "Memorial" in Ukraine contained a self-serving spin for the benefit of the Communist Party (suggesting that the party was actually aiding the starving people), the publication of this compilation became a watershed event that opened the floodgates for subsequent appearance of numerous works on the Famine-Genocide.

Ms. Dziubenko reminded all Ukrainians to light a candle in their window on the fourth Saturday of November in memory of the victims of the Holodomor.

Volodymyr Lozitskyi, director of the Central State Archive of Civic Organization in Kyiv, opened his presentation with the statement that the archive of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) possessed all the information pertaining to life in Soviet Ukraine. It comprised the secret decrees of the CPU as well as the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR; reports of local and regional party committees, state security organs, police, as well as letters from ordinary people.

All of this information, however, was kept secret until about 1988, when the Famine-Genocide was exposed and condemned in the "Report to Congress: Commission on the Ukraine Famine" authored by Dr. Mace. This exposure, as well as the political thaw of the Gorbachev era, helped open the Soviet archives to scholars.

Dr. Lozitskyi pointed out that, while these archives do contain the mortality figures for some individual localities, there are no hard statistical data on the Famine-caused mortality in Ukraine as a whole. The estimates presented by scholars are based on demographic analyses. Nevertheless, considering that concurrently with the starvation the Soviet regime implemented a policy of de-Ukrainization both in Ukraine and in the Kuban region, there is no question that we are dealing here with genocide against the Ukrainian people, concluded Dr. Lozitskyi.

Volodymyr Danylenko, director of the State Archive of the Kyiv Oblast, which has more than 2.5 million documents, focused on a few raions (counties) and even some specific villages in the Kyiv region, for which he described the events of the Famine-Genocide period in painfully graphic detail. Going beyond the cold statistics, which attested to the loss of up to 50 percent of the population in some areas, he recited a multitude of family names as well as first names of the victims of persecutions, expropriations, death by hunger and even cannibalism.

Illustrative of the brutality of the Soviet regime, Dr. Danylenko said, was the decision of the Kyiv City Council in May 1933 to bar any peasants from entering the city in order to buy bread. The speaker concluded by referring to Ukrainian proverbs that were generated by the people's experiences during the Famine-Genocide.

The program was closed by the president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the U.S., Dr. Larissa Onyshkevych, who thanked the speakers, as well as the standing-room-only audience. In attendance were members of Ukraine's diplomatic corps, who were introduced earlier: Markian Kulyk, deputy permanent representative of the Mission of Ukraine to the U.N.; Danylo Lubkivsky, the Mission's second secretary; and the Andrii Nadzos, vice-consul of the Consulate General of Ukraine in New York.

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