EDITORIAL: James E. Mace, 1952-2004 (05/09/04)

EDITORIAL

James E. Mace, 1952-2004

The name of Dr. James E. Mace will forever be associated with the Great Famine of 1932-1933. And for good reason. More than anyone else, it was Dr. Mace who brought the Famine to the awareness of the public - in the United States, in Ukraine and around the globe through his participation in international conferences on genocide and his countless writings on the subject.

Many readers of The Weekly have followed Dr. Mace's career since March 1983, when we wrote about him, a 31-year-old post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the "junior collaborator" of Dr. Robert Conquest, who was then working on his seminal book about the Famine. At the time Dr. Mace humbly indicated that someday he hoped to teach at a respectable university and to produce studies that would be useful to scholars in Soviet and Ukrainian studies. His paper "The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933: What Happened and Why," delivered at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide held in Tel Aviv in 1982, became the lead article for The Weekly's book "The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust" (1983). In 1986 Dr. Mace was tapped as the staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine.

In the years that followed, Dr. Mace continued to seek the truth and justice as he tirelessly worked on researching the Famine and on insisting that this genocide cannot be forgotten. He went further perhaps than most scholars would, becoming an advocate for the suffering Ukrainian nation, a passionate voice against those who concealed the Famine (e.g., Walter Duranty) and a passionate advocate for those who tried to tell the world the truth (e.g., Gareth Jones). His passion was obvious to all. As a professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and as a columnist for Den, he would attempt to uncover for his students and readers the truth about Ukraine, past and present, with the goal of guiding the nation toward a brighter future.

When the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine held hearings last year on the Holodomor, Dr. Mace wrote in the newspaper Den: "The February 12 Verkhovna Rada hearing ... was a triumph not of any one person, but of historical justice for millions who perished - not only in the countryside but for the Ukrainian people as a whole, for a nation literally dismembered by terror against those who had taken part in the earlier policy of Ukrainization and suppression of what they had done, dismembered by being cut off from much of its own history and culture, which were fed them in such a distorted form that the very word 'Ukrainian' seemed to become second rate ..." He argued that Ukraine needed an institute to study the Famine, and urged all Ukrainians to light a candle in memory of the Famine victims on Ukraine's national day of remembrance.

Dr. Mace's most recent appearance in the United States was in November of last year at the international conference on the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide held at Columbia University, where he spoke about the politics behind the establishment of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, as well as about the use of oral history in studying that genocide. He participated also at the conference organized on the occasion of the Famine's 70th anniversary at the Shevchenko Scientific Society, where his topic was "Why Was It Genocide?" While in New York, Dr. Mace spoke about the amount of work that remained to be done in studying the Famine-Genocide and establishing the historical record, about the wrongs that still needed to be righted.

Now Dr. Mace's life and dreams have been cut short. Nonetheless, he leaves behind an invaluable legacy for which we all must be profoundly grateful.

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