| |
The Kennan Institute (Russia and Surrounding States)
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Washington, D.C., November 13, 2003
|
EVENT SUMMARY
A recent conference organized by the Kennan Institute and cosponsored by the
Embassy of Ukraine to the United States, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of
America, and the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation examined new historical data about
the Ukrainian famine; the international reaction (and non-reaction) to the
famine, and how the famine fits in the context of our understanding of
genocide.
Historians have long known that the Soviet Union exported grain harvested in
Ukraine and other agricultural centers during Joseph Stalin's forced
collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s in order to finance the
rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. While the collectivization of
agriculture lead to the death or displacement of millions throughout the
Soviet Union, in Ukraine alone between five and ten million peasants
perished of starvation.
|
James Mace
Photo by the ArtUkraine.com Information Service
(Click on images to enlarge them)
|
New evidence from Russian and Ukrainian archives now shows that it was the
intent of Stalin and his lieutenants to use starvation as a weapon against
perceived potential enemies in Ukraine: "Each year, we learn more and more
about the famine in Ukraine. Even so, it is still difficult to grasp the
enormity of the tragedy: millions of people, in what was the breadbasket of
the then-Soviet Union, were quite literally starved to death," stated Paula
Dobriansky, Undersecretary for Global Affairs, U.S. Department of State.
According to Yuri Shapoval of the Institute of Political and Ethnonational
Studies in Kyiv, Stalin desired to turn Ukraine into a "model Soviet
Republic," but feared that the Ukrainian Communist Party was penetrated by
Polish agents and believed that "nationalist tendencies" in the Ukrainian
peasantry guaranteed their disloyalty to the Soviet state. Soviet officials
used this perception of disloyalty to justify the "special measures" used in
Ukraine. Failure to meet a grain quota was met with "in-kind fines" (the
confiscation of all food from a farm or village) and "blacklisting" (cutting
the farm or village off from all supplies).
James Mace of University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy argued that the
state-organized mass killing of the rural population combined with the
attempted destruction of Ukrainian culture amounts to genocide against the
Ukrainian nation. He noted that blockades were imposed to keep food from
going in to Ukraine, and to keep starving Ukrainians inside. At the same
time, leading elements of Ukrainian society, from teachers to artists, were
imprisoned or killed. The Ukrainian alphabet and grammar was changed to
correspond more closely with the Russian language.
|
Abbott Gleason of Brown University agreed that new evidence seems to point
to genocide as the correct classification of the tragedy. Evidence
demonstrating that Ukraine was singled out beyond other nationalities in the
Soviet empire would strengthen the argument. He cautioned that the strictest
interpretation of genocide-the intention to exterminate the entire
population-does not seem to fit with Stalin's desire to mold Ukraine into a
"model Soviet Republic."
Mace and Shapoval responded by pointing out that a famine in the Russian
Volga region was met with government assistance, and residents were allowed
to escape the area to Siberia, whereas the North Caucasus, an area with a
substantial Ukrainian population, was targeted with many of the same special
measures used in Ukraine. Stalin's plan for Ukraine as a "model Soviet
Republic" envisioned the destruction of Ukrainian culture and the deaths of
all who would cling to that culture.
|
Yuri Shapoval
Photo by the ArtUkraine.com Information Service
|
The second panel wrestled with the issue of international reaction to the
famine in Ukraine at the time. Panelists Eugene Fishel of the Department of
State and independent scholar Leonard Leshuk both agreed that there were
accurate news accounts of the famine provided by journalists such as Malcolm
Muggeridge and Garrett Jones. They were largely drowned out by positive
media coverage of the Soviet Union by journalists seeking to curry favor
with the Soviet government. The most famous example of such reporting came
from Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who denied the famine and went
on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Soviet Union.
Fishel noted that the U.S. government received news of the famine from a
number of other sources, including the Ukrainian-American community,
international groups such as the Red Cross, and official diplomatic
communications from other countries. The U.S. government, and other
governments, viewed the famine as a strictly internal matter that did not
directly impact on national interests. Moreover, the U.S. government was in
negotiations to open diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and did not
wish to derail those negotiations. The Great Depression was underway in
America, and the Soviet Union was seen at the time as a potentially
important market for U.S. industrial goods.
The final panel attempted to put the Ukrainian famine in the broader context
of genocides throughout history. Frank Chalk of Concordia University,
Montreal noted that hunger had been used throughout history as a tactic in
siege warfare and as a weapon against populations-from the Romans salting
the fields of Carthage to colonial powers burning local crops to weaken and
suppress revolts. He differentiated famine as a weapon of war from famine as
revolutionary social engineering.
Examples of the latter include the Ukrainian famine, China during the Great
Leap Forward, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. David Marcus
of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann and Bernstein, LLP described how man-made famine
does not fall into an existing framework under international law, which
recognizes genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Famine does
not fit neatly into one of these categories, and as a result famines are
often left off lists of great crimes against humanity and guilty parties go
unpunished. He recommended codifying famine law to criminalize inflicting or
creating conditions for famine.
Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch noted that the Ukrainian famine was not
illegal under international law at the time. It was not until 1944 that the
term genocide was introduced by Raphael Lemkin, and not until the 1948
Geneva Conventions that it was outlawed. Yet "since 1948, there have been at
least fifty-five genocides and political mass-murders with more than eighty
million victims," stated Stanton. "The prevention and prosecution of
genocide has been plagued by 'definitionalism.' The most recent example was
the State Department's refusal to call the Rawandan genocide by its proper
name until it was nearly over."
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1424&fuseaction=topics.event_summary&event_id=38768
Kennan Institute (Russia and Surrounding States)
Woodrow Wilson Center, One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004-3027
Email: kennan@wwic.si.edu, Tel: 202/691-4100
|
|
back
'))
'))
