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Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
There are some things that cannot be addressed except in the first person
singular, even in history. I spent over ten years researching the Ukrainian
Famine of 1933 and perhaps as long running away from it. Every decade or
half-decade it seems, first the emigration and then Ukraine itself begins a
"celebration" (what a horrible word; why don't we go out next week and
celebrate the Armenian Massacres?) of its national tragedy. At any rate,
historians marked November 7, the date of what was once known as the Great
October Socialist Revolution, with a conference at the Shevchenko Kyiv State
National University on the three manmade famines in Ukraine, those of the
twenties, thirties, and forties.
It was almost a lifetime ago in 1981 that I was asked by the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute to take up the topic of the famine of 1933. I
was finishing a doctoral dissertation on national communism in Soviet
Ukraine during the immediately preceding period, and I knew the Soviet
Ukrainian press of the period. There is a great misconception that in a
totalitarian state the press prints only lies. It also has to define what is
permissible, what is not, to tell people what they are expected to do and
threaten them with the consequences if they fail to do so. The Stalinist
Ukrainian press of the period did this in great abundance, and I eagerly
accepted the assignment. Later the US Congress in its wisdom created a
Commission on the Ukraine Famine, and I was named staff director. I did what
I was able as honestly as I could, and - as I had to tell the distinguished
conference at Kyiv University - the silence was deafening.
The first attack I weathered was in 1985 from Steven Wheatcroft, now
Professor at the Australian National University, in the journal Problems of
Communism. My sums, he argued, were off. They might well have been, I am not
a statistician, and that is not the point. The best historian of the
Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, maintains that Hitler killed not six million Jews
but only 5.1 million. Does that mean that what Hitler did was 20% less bad
than we thought? The point is not the figures. The point is that a culture
that enlivened European civilization no longer exists. The Yiddish Theater
in Lviv no longer exists. Something that made humanity rich is gone, and
humanity as a whole is impoverished by its loss. Something similar but not
equivalent (there are still Ukrainians, albeit trying to figure out who they
are and what they want) happened here. And it is here that historical denial
begins.
My sin - and the sin of so many others in this benighted land - is to
connect the destruction of the Ukrainian peasantry with that of the
Ukrainian nation, with what they were creating even in the less than free
atmosphere of the 1920s, when Ukrainians had their rozstriliane
vidrodzhennia, literally the rebirth that was stood up against the wall and
shot. I have met intellectuals in Ukraine who could acquaint themselves with
that chapter of their literary heritage only in the 1990s because much of
their history, including the history of their literature was banned. For
accenting this Prof. Wheatcroft and others accused me of debasing the
profession of Soviet studies. Let history be my judge, for the history of
Ukraine will be made in Ukraine as part of the making of Ukraine itself.
Perhaps that is the main reason why I chose to live here.
History is a far more subjective thing than most historians would have it.
We can define our history only after we define who we are. There was a
process here that was violently interrupted in 1933, and that interruption
has something to do with the manmade famine. It is interesting how those who
deny its national character pass over in silence the trepidation of Stalin
and Kaganovich's statements that the problems in the Kuban were was all
because of people sent in from Ukraine, obviously from Mykola Skrypnyk's
Commissariat of Education, the centerpiece of the Ukrainization at the time
and the first object of destruction by Stalin's satraps.
Still, there is an antiseptic quality to documents and even the most brutal
newspaper editorials. It is another to deal with those who suffered through
something beyond the bounds of one's own experience. Twenty years ago there
were plenty who wanted to tell the world what they had experienced. Now we
hear, especially by one Prof. Mark Tauger of the University of West
Virginia, that witnesses are not trustworthy, even if they number in the
thousands. In his view, the harvest was bad, and the Soviet state made a
heroic effort to feed the cities, but the food simply ran out (ignoring, it
seems, what of it was sold abroad).
I was sad to tell colleagues here that what I had done then and what they do
now simply fall on deaf ears in the Western world of Soviet studies. It is
as though those who study the Armenian Massacres were trying to make their
case through Turkic studies or those on the Holocaust through Germanic ones.
In the United States, at least, studies of the former Soviet Union are
dominated by those who not so very long ago were out to discredit the idea
of totalitarianism as Cold War ideology (a concept, be it totalitarianism or
any other, is either useful or not in explaining things but it cannot by its
nature be true or false) and now seem attached to the great friendship of
Soviet peoples: everybody suffered together, and only reactionaries would
assign separate histories to the separate peoples once united in the USSR.
Perhaps we should also think the same way about the former Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Or perhaps we should take each people separately as a unique
component making up the variegated thing we know as humanity, even if they
lived in the former Soviet Union. Was what they managed to retain of their
identity only reactionary or should they, like the great progressives Marx
and Engels would have had it, reconcile themselves to their own destruction
as they once wished for the Czechs?
November 12 2002, The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine
http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2002/35/1-page/1p4.htm
For personal and academic use only
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