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By Dr. Roman Serbyn, Professor of Russian and East European History
University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
The Link student newspaper, Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
December 5, 1988
Within the last two years, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 has become an
important topic of discussion in the Soviet Union. Soviet newspapers and
journals, both in Ukraine and in Russia, are replete with memoirs of famine
survivors and discussions by historians, writers and intellectuals in
general. High ranking party officials no longer deny the historicity of the
tragedy, and even Shcherbytsky, the reactionary boss of Ukraine, recently
felt obliged to admit that the famine did occur.
The famine was discussed at the 19th Party conference, held in Moscow last
June. On that occasion, Borys Oliynyk, secretary of the Ukrainian Writers'
Union (UWU), called for the publication of a "White Book" on the crimes of
the Stalin era. Oliynyk further demanded that the people finally be told of
the "true reasons for the starvation of millions of Ukrainians." In Kiev,
the capital of Ukraine, the party committee of the local branch of the UWU
decided to bring out a commemorative book on the famine and appealed to
historians, social scientists and famine survivors to assist it with
documentary material.
While the Soviet Union has not as yet produced any monograph or extensive
collection of documents on the famine, a wealth of material has been
published in the periodical press. The frankness of some of the recent
Soviet literature on the famine may come as a surprise.
First, it provides graphic descriptions by eye-witnesses of the horrors of
the famine. S. Latyshev was a twenty year old student when he visited
villages in the Kharkiv region in April 1933;
"No domestic animals were left in the villages, and even dogs, cats and
other animals disappeared. Even sparrows were scarcely seen in the streets,
everything had been eaten, whether living or dead. Leather footwear,
sawdust, straw and chaff were consumed. When the snow thawed in the fields
the people caught gophers, moles, mice and other rodents - all were eaten.
"That spring, there was not a household where someone had not died from
famine. Whole families died out; there was no one to dig communal graves.
Peasants mobilized by the village Soviet dug the earth with difficulty and
many died there themselves. Decomposing corpses lay in houses for weeks. The
stench spread far beyond the villages. By the beginning of June, not more
than one quarter of the population remained in the villages, but they were
incapable of any work." ("Argumenty i Fatky," (Moscow) 1988, No.32)
Driven by hunger to beastly behaviour, some people resorted to cannibalism.
Children were the prime victims, but adults also perished;
"In some people famine devoured all that was human in their soul and bred in
its place beastly instincts... In our village, one man became insane from
hunger; he butchered, cooked and then ate, first his mother and then his
wife." ("Molod' Cherkaashchyny," (Cherkasy, Ukraine) 1988, No.30)
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Second, the sources show the circumstances which brought on the famine. The
witnesses are unanimous; the famine was not the result of any natural
calamity. I.M. Khmil'kovskii writes:
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"In 1932 I was 19 years old... I visited the fields of the Kiev and
Kirovohrad regions and can testify the in 1932 there was no serious drought
in Ukraine." ("Ogonek" (Moscow) 199, No.12)
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The famine was the result of confiscation of foodstuffs, first from the
collective farm, and then from each of its members. House searches entrusted
to specially recruited "activists" were carried out with great cruelty and
complete disregard for the survival of plundered families:
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"It was late fall of 1932. They came, as usually, unexpected: two men from
the collective and an "activist" from the city. They poked iron-tipped rods
into the ground in the yard and the garden looking for buried grain. Finding
nothing, since there was nothing left, they entered the house as the family
sat down to a dinner of potatoes - the only food left. Cursing, they took
all the potatoes from the house, even the cooked ones from the table, and
carried them to the cart outside. Then they started looking for hidden food
in the house. They found none. As they were about to leave, the "activist"
noticed that the three-year-old daughter, clinging to her mother's skirts,
clutched in her hand a potato from dinner. The "activist" grabbed this last
piece of food from the child's hand, threw it to the ground and crushed it
with his boot" ("Literaturna Ukraina" (Kiev) 1988, No.45)
Third, survivors, eye-witnesses, and some writers do not hesitate to refer
to the tragedy as "man-made famine", "artificial famine", "extermination by
starvation" or even" genocide". Thus, V. Pakharenko, commenting on the fact
that the famine also touched some regions of Russia and Kazakhstan points
out that, "the uniqueness of our [Ukrainian] tragedy lies only in this, that
the social-class genocide coincided in Ukraine with the cultural-national
[genocide]" (Ibid.)
It would be ludicrous for anyone in the Soviet Union today to pretend that
the famine never existed. But this was not the case in the past. Until
Gorbachev's glasnost became more firmly entrenched, the subject remained
taboo as the Soviet regime tried to keep this most atrocious of Stalin's
crimes a secret, both at home and abroad. Soviet citizens who dared speak of
the famine were repressed while critical foreigners were denounced as
anti-Soviet Fascists. As a result, in place of the famine, Soviet
histography was left with just another "blank spot".
In the West, the Ukrainian famine was well known at the time of its
occurrence, both to the Moscow based Western press and the Western
governments. The documents of the British Foreign Office recently opened to
the public reveal that the British and the Canadian govemments were very
well informed about the tragedy, but preferred to ignore it. Malcolm
Muggeridge and other honest reporters published accurate accounts in papers
willing to print them.
But Western apologists of Stalinism disputed authentic reporting on the
Ukrainian famine. The most notorious among them was Walter Duranty of the
"New York Times" who in private conversations allowed that as many as
10,000,000 people may have died from the famine, but in public called the
famine a fabrication. Militant famine denial was continued into the Brezhnev
and early post-Brezhnev era. In 1983, Podakin, secretary of the Soviet
Embassy in Ottawa, called the famine a myth, and this charge was repeated
the following year in a pamphlet emanating from the Manitoba Students
Movement (Marxist-Leninist).
In the most recent years the old tradition of genocide denial was picked up
and updated by Jeff Coplon of the "Village Voice" and the "jack of all
trades", Douglas Tottle. It is to these luminaries, whose "penetrating"
studies remind us of Holocaust deniers (A.R. Butz. "The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century," and others) that Donne Flanagan of the Canadian
University Press chose for inspiration.
In his article, "The Ukraine Famine: Fact or Fiction" (The Link, Nov.22)
Donne Flanagan confuses three interrelated but distinct issues with regard
to the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33: a) the historicity of the event, b) its
classification as genocide, and c) the use of photographic documentation.
Let us examine the three issues.
The historicity of the famine is so obvious today that no one in his right
mind would challenge it. Even Coplon and Tottle admit that the famine did
take place. The article's title "The Ukraine Famine: Fact or Fiction" can
thus only be the result of stupidity or inattention.
Can the famine legitimately be qualified as genocide? Michael R. Marrus,
professor of at the University of Toronto, and the author of The Holocaust
in History, in his foreword to "The Foreign Office and the Famine: British
Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-33," comes to the
conclusion that the evidence presented by the British documents suggests
that there was a genocidal attack upon Ukrainians.
Leo Kruper, professor emeritus at the UCLA, author of "Genocide," a pioneer
work on the subject, writes in his latest work, "The Prevention of
Genocide," about the "many millions who died in the Soviet man-made famine
of 1932-33." Kuper accepts the argument that "this artificially induced
famine was in fact an act of genocide, designed... to undermine the social
basis of a Ukrainian national resistance." (p 150)
We can see from the above discussion that the Ukrainian famine is now
accepted as genocide by a growing number of Soviet citizens (including
members of the Communist Party) and serious scholars in the West. People who
only a few years ago refused to publicly recognize the famine as genocide,
because of the fear of repression (Soviet Union) or due to lingering doubts
left by lack of readily available documentation (west) are now more open to
the genocide theory. As new evidence becomes available with further
publication of Soviet sources, the opposition to the famine-genocide concept
diminishes.
The reader will have noted that up to this point no mention was made of the
famine photographs. We do not need the photographs to prove the historicity
of the famine; nor does the interpretation of the genocidal nature of the
man-made calamity depend on them. The photographs constitute just one
element in the documentary stock, and as such they are best used in
conjunction with other documents. It is basically dishonest to suggest, as
do Coplon, Tottle and Flanagan, that the whole issue of famine-genocide
hinges on the photographs.
One last point needs to be clarified about the photographs of the famine of
1921-23, and the tragedy they portray. Tottle's basic argument comes down to
the following claim: the film maker's use of photographs depicting a natural
famine of 1921-22 in Russia was to prove the existence of an alleged
man-made famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. Were this claim true, Tottle would
have a case, but he is wrong on several counts.
First, there was a famine in Ukraine which lasted from 1921 to 1923 (and not
1922), and most of the photographs in the film were from this famine in
Ukraine and not from the concomitant Russian disaster.
Second, the Ukrainian famine of 1921-23 was also man-made. In spite of the
drought in its southern provinces, Ukraine had enough grain to feed its
entire population, but on the condition that this food be kept in the
country and not exported. Soviet authorities removed from Ukraine several
times the amount of foodstuffs necessary to feed the 1.5 to 2 million people
who died in the country from starvation. The first year of the famine,
Ukraine grain was sent to Russia to feed the Russian cities and the famished
population along the Volga; the second year Ukrainian grain was sold in
Western Europe. Aid offered by foreign countries was accepted immediately
for the Volga but it was let into Ukraine only eight months later.
Since both famines in Ukraine were manmade, it was quite legitimate to use
the photographs from the famine of the 1920s as well as those from the
1930s. The weakness of the film lies not in using these photographs but in
not sufficiently explaining and stressing the first famine. This, however,
has no bearing on the authenticity of tile famine-genocide of the 1930s. To
suggest the opposite, as Coplon, Tottle and Flanagan do, is to display a
complete lack of intellectual integrity.
For an article written by a bureau chief of the Canadian University Press,
"Famine: Fact of Fiction" is a disappointment. What at first sight appears
to be an objective piece of investigative journalism turns out to be nothing
more than a slick bit of propaganda for genocide-denial. Discussing a
historical event, Flanagan falls back on the opinions of professors of
mathematics, statistics, and cinematography; there isn't one historian in
the lot! Rehashing dated discussions, he ignores the latest literature on
the subject, the documents which have been published in Canada, the United
States and the Soviet Union. What educational purpose can such journalism
serve?
COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE-GENOCIDE
By Dr. Roman Serbyn, Professor of Russian and East European History
University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
The Link student newspaper, Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
December 5, 1988, http://www.dlink.ca/LINK/index.html
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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