James E. Mace
The US-born historian James E. Mace will always be identified with the study of the Famine in Ukraine, a subject that appeared as a chapter in his PhD thesis (later a 1983 book)73 and, was the hallmark of his career that began as chairman of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine in the period 1984-88.
However, Mace is unique in that in addition to being influential in determining the prevailing discourse on the Famine in contemporary Ukraine, he is also a representative of both Western scholarship (some would argue of the Ukrainian Diaspora, too) and the Ukrainian media. Through the Famine Commission’s conclusions, Mace was the first Western scholar to maintain that the Famine was an act of genocide perpetrated against the Ukrainians as a nation, a statement that was also supported by his PhD thesis/book with its focus on national self-assertion in Ukraine during the 1920s and early 1930s. According to his close friend and colleague Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, Mace was unable to get a permanent academic position in the United States because of his outspoken views on the Famine.74 There is little evidence to support such a statement—indeed Mace acquired the prestigious position of Research Fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Illinois once the Famine Commission completed its work—but it is clear that Mace had strong disagreements with a number of Western scholars working in the area of the first Soviet collectivization campaign who disputed his views and those of the Commission on a number of occasions.Mace visited Ukraine in 1990 and moved there permanently in 1993. Though affiliated with a university, his most notable writings were those contributed to the editorial pages of the newspaper Den', which appears in Ukrainian, Russian, and English. Mace was thus able to write in his native language and at the same time reach a Ukrainian audience through the translated version.
His columns coincided with a period when historians and the general public in Ukraine were inquisitive to know more about the Famine. As Kul’chyts’kyi has noted, Mace's focus on the national question in the Famine added a new dimension to the topic. Gradually—and it is a factor that is difficult to measure precisely—historians in Ukraine came closer to the views propagated by Mace. This was a process that might have occurred without the latter’s presence, but there is little doubt that his writings accelerated matters. Mace died prematurely in May 2004 at the age of 52, and at a time when the program to commemorate the Famine as a national tragedy in Ukraine was reaching a culmination point. His death was marked as a national tragedy and Mace was regarded as a figure irrevocably tied to Ukraine. His contributions to the discourse on the Famine are significant in two areas: first, his relentless emphasis on the national issues as the key factor; and second, his recourse on several occasions to emotional aspects linked to national memory. It appears that this latter issue had the widest appeal, and it is a notable feature of his later writings, in which he would regularly cite his past experiences with Famine victims, as well as those of his protracted disputes with Western scholars who opposed his point of view. Let us recount a few examples of these writings as illustrative of Mace’s contribution to the debate on the Famine.In May 2002, Mace commented that as the 70th anniversary of the Famine approached, “presumably tenured professors” from the United States were once again engaged in a discussion with comments that it never occurred or no one had wanted it to occur, without looking at the evidence available. Such comments, he added bitterly, were even appearing in prestigious journals of Slavic studies.75 Later in this same year Mace recounted that in 1981, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University approached him to take up study of the topic of the Ukrainian Famine.
Later he became the director of the US Commission, but the “silence was deafening.” The first assault on his views came in 1985 from the British-born economist Stephen Wheatcroft, who informed Mace that his “sums were off.” However, writes Mace, the real sin he had committed was to connect the destruction of the Ukrainian peasants with that of the nation as a whole. In so doing, according to Wheatcroft, he had debased the field of Soviet studies. Mace makes an appeal to history, to be the judge, and declares that the history of Ukraine will be manufactured in that country as part of the creation of the state. He then reverts back to his tormentors. Though numerous eyewitnesses had appeared to give testimony about the Famine some twenty years earlier, now the American historian Mark Tauger was declaring that such testimony was not reliable, even when there were thousands of such witnesses. Why were Mace's views so unacceptable in his homeland? His belief is that studies of the USSR were under the control of people who once condemned totalitarianism but now seem linked to the notion of the “great friendship of Soviet peoples.”76Mace denounced Western scholarship for viewing the Soviet period as a single history rather than one of individual nations. In turn, he praised then President Leonid Kuchma for declaring that Ukraine must inform the world of the truth of the events of 1933. It is correct, Mace stated, to link the Famine with the general period of repressions. When Stalin dispatched Kaganovich to the North Caucasus, he [Stalin] made it clear that the difficulties lay in the Ukrainian-speaking regions. In December 1932, Molotov, who had been sent to Ukraine, blamed the failure to collect sufficient grain on Ukrainian nationalism. Tauger, on the other hand, places the blame on a bad harvest “that no one who lived through it seems to have remembered.”77 According to Mace, the Famine must be explained in terms of the totalitarian paradigm— another theme later taken up by his mentor Kul'chyts'kyi—as a consequence of the “zoological anti-peasant hatred of Lenin and Trotsky” and Stalin's continuation of the same tradition.
This was a war with Ukraine, he continues in a leap in logic. To an interviewer's question as to why Stalin remained popular to the extent that people mourned on the day he died, Mace responds that the mourning was ritualistic and that the cult of Stalin continues to exist in the contemporary era. Turning to Ukrainian society, Mace refers to it as “post- genocidal,” indicating that the survivors of that period remain too afraid to divulge their memories. However, says Mace, memories are the critical factor in order for Ukrainian society to recover from its brutal past.78One suggestion offered by Mace was for residents of Ukraine to light a candle in their windows on a national day of commemoration of the Famine. This idea, which was eventually taken up by many (including President Yushchenko), is perhaps the most apposite example of this historian’s focus on the emotional side of the Famine and its memory. One writer considered that the proposal should contribute toward the national idea of the unity of the Ukrainian people, a people that should be living an existence merited by a large European nation with a rich culture.79 At one point Mace declared that the Famine was a tragedy that had long “weighed like a stone on my heart.” As an editor of oral histories in his capacity as director of the US Commission, he had shared the suffering of those who were victims of the tragedy. Though it might be regarded as unusual for an historian to become so emotionally involved in the issues he studies, it was impossible for him to respond otherwise, just as people could not study the Holocaust without being moved to the stage at which one’s spirit becomes “half-Jewish.” Perhaps, continues Mace with regard to his residence in Ukraine “this is why I now live here and spend so much of my energy trying to understand what was done to this people and what scars from it this country still bears.” Again, the reference to a post-genocidal society is offered: Ukraine is a country that still carries “the psychological and physical scars of genocide.” Such a dilemma, and the failure of residents to extricate themselves from it, is the only way to explain the disgraceful things that appear in the press, Mace writes.
Sometimes he wonders whether the country “will ever be whole.”80In an interview on the Maidan website, Mace was asked two questions: “How did the study of famine change your world view? Do you think the famine belongs only to the past, to just [sic!] history?” He responded to the first question by recalling how like many people of his generation (he was born in 1952) he used to have left-wing political views, but he had recognized how slogans advocating social justice could lead to horrors similar to those generated by a Fascist system. His reply to the second question is worth quoting in full:
I think that these 2 questions should be answered together. The very phrase “just history” leads to a mistake. Every person, every community, every nation, mankind as a whole is the result of its own personal history. But what happened in Ukraine in 1933 and in the 30s overall caused a fundamental breakdown in the normal course of development of a European nation. In this sense we can refer to Ukraine as a post-genocidal society in which there is no agreement as to the basic national values, a problem which does not exist in most European countries.81
Mace is probably not on solid ground in offering analogies with other European nations. First of all one would have to accept his view that Ukraine was actually a nation in 1933, which makes the assumption that the processes of the 1920s had reached a critical point and distinguished Ukraine from the Soviet Union. Second, one could make a similar argument about Germany after the First World War or during the interwar years, for example. Third, though the losses in Ukraine in the 1930s were catastrophic, the same argument could be made about Belarus, a Slavic republic that arguably never recovered from the elimination of its cultural and national leadership in the 1930s. However, the key point is that Mace was offering a new interpretation of Ukraine's recent history, with the Famine as the pivotal event, and tragedy and suffering as the hallmarks of Ukraine's Soviet experience, an experience in which there were two clearly delineated sides namely the Soviet government (and Communist Party) in Moscow, and the national leadership as reflected by figures such as Skrypnyk, and by the Ukrainian peasantry as a whole. The role of the CPU, the ostensible leadership of Ukraine at this time in Kharkiv, is somewhat unclear from this analysis. The interpretation offered by Mace might well have been developed further but for his untimely death. However, it was taken up by two different generations of Ukrainian historians led by Kul'chyts'kyi, who had also pioneered some of the early attempts to have the Famine recognized as a national tragedy and one that merited not only deeper study, but as the pivotal event in the creation of the Ukrainian state.