Transition of Interpretations after 1995

The second half of the 1990s saw a plethora of new interpretations of the Ukrainian Famine, led once again by Kul'chyts'kyi, Ukraine's leading authority on this event. These studies concentrated on several specific aspects: the number of victims, the relationship between Stalin's collectivization campaign and the Famine, and the motives behind the tragedy.

They varied in tone and quality, but in general by this period, historians in Ukraine were convinced of the malevolent nature of the tragedy, and that it was directed from above. However, it took longer to reach a consensus on whether the Famine was a phenomenon deliberately engineered to target Ukrainians as a nation, rather than as one of the most important grain growing regions of the country. The analyses benefited from the opening of Ukrainian archives in 1989, but according to Kul’chyts’kyi the demographic data from 1933 proved to be of extremely low quality and therefore statistics about the Famine had to be reconstructed using indirect methods. As in the earlier article, Kul’chyts’kyi also felt it necessary to take into account the migration processes as well as archival data for years other than the pivotal 1933 year. In turn, he considered that Western media and some local authors tended to exaggerate the number of casualties. According to his scientific deductions and based on the number of recorded victims each month, the losses on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in the year 1933 amounted to 3-3.5 million.³⁹

Once again, the focus of the research is on the activities of the Grain Commissions. The most severe grain procurements were imposed on those regions that had failed to fulfill the state annual targets. The “extraordinary commission” led by Molotov in Ukraine was unable to find any grain in the peasant households of most districts of Soviet Ukraine, and therefore began to confiscate other food products as a form of punishment.

These policies were more severe than those introduced elsewhere, says Kul’chyts’kyi, particularly those of Postyshev in the Volga region, where only grain was confiscated. Harsher policies were also imposed in the North Caucasus and particularly the Kuban region by Kaganovich. By 1998, Kul’chyts’kyi had fallen into line with the theory of a “terror-famine”—the term used by Robert Conquest earlier—that had rendered the Ukrainian peasantry entirely obedient.⁴⁰ This theory, however, was still some distance from those who attributed the Famine solely to reasons linked to recalcitrant nationalism. One such example from this period is that of Mykhailo Hoyan, who relies heavily on the book Holod- 33 by Lidiya Kovalenko and Volodymyr Manyak, published in 1991. According to Hoyan, the famine was not a consequence of drought, flood, or epidemic, but rather caused by the evil designs of one group of people against another, i.e., Russians against Ukrainians. In a vitriolic attack on Russians, he claims that the “free world” has long understood that the mentality of the Muscovite is one of expansionism and that the Famine should be regarded in this context. However, some Ukrainians living in the eastern and southern regions of the country are ignorant of this fact because they do not know their own history, and thus hapless people sometimes still vote for traitors and “janissaries nourished by the bloody system of Lenin and Stalin.” Hoyan calls for a tribunal to judge those who have damaged the “genofond” of the Ukrainian people and who are responsible for 7.5 million deaths.⁴¹

Generally, however, in these early post-independence writings, the Famine was attributed chiefly to policies of terror and retribution rather than an all- out attempt to eliminate Ukrainians as a national group. Many authors overtly debate such issues in trying to assess the status of the Famine in contemporary Ukraine. Some are downright muddled. Dana Romanets, for example, concurs that despite the efforts of some intellectuals to organize a Nuremberg- style tribunal for those who committed crimes against Ukrainians, the state cannot compensate victims so the only plausible recourse is to remember them.

She believes that the Famine was genocidal because the state created the conditions in which the deaths of masses of people were inevitable. Because there was no drought in 1932, in contrast to the years 1921 and 1946 when famines also occurred, the Holodomor of 1933 was unique. However, the harvest of 1932 was low because the peasants lacked motivation to cultivate the fields in the wake of collectivization. Ostensibly this article tries to link the Famine of 1932-33 directly with the Purges of 1937, so one suspects that she is adhering to the line that the Famine was an act of terror. However, her conclusions could be interpreted in several ways, and thus they exhibit the lack of a clear thesis on the causes of the Famine.⁴²

Similarly, Yaroslava Muzychenko’s article, which tries to relate the Famine to the emergence of the new Ukrainian state, struggles to corroborate her conclusion, which is that the Famine was introduced to “teach Ukrainian peasants a lesson.” She makes a clear demographic distinction between the suffering peasants and the relatively unaffected urban dwellers, going on to comment that because most peasants were of Ukrainian ethnicity, they were overrepresented among the victims, who included residents of Bulgarian, German, and Greek villages. Because they were city dwellers, Russians and Jews did not suffer unduly during this period. Though she claims to recognize that the Famine knew no ethnic boundaries, she is convinced that Ukrainians’ situation was the most severe: “Only in Ukraine did severe terror accompany famine.” She laments the lack of or superficial character of Famine commemoration in the new Ukrainian state, which is limited to laying flowers on the symbolic monument in Kyiv. She approves the idea of Roman Serbyn (a history professor from Montreal, Canada) to establish a research center for the Famine similar to the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel (for the study of the Holocaust) or the Polish Institute of Memory.

But her appeal is weakened by the lack of a clear conception on the causes and meaning of the Famine. In particular, there is little discussion of what the Ukrainians did wrong in order to be the victims of punishment from the Soviet state. Unlike Romanets, she does not dwell on the national issue, restricting her argument to a few comments about the ethnic backgrounds of sufferers.⁴³

Six months later, Muzychenko returns to her theme in an article that documents episodes of resistance to collectivization and the Famine, as well as contemporary attitudes of the public toward the commemoration of the past. Using oral testimonies of Ukrainians, she constructs a fairly unrealistic picture of universal resistance to the first collectivization campaign through her description of an opposition “band” in the Hadiach district of Poltava region. The group was led by Yukhym Shcherban who lived together with his brothers in the forest to avoid deportation. An informant maintained that Shcherban's band had been designated as rich peasants. By contrast the poor peasants donned leather jackets and became Communists and started to order people how to live their lives. The band reportedly tried to persuade collective farm members to abandon the enterprise but eventually all the bandits were killed. Muzychenko then goes on to portray the Famine as Stalin's attempt to subdue resistance, citing Kul'chyts'kyi's theory of Terror with Famine. Those peasants who took on the role of activists for the Soviet regime, she says, ate well in contrast to the rest of the village residents. She also comments on the concealment of the Famine by the authorities, arguing that if the Soviet leaders refused to divulge news about the event, then they must have been the ones to organize it—a statement that requires a leap in logic. She relies also on the work of the Diaspora to commemorate the Famine, citing the Commission for the Study of the Ukraine Famine in the USA, which delivered “30 volumes of documents” to the Ukrainian Parliament.

One week before this article appeared, an all-Ukrainian conference on the Famine was held at the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) in Kyiv, which proposed to send a petition to the UN to acknowledge the Famine as an act of genocide. The problem is that Muzychenko's article failed to prove that point.⁴⁴

A more scholarly paper of this same period pinpoints some signposts on the road to famine: forced industrialization at the expense of the countryside and collectivization marking the starting point. Collectivization in Ukraine, the author posits, was carried out faster than elsewhere, and was followed by confiscation of grain, livestock, and farm equipment. The main thesis of this article is that despite the official awareness of drought, low harvest, and famine in some localities, the central authorities still endorsed truly fantastic plans for grain procurements. The author cites specifically the activities of the

Molotov Commission, which in October 1932 managed to squeeze another 89.5 million poods of grain out of peasant households. The purge of the Ukrainian party and state apparatus took place simultaneously: in November and the first days of December 1932 the authorities arrested 340 kolkhoz chairmen and 140 book-keepers. Through the law for the protection of the harvest, over 20,000 people were imprisoned. Stalin and his associates were fully aware of the Famine but continued to ship grain abroad in order to promote the image of a Bolshevik paradise and to earn income to support the industrialization campaign. The author proposes a series of events, particularly in schools, to commemorate the Famine, including conferences and drawing competitions. This writer more explicitly endorses the theory of a Famine-Genocide, but does not elaborate on the possible reasons behind it, though he has explained clearly that Ukraine as a republic was singled out for very harsh treatment.⁴⁵

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Source: Marples David R.. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. udapest—New York: Central European University Press,2007. — 363 p.. 2007

Transition of Interpretations after 1995

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