THE HOLODOMOR: WHO WILL FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF HISTORY
Genocide is a crime that does not and will never have a statute of limitations.

By Prof. Zinovii Partyko, Ph.D. (Linguistics), Head of the Department of Publishing and Editing

Institute of Journalism and Mass Communications of the Classical Private University

The Day Weekly Digest in English #38, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 2 December 2008 

 

By Alex Rodriguez, Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Friday, December 26, 2008

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA - At first, the purpose behind the midday raid at a human-rights group’s office here was murky. Police, some clad in masks and camouflage, cut the electricity to Memorial’s offices and demanded to know if any drugs or guns were kept on the premises.

Five hours later, after police had opened every computer and walked out with 11 hard drives, the reason for their visit became clear to Memorial director Irina Flige.

On the hard drives, a trove of scanned images and documents memorialized Josef Stalin’s murderous reign of terror. Diagrams scrawled out by survivors detailed layouts of labor camps. There were photos of Russians executed by Stalin’s secret police, wrenching accounts of survival from gulag inmates and maps showing the locations of mass graves.

“They knew what they were taking,” Flige said. “Today, the state tries to reconstruct history to make it appear like a long chain of victories. And they want these victories to be seen as justifying Stalin’s repressions.”

Stalin, the brutal Soviet dictator responsible for the deaths of millions of his citizens, has been undergoing a makeover of sorts in recent years. Russian authorities have reshaped the Georgia-born dictator’s image into that of a misunderstood, demonized leader who did what he had to do to mold the Soviet Union into the superpower it became.

In Russian classrooms, history teachers are guided by a new, government-approved textbook, Alexander Filippov’s “Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006,” which hails Stalin as an efficient manager who had to resort to extreme measures to modernize the Soviet Union’s lumbering, agrarian economy.
There were, writes Filippov, “rational reasons behind the use of violence in order to ensure maximum efficiency.”

A museum commemorating Stalin as a national hero opened in 2006 in the southern city of Volgograd. The following year, a 40-episode TV drama broadcast on a state-controlled network whitewashed Stalin’s crimes and portrayed him as Russia’s savior.

When he was president, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin never lavishly praised Stalin, but he sought to shift the nation’s focus away from the Soviet leader’s legacy of brutality. Meeting with history teachers in 2007, Putin acknowledged that Russian history “did contain some problematic pages. But so did other states’ histories.

“We have fewer of them than other countries, and they were less terrible than in other nations,” Putin continued. “We can’t allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”

The battle over how Stalin should be remembered remains one of Russia’s most divisive topics. For many Russians, Stalin’s achievements far outweigh his crimes. He is seen as the wartime leader who the saved the Motherland from Nazi Germany in World War II and engineered the country’s ascent as an industrial and military powerhouse.

For many others, that ascent was made using millions of Russians’ lives as grist. Historians estimate that Stalin’s decrees led to the deaths of as many as 20 million people, either from famine, execution, incarceration in labor camps or during mass deportations.

After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power included a program of de-Stalinization, which condemned Stalin’s dictatorial rule and brought an end to forced labor.

In recent years, Russian authorities have made strides in rehabilitating Stalin. In 2006, nearly half of Russians polled by the Levada Center, a leading Moscow survey group, said they viewed Stalin positively, while just 29 percent perceived him negatively. When a Russian television network conducted an online survey this summer asking who was the greatest Russian ever, Stalin was a leading contender.

Memorial’s St. Petersburg branch has been researching and documenting Stalin’s crimes for 20 years, building one of the world’s most complete archives of one of the darkest chapters in Russia’s history.

These archives are now in the hands of Russian police. St. Petersburg prosecutors say they conducted the raid because they were trying to track down an article in Novy Peterburg, a local newspaper under investigation on charges of extremism. But Flige says Memorial has no connection with the paper.

The archives include information and images that Flige says play an invaluable role in preserving the historical record of the Stalin era, including databases recording the names and biographical data of thousands of Stalin’s victims.

Flige says she does not know when she will get the archives back, or what condition they will be in when they are returned. “They could damage them, either deliberately or by accident,” she says.

The raid occurred Dec. 4, a day before Flige was slated to join leading historians and academics at a conference in Moscow about Stalin’s place in Russian history. “The way we see it, the raid was a kind of greeting card from the authorities ahead of the conference,” she said.

LINK: http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2008/12/26/stalin.html

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TOP FIVE CHOICES IN POLL
Pyotr Stolypin, pre-Revolutionary statesman - 426,300
Alexander Nevsky, medieval warrior prince - 418,200
Alexander Pushkin, poet - 397,100 votes
Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator - 397,000
Vladimir Lenin, Revolutionary leader - 342,400
data correct as of 1400 GMT 27 December

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"Stalin made Russia a superpower and was one of the founders of the coalition against Hitler in World War II," says Sergei Malinkovich, leader
of the St Petersburg Communist Party. "In all opinion polls he comes out on top as the most popular figure. Nobody else comes close. So for his service
to this country we can forgive his mistakes."

Not only is Mr Malinkovich prepared to forgive Stalin's "mistakes", he also wants the man who is regarded as one of the most bloodthirsty tyrants of the
20th Century to be made a saint. As I was interviewing him, he held a small neatly framed icon of Stalin's face.

Last month an Orthodox priest also displayed an icon of Stalin in his church near St Petersburg. Although he was eventually forced to remove it, he vowed
he would not be silenced and went on to describe Stalin as his "father".

Many in Russia do still revere Stalin for his role during World War II when the Soviet Union defeated the forces of Nazi Germany. But now there is a
much broader campaign to rehabilitate Stalin and it seems to be coming from the highest levels of government.

ARCHIVES SEIZED
The primary evidence comes in the form of a new manual for history teachers in the country's schools, which says Stalin acted "entirely rationally". "[The initiative] came from the very top," says the editor of the manual, historian Alexander Danilov.

 

"I believe it was the idea of former president, now prime minister, Vladimir Putin. "It fits completely with the political course we have had for the last eight years, which is dedicated to the unity of society."

 

But the campaign goes further than reinterpreting history for schoolchildren. It is also physical. Earlier this month, riot police raided the St Petersburg office of one of Russia's best-known human rights organisations, Memorial.

Claiming a possible link with an "extremist" article published in a local newspaper, the police took away 12 computer hard-drives containing the entire digital archive of the atrocities committed under Stalin. Memorial's St Petersburg office specialises in researching the crimes committed by the Soviet regime.

"It's a huge blow to our organisation," says Irina Flige, the office director. "This was 20 years' work. We'd been making a universally accessible database
with hundreds of thousands of names. "Maybe this was a warning to scare us?" Irina Flige believes they were targeted because they are now on the wrong side of a new ideological divide.

NEW NATIONALISM 

The new ideology is "Putinism" which, she says, has evolved over the past two years and is based on a strident form of nationalism.  It seems Russians are to be proud of their history, not ashamed, and so those investigating and cataloguing the atrocities of the past are no longer welcome.

"The official line now is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country," says Irina Flige. "And if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims." The outrage at what has happened to the Memorial archive spreads beyond
Russia's borders.

The British historian Orlando Figes worked with Memorial when he was researching his latest book "The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin's Russia."
"By conservative estimates 25 million people were repressed in the Soviet Union [under Stalin] between 1928 and 1953," he says.

"That means people executed, arrested and sent to prison camps or turned into slave labourers or deported. "Virtually every family was affected by repression." "What we have now [in Russia] effectively is the KGB in power," he adds.

"Opposition forces and awkward historians reminding the Russian population of what the KGB did 50 years ago is inconvenient for these people." So it seems whoever is voted the country's greatest citizen on Sunday, it is Joseph Stalin who is the biggest winner this year as he is rehabilitated in Russia's brave new world.

LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7798497.stm
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As the reviewer Svyatoslava Kozhukova notes, this book, which attempts to stand up to the disturbing tendency of forgetting the crimes of the [Soviet] powers toward society," consists of a set of outlines of the best lectures on history, civics and literature prepared by teachers in various regions of the country.

This effort is important, Kozhukova continues, because "the historical memory of a society is not something as natural as the personal memory of an individual.  It must be formed. And its content depends on who is doing that, how they are doing it, and what goals they are pursuing.

Building a democratic society in countries with an authoritarian past is impossible unless that society faces up to its past, she says.  Unfortunately, as officials at the Sakharov Museum point out, "Russia lives without understanding what has taken," despite some progress in Khrushchev's, Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's time to do so.

"But more recently," Yury Samodurov, the museum's director says, "public interest in [this past] was again extinguished.  [And] in the consciousness of society has been introduced the conviction that one should not 'blacken the historic past.'" That has prompted a group of concerned democratic activists, historians and teachers look for a way out.

Theirs is no easy task, Kozhukova argues in her review. "What and how must one tell children about Soviet realities so that future generations will not repeat the mistakes of the past? And how should they tell this at a time when outside the school, the child may encounter an opposing point of view?"

More specifically, "what should they do if a significant part of society is deprived of historical memory and considers Stalin a hero, and grandmothers with a failing mind recall the words 'Thank you Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood' and tell their grandchildren that the teacher is lying?"

The task is complicated, the compilers of the book say, because it is not only a question of fact but of methodology.  Not only do children need to learn specific facts about the Soviet past, but they need to learn these facts in a way that does not reinforce the authoritarian patterns of the past.

That is, they need to acquire these facts not by taking down, memorizing and giving them back on tests – the classical authoritarian approach which has the effect of leading students to accept the idea that someone else will always tell them what the facts are – but by asking questions and by acquiring the information in that more open and democratic way.

In many respects, changing the way history is taught is an even bigger challenge than changing what is taught about it, the compilers say. And they acknowledge that so far, they have made less progress in this direction than many of them have hoped for. But the discussions in this volume provide some importance guidance in this respect as well.

I.G. Yakovenko of the Moscow Institute of Sociology in one of the book's chapter points out why this is so critical. Children need to learn that individuals bear responsibility for what happens to their societies, rather than always seeking to blame others, be they foreign governments or their own, for what happens.

They need to brought to an understanding, Yakovenko writs, that one cannot explain Stalinist crimes by reference to the organs of the state but must recognize the role millions of "simple people" played in denouncing their fellow citizens – people who are "just like those who consider Stalin a hero and the period of Stalinism in Russia the heroic past of the country."

But those like the compilers of this book who want an honest examination of the past face an uphill battle.  As one of the authors notes, polls show that as Russians feel better of themselves and their situation, they show less and less interest in the past and prefer to stay with mythologized versions that have little in common with the facts.

Unfortunately, Kozhukova writes, if they remain in that situation, Russians and all the others who were victims of the communist past, will not be able to escape from it. And she points out that "the establishment of a free, civilized society in countries which have experienced a totalitarian regime is not the same thing as establishing such a society in principle."

Such societies must "overcome" the past by avoiding forgetfulness, by internalizing what happened and by committing themselves to avoiding any repetition.  Those are steps that Germany has made, but it is a step that many Russians, with the encouragement of their own government, have not been willing to take.

And Kozhukova concludes that "the present-day growth of nationalism and authoritarianism in Russia are the results of a past that has not been dealt with" in the ways that the crimes of the Soviet era must be if the country is finally to escape from them and to ensure that they never happen again.

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[return to index] [Action Ukraine Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]

Analysis & Commentary: By Jeff Emanuel, American Thinker, El Cerrito, CA, Sat, Dec 06, 2008

In recent years, the Russian bear has bared his fangs at Ukraine as the grim season commemorating genocide-by-famine 75 years ago. On November 22, the former "Soviet republic" of Ukraine observed the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holodomor, a genocide-by-famine perpetrated by Josef Stalin's Soviet government which left up to ten million Ukrainian men, women, and children dead due to forced starvation.

PUNISHING ENEMIES OF COLLECTIVISM 
In the fall of 1932, Stalin's Soviet Union was facing unrest caused by a shortage of food in the cities under his control. Rather than allow for the chance of a replay of 1917, when inner-city hunger helped the Bolsheviks instigate their successful communist revolution, Stalin turned his attention westward to the breadbasket of Europe, Ukraine.

Driven by the dual goals of increasing Russia's grain stockpile to the point where it could not only feed its city-dwellers but also export food for profit, and of forcing the Ukrainian farming class to accept Soviet collectivism (something it had not yet done at this time, despite the imposition of a communist central government on the East European state), Stalin increased the amount of grain Ukraine was required to provide the USSR by 44%, a level too high for the Ukrainian farmers to meet and also be able to feed themselves.

Stalin sent a host of Communist Party officials, soldiers, and secret police to Ukraine to enforce on penalty of death the Soviet law stating that no grain or grain products - not even a loaf of bread - could be kept by the Ukrainian peasants for their own consumption until the entire requisition quota had been fulfilled.

Further, according to a Ukrainian historical website, "an internal passport system was implemented to restrict movements of Ukrainian peasants so that they could not travel in search of food. Ukrainian grain was collected and stored in grain elevators that were guarded by military units [and] NKVD secret police units while Ukrainians were starving in the immediate area."

FROM "TRAGEDY" TO "STATISTIC" 
The barbaric tactic worked all too well. Between 1932 and November 1933, the man who became infamous for, among other things, coining the phrase, "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic" added nearly ten million innocents to his tab through starvation, while taking such plentiful fruits of their labors for his own use that "journalists," like New York Times writer and communist sympathizer Walter Duranty, easily swallowed and regurgitated that Soviet party line that the sheer amount of grain flowing into Moscow and out through port cities like Leningrad and Vladivostok meant that the claim of famine anywhere in the Soviet principate was patently absurd.

One writer at conservative weblog www.RedState.com described the ending of that year of barbarism: As fall turned into winter in Ukraine in late 1933, good summer and fall weather had produced a bumper crop in Ukraine's ultra-fertile fields. By later in November, it continued to sit there and rot under the impending damp of winter - because there was no one to harvest it. Everyone who had planted the crops in the spring was dead - there was no one left alive to gather the harvest.

On November 28, 2006, after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered the release of thousands of KGB documents showing that the forced famine was perpetrated in part for the purpose of wiping out ethnic Ukrainians, that nation's Parliament declared the Holodomor - a Ukrainian term which, roughly translated, means "Death by Hunger" - a deliberate act of genocide by the USSR.

DIFFERENT CENTURY, SAME BULLY 
While Ukrainians were somberly observing the 75th anniversary of the end of Stalin's forced famine, Russian chose to remind those in Ukraine and elsewhere of its continued desire to play a negative role in the affairs of its neighbors. This time, Moscow threatened to cut off the natural gas supply flowing through that gateway to Western Europe if the entirety of Ukraine's fuel-related debt to its former ruler, estimated at $2 billion, was not immediately settled.

The timing of the threat, which was likely every bit as accidental as President Dmitriy Medvedev's statement, made on the day Barack Obama was being elected President of the United States, that Russia was "prepared to place short-range missiles in the territory of Kaliningrad in response to U.S. plans for a missile-defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic," did not go unnoticed by its target audience.

"The unsubtle Kremlin gets no points for timing," wrote the editors of Ukraine's Kyiv Post on November 26. "The threat to cut off gas in the dead of winter came over the weekend that Ukrainians commemorated the Holodomor, the death by hunger of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. The Soviets lied about the Stalin-ordered famine and today's Russian leadership still belittles the epic crime."

RUSSIA'S FINANCIAL CRISIS 
On December 4, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reiterated the threat, this time before an international television audience. The move comes as Russia is attempting to force its former vassals, Ukraine included, to transition from paying Soviet-era subsidized prices for natural gas to paying the full international rate.

"How can we leave in place the prices of the current year?" Putin asked, referring to the hardship being brought on Russia by the growing global economic crisis (and by the transcontinental state's decision to increase the percentage of its GDP being spent on the military by nearly 200% over the last year to fund its invasion of former satellite Georgia and to fund its efforts to reassert itself on the global stage as a counter to the U.S.).

"Then," according to an AFP report of Putin's address, "drawing on a Ukrainian colloquialism -- and speaking in Ukrainian -- Putin added: ‘Have you lost your mind?'"

A THREAT WITH PRECEDENT 

"In the long march of history, progress is being made," the Kyiv Post's editors wrote. "Kremlin leaders in the early 20th century starved Ukrainian men, women and children to death. Their successors in the 21st century merely threaten to freeze Ukrainians to death."

Russia's threat to cut off heating fuel to Ukraine, where winter temperatures reach as low as -68° Fahrenheit as a matter of course, is not without precedent. In January 2006, Russia responded to Ukraine's refusal to pay a higher price for fuel by reducing the natural gas flowing through Ukraine to a level commensurate with Western Europe's paid allotment alone.

 

Ukraine responded by siphoning gas to meet its own needs (though the government still officially denies that any siphoning ever took place), and, after some European leaders expressed concern about the amount of natural gas that was reaching their nations, Russia returned the flow of fuel to its full previous level.

A DESPERATE DESIRE FOR RELEVANCE 
The former Soviet capital has taken advantage of the state of flux in America's political leadership, and of outgoing President George W. Bush's unwillingness to make any further military commitments, to take a more active role both in the affairs of its neighbors and in those of Western nations.

 

From providing weapons and nuclear aid to Iran, to running roughshod over former vassal state and current NATO applicant Georgia this August, to dispatching President Medvedev to meet with Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to conducting joint naval exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea, Russia's leaders are working to regain the lost trust and rebuild the damaged nationalist pride of their subjects by asserting international relevance in the best way they know how: by intimidating neighbors and acting, despite their inability to actually be such, as a global counterbalance to the United States.

This year's dispute with Ukraine will likely be solved, as its 2006 predecessor was, with little or no physical harm done to Ukraine's population. Putin's threat, though, is yet another example of Russia's growing efforts to impose itself once again on the international stage in the way it has been doing so for centuries: through imperialism and intimidation.

"It seems that the closer a country is located to Russia, the worse Moscow's relations are with that nation," Russian radio host Yulia Latynina wrote in the December 3 Moscow Times. "The Kremlin wants to be on good terms with France and Germany, for example, but if any country that was once part of the Soviet empire tries to shed light on its own history, the Kremlin lashes out with angry reproaches that it is deliberately provoking a conflict."

While this will likely always be a hallmark of Russia's foreign policy, it is one which the civilized nations of the world - from Eastern Europe to the United States - have a duty to oppose in all cases where it manifests itself in acts of aggression, lest invasions of sovereign states like Georgia and the perpetration of barbaric tragedies like the 1932-33 Holodomor be allowed to occur once again.

NOTE: Jeff Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a columnist, a combat journalist, and a director emeritus of conservative weblog www.RedState.com. An archive of his writings can be seen at www.JeffEmanuel.net.

 

LINK: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/russia_rubs_raw_nerves_in_ukra.html

 

By Dariya Orlova, Staff Writer, Kyiv Post, Kyiv Ukraine, October 3, 2008
  
While most consider Josef Stalin as one of the most prolific mass murderers in all of history, Russian schoolchildren may be taught that he was “an efficient
manager.” Russian history now glosses over persecution and hails Soviet-era triumphs

The foreign ministries of Russia and Ukraine are not the only soldiers in the ongoing war of words over the countries’ shared Soviet history.
The battle over the past is also being waged in the classrooms of both countries. The stakes are high, as the victor may be able to win over the hearts and minds of future generations.

 

The Stalin-ordered Great Famine of 1932-1933, which claimed millions of lives, is a stark example of the conflicting historical views.

A current Russian version: “It should be stressed that there was no organized famine in the U.S.S.R.’s countryside. It was not instigated by authorities against one or another people or social group.”

A current Ukrainian view of the same event: “The Holodomor of 1932-33 was for Ukrainians what the Holocaust was for Jews and the slaughter of 1915 for Armenians.”

The statement exposes the increasingly widening gap between the two nations’ understanding of history.

Since 2003, Ukraine has sought international recognition of the Holodomor (death by hunger) as an act of genocide against Ukrainians since 2003. President Victor Yushchenko has pursued the goal vigorously, drawing the ire of Stalin’s apologists at home and in Russia.

The Russian version of the same tragedy is not an obsolete bit of Communist propaganda. It is what Russian education officials are recommending for their country’s school curriculum. It comes from the Russian Ministry of Education and Science’s “Concept paper on Russian history from 1900-1945.”

Ukraine blames the Communist regime and Stalin specifically for the famine of 1932-33, while Russia seems to justify – or at least minimize – Stalin’s policies. According to the proposed Russian teacher’s manual, starvation was caused by poor weather conditions and problems with collectivization.
The Russian manual now under consideration also explains away the Great Terror and mass repressions of the 1930s.

This is the Russian description of Stalin, one of the great mass murderers in world history: “It is important to show that Stalin acted as a very efficient manager in a specific historical situation, as a protector of the system, as an unwavering backer of the country’s transformation into an industrial society managed from a single center, as a leader of a country which faced the threat of imminent large-scale war.”

The rationalization of mass repressions in Russia’s school curriculum was presented to teachers just before the beginning of the current school year, sparking debate in Russia.

Last year’s textbook “History of Russia, 1945-2007” evoked criticism for its extremely loyalist coverage of the Soviet period and characteristic of Stalin as an “efficient manager.” Yet the textbook was published and distributed in schools.

The shift in official interpretation of history is related to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s view of the Soviet past. In 2005, Putin famously called the Soviet empire’s disintegration the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Putin held several major meetings with the country’s teachers where he emphasized the need to produce decent history textbooks – or those that teach history in the cheerleading manner that the former KGB agent evidently prefers.

“We need to remove all the layered husk and foam. Textbooks must include historical facts, they must nurture pride in the country and its history among young people,” Putin said back in 2003.

With its resurgent oil wealth, cost appears to be no objection to nurturing pride in Russia – which means overlooking some of its darkest chapters.
“As to some problematic pages in our history – yes, we’ve had them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such pages than some other [states],” Putin told teachers last year. “All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt.”

 

Given the Kremlin’s attention to historical issues, the contents of textbooks have turned into a political matter in Russia, observers noted.

“In the 1990s, there was a relative diversity in the interpretations of Russian history in the textbooks while the mainstream ‘history of state and statehood’ was quite critical in its estimation of the Soviet period,” said Georgiy Kasianov, a Ukrainian historian. “In the 2000s, we see a tendency to glorify empire and its greatness and, thus, the apologetic estimation of the Soviet period, justifying the extremes of Stalinism by a renewed version of raison d’etat.”

Another Ukrainian historian, Stanislav Kulchytsky, said that Russian history textbooks provide a “light” version of Soviet history.

“Yes, they speak about repressions, but they try somehow to explain them…All in all, there is kind of a mixture of everything that is in line with the modern state-building process in Russia. They use the Red Army, the White Guard, and the Tsarist Army [to glorify Russia],” Kulchytsky said.

It remains to be seen if reinterpreted history wins over Russians minds. If the television project "Name of Russia"  -- Russia’s equivalent of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons – is any indication, Stalin’s apologists are making progress: the dictator was ranked second behind 13th century Russian leader Aleksandr Nevsky.

Meanwhile, the situation with teaching history in Ukraine leaves a lot to be desired. On the one hand, top Ukrainian officials are pursuing an approach similar to Putin’s in establishing a “correct” version of history. On the other hand, the poor quality of Ukrainian textbooks is to blame. Kasianov said the major problem with Ukraine’s textbooks is institutional.

“The system for evaluating textbooks in Ukraine is non-transparent, muddled by conflicts of interest and ineffective. The main problem is that the primary consumers – parents, teachers and students – have no influence on quality and are forced to use what the state imposes upon them. It’s not an issue of influencing the contents of textbooks. It’s a question of the right to choose among several textbooks on a given subject that are different in terms of quality,” Kasianov said.

“In contrast to Russia, these issues are actively discussed by professional historians and the public in Ukraine, but so far with little results.”

Officials have become more involved in humanitarian disciplines, Kasianov said, citing Yushchenko’s campaign to have Holodomor recognized as genocide against the Ukrainian people. The president’s administration has also signalled to the Institute of National Memory that it should prepare a “correct” textbook on Ukraine’s history.

“But the permanent political mess is drawing Ukrainian officials’ attention away from more active interference,” Kasianov said.

 

LINK: http://www.kyivpost.com/nation/30050

 

Interview with Olha Herasymiuk, Member of PACE Monitoring Committee
By Alina Popkova, The Day Weekly Digest in English #36, Tue, 18 Nov 2008

Ukraine is having a hard time getting the Holodomor of 1932-33 to be recognized on the international level. What with the Kremlin’s frenzied resistance, Ukraine has to struggle even for its right to submit pertinent resolutions for consideration by international organizations and look for additional arguments to prove its rightness and explain its stand, although it is self-evident.

 

Olha HERASYMIUK, chairperson of the subcommittee for cooperation with NATO and the WEU Assembly of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on European Integration and a member of PACE’s Monitoring Committee, believes that Ukraine has just embarked on the road leading to the international recognition of the Holodomor.

 

In the following interview with The Day, she tells about how the issue of the Great Famine is being dealt with by various international organizations: the UN, PACE, and European Parliament. As a Ukrainian MP, she offers answers to acute questions relating to current Ukrainian realities.

GENOCIDE: A COMPLICATED ISSUE

Ms. Herasymiuk, you recently returned from New York City where you took part in the 63rd Session of the UN General Assembly. Do you think Ukraine stands a chance of the UN passing a resolution on the Holodomor in Ukraine in conjunction with its 75th anniversary?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”It is still a long way before the United Nations approves any do­cument recognizing the Ho­lo­domor as a crime. I think the coming anniversary of this tra­gedy is meant for us, Uk­rain­ians, for all those who have survived it, and their children and grandchildren.

 

"Ap­parently, this date will be marked also by the countries that have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide and a crime. As for the UN, we have just embarked on the road, although five years back we had a UN document relating to this problem.

 

"Today the new Russia is going all out to frustrate our efforts along these lines. This takes the form of brazen and open blackmailing regarding various countries. Five years ago, Russia signed a document that includes the word ‘Holodomor’ and recognizes the fact that it was a crime perpetrated by the Stalinist regime. This is no surprise, considering Russia’s vision of its current foreign political course, as recently voiced by President Dmitri Medvedev.

 

"He declared that the Kremlin will not remain indifferent to what is happening in the so-called outskirts of Russia, which include, above all, Ukraine — of course, the way the Kremlin sees it.

”In addition to these circumstances, we are witnessing how Stalin is being restored as a historical figure and a person who programmed quite specific imperial view of Russia’s role in the world. Therefore, I must say that the path to the recognition of the Holodomor will not be easy.

 

"I would advise everyone to be aware that this road is a long one indeed. The Jews upheld their resolution on the Holocaust in the UN for 62 years, so I hope you understand what I’m talking about.

”As for the current situation, I believe this issue will be raised during the 63rd UN General Assembly session.

”I would also like to point out that the more intrigue is generated around this issue (and given such harsh measures into which Russia translates this intrigue), the more interested the world is in what we are defending. You won’t find one delegate in the UN audience, even from the remotest country, who doesn’t know about the Holodomor or who does not believe that [Russia’s] blackmailing regarding the Ukrainian issue is redundant.

”I realized this when I was in New York as a member of the CE delegation. Even in the present conditions of financial crisis, terrorism, and reshaping of the map of the world, this all-European body believes that what we need now is an even closer cooperation with the UN, especially in the domain of human rights. We were there to discuss this need. We held numerous meetings with people who were in charge of various areas of UN activities.

”Apparently one of the most interesting meetings was with the UN official in charge of genocide and mass violence and destruction. We discussed the sensitive issue of genocide, its definition and boundaries, and what a post-genocidal country should do along this line. We found the following answer: no one should be stopped on this road by what is usually the simplest counterargument, which is a request to present documentary evidence. There is hardly any evidence of this kind left in these cases because such heinous crimes are committed in a different way, leaving no evidence for the future trial.

”The UN official said that Ukraine was doing the right thing by defending this issue because the goal that we set before us is what matters in the first place. In this debate the main thing is to know what kind of goal we have set. If it is to prevent this evil from happening ever again, then we must struggle on, come what may. Here the important thing is presenting our case to the international community as frequently and loudly as possible, making the issue clear and explaining it. This is the only way to guarantee that this crime will never be perpetrated again.

”This debate may have been more on the philosophic side, but delegates of various countries were genuinely interested. In particular, there was the Polish representative, who had not previously supported our stance on the Holodomor (while Poland is generally friendly to us in this issue).

 

"He said that Poland had appealed to Russia demanding that it acknowledge the mass massacre of the Poles at Katyn as a crime of the Stalinist regime. Russia had flatly refused to do so. This is another proof of the Kremlin’s serious determination to ‘take case of its outskirts.’

”The Holodomor is not merely a historical issue. Its recognition is fundamental because this is what we may face if we lose our state and independence and stop resisting the bear that is stretching its paws over all the lands which it calls its empire’s provinces. There is nothing anti-Russian in these statements of mine; it’s just that the threat to a number of countries is too serious.”

Not so long ago the European Parliament supported Ukraine by recognizing the Holodomor of 1932-33. Will this decision have an impact on the UN resolution in regard to this problem?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”The European Parliament’s support is extremely important, and yes, it will have its impact, but there has to be many such resolutions; we have to struggle on a daily basis to have them passed, and not just in conjunction of the 75th anniversary, so we can cross it off the list.

 

"I think we’ll have to persist in this direction for more than a year-the way your newspaper has been doing it: not for the sake of awards or laudatory entries in the service record, but valiantly, never swerving from the road and involving in this complicated task people who regard it as a cause to be defended, rather than a temporary project.

”This is how this was done back in 1993 by the late Lidia Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak. They collected piles of letters containing accounts of the Holodomor by its victims and published a memorial volume which you can’t buy anywhere now, just as you can’t find any of those letters.

”The point in question is not the date but the fact, the principle, and the phenomenon. It is very important not to bury this ussue under the layer of red-letter day events. Views expressed by the OSCE and UNESCO still carry a lot of weight.”

We know that the Albanian envoy, Aleksander Biberaj, will prepare a report for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on the Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine and elsewhere in the [former] Soviet Union. Can you please tell us about the progress of this report and its special features?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”The procedure for writing reports is not widely known, so let me explain. The thing is that it takes years to prepare each such report. At the current stage, Aleksander Biberaj has been approved and the first discussions have taken place during the autumnal session. His position is to study the Holodomor as a special page in the history of the Stalinist regime. He is investigating the issue and has already visited Ukraine and attended a scholarly conference here, where he gained a lot of [pertinent] knowledge.

”I met with him during the UN session in New York and we continued our discussion. I might as well point out that he has no doubts that the Holodmor was an act of genocide. He plans to attend our forum on November 22. By the way, among our guests will be the chairman of PACE’s Political Committee, who is the author of the report on the condemnation of totalitarian crimes — one of the best-known reports in the PACE.

 

"This report was successfully presented in 2006. However, the Holodomor issue was left out, blocked by Russia, and Ukraine was not mentioned. These two European representatives will attend our forum to voice their support and continue investigating this issue.

”There are procedures according to which Biberaj will come to Ukraine again to explore the areas where the crimes [pertaining to the Holodomor] were committed, study archival documents, and talk to scholars. He also intends to visit Russia, including the Kuban and Kazakhstan. He is taking a keen interest in this problem because of the truths that have been revealed to him, while many Europeans remain unaware of them.

 

"He says he will work hard to deliver his report at the earliest possible date; he isn’t going to spend many years writing it. Meanwhile, the Russians are delaying contact with Biberaj and have developed a strategy of playing for time. So this project will take a while.”

THE CRIMEA: JOKES ASIDE
Ms. Herasymiuk, this August you forwarded a parliamentarian message to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), requesting that they monitor the situation with the unlawful issuance of Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens, specifically in the Crimea. Are there any results? Has the SBU been able to ascertain anything? Was this problem placed on the PACE agenda?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”The SBU replied that they are also concerned with this issue. It is being investigated by competent authorities. They also promised that I will be informed about the findings on a priority basis, period. However, this issue remains in the limelight. We discussed it at the PACE session with colleagues from the Baltic countries, Georgia, Moldova, and other countries that are also disturbed by this phenomenon. We spoke about the necessity of a resolution on the matter.

”Many members of the Council of Europe tell us that Ukraine may be next after Georgia. Even if we are silent on the subject, it is brought up by others to keep us on our toes. After all, [President] Medvedev recently stated that he demands a prolongation of his presidency and is launching a new program to resettle ‘fellow countrymen.’ This program is being very actively implemented in Kaliningrad. He wants to deploy missiles there, too. These signs tell us that Russia is paying little attention to weak warnings. We all must be constantly prepared to defend ourselves.”

[Olha Herasymiuk] Do you think the South Ossetia scenario could be played out in the Crimea?

”There is no joking about the situation. We are monitoring the Kremlin’s policy. It’s just that we have to constantly work on it, rather than react to a possible sudden explosion, for we may simply be too late to respond to it. Implementing Ukrainian [national] policy in the Crimea is not easy, yet we are doing just that.

 

"Recently, criminal proceedings were initiated against Communists who seized the studio of the State Television and Radio Company. The Crimea will soon host a local drama production dedicated to the Holodomor with the support of the Symferopil branch of Our Ukraine. The Crimea is part of Ukraine. Our people live there.”

CONTINUING IN THE SET DIRECTION

Ukraine obviously cannot count on being granted the Membership Action Plan in December. Who do you think is to blame for this situation?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”The situation in country is least conducive to state-building, for the time being anyway. There are probably objective reasons for this. The politicians and individuals that have to remain in politics should be those who address the issues of the state, rather than do what they are doing now. There we need to have new statesmen and people who have already brought great, real benefits to this country and whose accomplishments are still being used.

”I think that we are in a very complicated situation now, in particular because the rest of the world no longer admires some of our politicians. Previously, after Yulia Tymoshenko delivered her speech in Brussels, Javier Solana would quote her. This euphoria is no longer there. The world is disturbed but what is happening between the branches of power in Ukraine. It certainly does not reject Ukraine. On the contrary, Ukraine is now in the limelight with the European and international communities. They are willing to help Ukraine on this road.

”I see nothing fatal about what is happening on our road to progress. The world wants to have Ukraine with its tremendous intellectual potential, traditions, history, and capacities. I think that we should continue on our course toward Euro-Atlantic integration. We shouldn’t let any failures depress us. This is a special course that has to be mapped out by experts, not amateurs.

”Our society must also share the responsibility for the individuals it elects to be its leaders. We must advance individuals who will eventually go down in history as those who have helped this country’s progress, rather than comic or scandalous characters, as is, regrettably, the case today.”

NEVER GIVE UP STRUGGLE!
Why do you think our politicians cannot join efforts and come to an agreement even now, in the conditions of the world financial crisis?

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”Such is the level of their professionalism: frankly, it is not very high. I also believe that this situation will continue until the election campaign separates the chaff from the grain so good bread can be baked. This society must duly assess its politicians, and it’s not worth relying on the images generated by Internet mass media and political shows. Our media are shaping the wrong kind of politicians. As a rule, on our television screens we see those who tend to wrangle in a loud way. This forms a certain [public] attitude to [our] politics, so our society must learn to respond to this kind of offer and this kind of television.”

Aren’t you tired of politics? For example, Sviatoslav Vakarchuk couldn’t stand it any longer and called it quits.

[Olha Herasymiuk] ”What Vakarchuk did is not an example for me. He must have had no goal, considering that he took up politics and got tired of it so quickly even though he promised he would not give up without a fight, as he sang in his song. You can get tired doing something tiresome and burdensome only if you don’t understand why you are doing it.

”Indeed, building an independent state is a hard task, like a stonemason’s work. It can never be easy, much less so in our situation. Ukraine is the goal of my life. I have made a conscious choice, so I don’t accept the notion of fatigue in this sense. Nor should our society get tired or disillusioned — mind you, our society has changed.

 

The Maidan demonstrated that we are different from what we were before and that we have willpower. It would be a crime against Ukraine to say, ‘Well, we have failed so let’s go back.’ I can predict that there will be more snap elections and more fiascos, but this is our road. It cannot be any different.”

 

LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/257135/
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[return to index] [Action Ukraine Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]

OR HISTORY ON THE SERVICE OF AN IMPERIAL POLICY

 

By Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Professor and Doctor of History
The Day Weekly Digest in English, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Once Empress Catherine II felt she was sitting firmly on the Russian throne, she immediately instructed Prince Viazemsky to take a number of certain steps to force Ukrainians “to get Russified in a delicate way” as soon as possible. Just a hundred years later Russia’s interior minister Valuyev considered it necessary to persuade the entire world that “there were not, are not and cannot be” any Ukrainians.

I recalled this when I read the book "The 1932-1933 Famine: a Tragedy of the Russi­an Count­ry­side" by the Penza-based professor of history Viktor Kondrashin, which was recently published in Moscow.

 

This author, who decided to study the 1932-1933 famine in the Volga, Don and Kuban regions, failed to see there the Ukrainians who were the main grain-growing trail-blazers at least in the two last areas: “The Russians, Mord­vins, Tatars, Ingushes, and other peoples lived then and are living now in the above-mentioned regions of Russia.

 

At the same time, this study puts emphasis on the Russian population of the Volga, Don and Kuban areas because, historically, it was they who were involved in grain production and, therefore, became the primary object of Stalin’s forced collectivization” (p. 51 in Russian).

Why Kondrashin wants to convince the readers that there were no Ukrainians in these regions from the very beginning of cultivation and farming and does not consider them “historically involved in grain production” becomes clear from the panegyric that the author dedicates to himself in his own book: “V. V. Kondrashin actively opposes in the media and scholarly publications, including foreign ones, the idea of Ukrainian historians and politicians about ‘genocide of the Ukrainian people by the 1932-1933 Holodomor.’ He concludes in his publication son this matter that the 1932-1933 famine is a common tragedy of all the USSR peoples and this tragedy should unite, not disunite, the peoples” (p. 29, Russ.).

Given this self-assessment of the author, it is small wonder why he did not consider it necessary to mention Ukrainians among the main agricultural ethnoses in the Volga, Don and Kuban regions. But they really lived there. According to the 1926 census, Ukrainians prevailed, for example, in all the 40 Kuban villages (stanitsas) founded by the first Zaporozhian Cossack resettlers in the late 18th century: Ba­tu­ryn­ska (5,034 Ukrainians out of the total 7,086 residents), Be­re­zanska (9,297 and 10,443, respectively), Briukhovetska (9,698 and 12,466), Vasiurynska (9,142 and 10,443), Vyshestebliivska (2,400 and 3,251), Dinska (10, 316 and 12,525), Diadkivska (6,665 and 7,324), Ivanivska (12,983 and 14,209), Irkliivska (5,884 and 6,473), Kanivska (13,878 and 17,248), Kal­ni­bo­lotska (8,606 and 10,998), Katerynynska (11,824 and 13,391), Kisliakivska (11, 416 and 13, 112), Konelivska (7,824 and 8,7121), Korenivska (9,313 and 15,548), Krylivska (8,146 and 9,427), Kushchivska (9,364 and 11,865), Medvedivska (15,222 and 18,146), Ne­za­ma­ivska (10,150 and 12,133), Pa­sh­kiv­ska (14,166 and 18,000), Pereyaslavska (7,552 and 8,781), Plastunivska (10,528 and 12,375), Platnyrivska (11,628 and 13,925), Poltavska (10,985 and 14,306), Po­po­vychivska (7,762 and 10,715), Rogivska (10,806 and 12,475), Sergiivska (4,127 and 4,714), Sta­ro­de­re­vian­kivska (6,529 and 7,230), Sta­ro­dzhe­reliivska (5,158 and 5,413), Starokorsunska (10,477 and 12,273), Staroleushkivska (5,857 and 6,521), Staromenska (19,736 and 22,604), Sta­­ro­my­sha­stivska (8,171 and 9,826), Sta­ro­nyzh­chestebliivska (11,356 and 12,273), Starotytarivska (8,552 and 9,536), Staro­shcher­bynivska (14,453 and 17,001), Ty­ma­shevska (8,961 and 12,112), Umanska (17,008 and 20,727), and Shkurynska (8,864 and 9,749).

On the whole, there were 915,450 Ukrainians in Kuban and 3,106,852 in the Northern Cau­ca­sus. So we find it difficult to understand the famine in these villages as a tragedy of “the Russian countryside” alone. All the more so that Kondrashin names such Kuban districts as Yeysky, Kanovsky, Kjorenivskt, Kra­sno­darsky, Staromensky and Kur­sav­sky in the Stavropol region as ones that make part of the “especially affected” areas of the Northern Caucasus.

Of course, this is also presented as a tragedy of the Russian countryside. However, the 1926 census recorded 74,037 Uk­rai­nians and 23,568 Russians in Yesky district; 45,451 and 8,130, respectively, in Kanivsky; 76,422 and 36,939 in Ko­re­niv­sky; 103,8312 and 18,086 in Kraskodarsky; 65,488 and 9,583 in Staromensky; and 57,665 and 8,767 in Kursavsky district.

 

After all, we are also not indifferent to the destiny of the 35,115 Ukrainians in the Kondrashin-quoted Armavisrsky district and the 11,514 in Kurganinsky district, where the Russians numerically prevailed at the time.

Similar facts of ethnic Uk­rai­nian enclaves during the 1932-1933 Holodomor can also be traced in the Don and Volga regions. In the latter, there were 49 percent of our ethnos in Kapustin Yar district, 51.9 in Yelansky, 69.3 in Kotovsky, 72.4 in Kranoyarsky, 74.9 in Pokrovsky, 79.3 in Samiylivsky, 81 in Mykolayivsky, and almost 90 in Vladirirsky district.

 

According to the 1926 census, the Lower Volga region alone was populated by 600,000 people who continued to identify themselves as Ukrainians. Some of them did not even speak Russian, which is proved by the following fact: failure to meet the planned targets of grain harvest in 1929 in Dubynsky district was explained by the fact that “Ukrainian slogans on grain procurement were apprehended in the district executive committee, and Russian-language placards were sent to the Uk­rai­nians.”

As for the Ukrainian population in the Don region, there was also a large number of areas, where our people made up the absolute majority. This was especially the case in some Taganrog districts. And the 1932-1933 Holodomor took a heavy toll of all these Ukrainians.

But we should admit that the Kuban Ukrainians were the first to suffer from this horror. And we cannot help recalling the village of Poltavska whose population favored the development of their native culture and where there was the first All-Russian Ukrainian Teacher-Training School. Its population was the first to be deported to the north, its houses were given to Red Army Cossack veterans, and it was renamed Krasnoarmeyska so that nothing betrayed its Ukrainian origin.

 

The second Ukrainian village in Kuban that suffered the same tragedy was Umanska. After the deportation, it was renamed Leningradska.
Incidentally, we could not find similar Kremlin instructions with respect to Rus­sia’s non-black-soil area which also failed to meet the grain procurement targets.

Indeed, this did not repeat on a mass scale in Soviet Ukraine because in many cases there was nobody to deport: entire villages had died out. There are documents that prove that a great number of Russians and Be­la­ru­sians were brought to hundreds of the famine-ravaged Ukrainian villages.

As for the “black boards,” they were introduced not only in Kuban, Don, the Central Black Soil Region, the Volga basin and the Ukrainian SSR but also in Northern Ka­zakh­stan on the republican leadership’s initiative. But if we look at the list of the villages that suffered this kind of punishment, we will see at once that they were predominantly populated with Ukrainian peasants.

 

For example, such villages in Ust-Ka­me­nogorsk or Fedorivsky districts were mostly Ukrainian because the Uk­rai­ni­ans were the principal grain producers in this region. For instance, the 1926 census sho­wed that out of the 28,302 residents of the Fe­dorivsky district 25,408 were Uk­rai­nians.

When you read the Penza historian Kondrashin’s book, you can see clearly that he tries, above all, to serve the current political interests of Russia, which consist in the refusal to recognize the 1932-1933 Ho­lo­do­mor as genocide of the Ukrainian people: “We do not support the opinion of Ukrainian po­liticians and historians about the national genocide in Ukraine by means of the 1932-1933 famine.

 

Nor do we agree with their definition of ‘holodomor’ as an action organized by the Stalinist regime inn order to exterminate millions of Ukrainian residents... We do not share the Ukrainian side’s position because no documents have been found, which would say that Stalin’s regime intended to eliminate the Ukrainian people.”

This raises a question to Kondrashin: and what about the directive documents on stopping the Ukrainization in the areas densely populated by Ukrainians (nothing of the kind was done against other nations in 1932-1933)? Do they not prove that Stalin’s regime aimed to exterminate, at least spiritually, millions of Ukrainians?

 

And the fact that the 1939 census showed that the Uk­rainian population of what is now Krasnodar Territory had diminished by 1,437,151 people in comparison to 1926? Does it not make the historian Kondrashin think that there was a carefully-orchestrated strike against the Ukrainian nation?

And the VKP Central Com­mit­tee and USSR Council of People’s Commissars resolution of January 22, 1933, on forbidding only Ukrainian and Kuban peasants to go to other regions in search of bread? Does this not prove that Ukrainians were deliberately left to starve to death? Then how should we interpret the following comment of Kon­dra­shin: “What can be called direct organization of the famine are draconian directives of Stalin-Molotov on the prevention of spontaneous migration of peasants, which kept them locked in the starving villages and doomed them to death by starvation. It is for this reason that the 1932-1933 famine can be considered a manmade famine, and this famine is one of the gravest crimes of Stalin” (p. 376, Russ.).

In our opinion, only after reading a large number of documents that prove the genocide of Uk­rai­nians could Kondrashin write, perhaps subconsciously, the following: “The famine helped Stalin liquidate what he considered a potential opposition to his regime in Ukraine, which could become political, rather than cultural, and rely on the peasantry. There are some facts that prove this, including those in the third volume of the documentary collection Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside devoted to the holodomor, which describes the activities of GPU organs in the Ukrainian countryside” (p. 242, Russ.).

Pressing the argument of the absence of concrete documents on pre-planned extermination of Ukrainians, Kondrashin refers us to the International Commission of Jurists which allegedly concluded that “it is not in a position to confirm the existence of a premeditated plan to organize famine in Ukraine in order to ensure the success of Moscow’s policies” (p. 18, Russ.).

Unfortunately, Kondrashin did not quote the next lines of this documents, which say: “Ho­we­ver, most of the commission members believe that even if the Soviet authorities did not actually plan the famine, they apparently took advantage of this famine to force [the populace] to accept the policy they resisted.”

Besides, the International Com­mis­sion of Jurists with the Swedish professor Jacob Sundberg at the head (and without a single Ukrainian, incidentally) also made this conclusion: “Although there is no direct evidence that the 1932-1933 famine was systemically masterminded to break the Ukrainian nation once and for all, most of the commission members believe that Soviet officials deliberately used this famine to pursue their policy of denationalizing Ukraine.”

It should be stressed that Prof. Kondrashin hushes up the fact that the Soviet government furnished no archival documents to this commission and refused altogether to cooperate with it, organizing protest letters against its activities on the part of communist historians. Nor does the monograph’s author cites the commission’s findings that show, on the basis of open censuses in 1926 and 1939, certain demographic changes in the USSR population.

The truth is that while the population increased by 16 percent in the USSR, by 28 percent in the Russian Federation, by 11.2 percent in Belarus over the aforesaid period, it dropped by 9.9 percent in the Ukrainian SSR. This provided ample grounds for well-known jurists in various countries to recognize the 1932-1933 Holodomor as a deliberate strike on Ukrainians.

We cannot bypass one more cardinal question that Kondrashin touched upon in his book. Admitting that “the mindless collectivization and excessive state procurement targets ruined Ka­zakh animal and land husbanders, caused a mass-scale migration to China and the famine-related death of hundreds of thousands of Kazakhstan residents,” this author claims: “at the same time, Kazakh academics did not follow in the footsteps of their Ukrainian colleagues and are treating the 1932-1933 tragedy in line with the approaches of Russian re­sear­chers” (p. 27, Russ.).

At the same time, Kondrashin himself points out that Kazakhs were allowed to settle and set up collective farms, say, in the Volga region during the Holodomor. For example, there were 81 economic entities with 391 people in Sorochinsky district, Middle Volga region (p. 188, Russ.).

In other words, Kazakhs were not forbidden to look for food outside their republic. This is proved, incidentally, by dozens of archival materials found in Kazakhstan. It is only with respect to the famine-stricken Ukrainian population that the regime would issue draconian, to quote Kondrashin, directives that deprived it of a possibility to flee from death to the neighboring regions.

Prof. Kondrashin tries to persuade us several times that no concrete documents have been found. But this is not a sound argument because Moscow also tried to persuade us 20 years ago that there were no secret supplements to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on dividing the spheres of influence in Europe, signed in the Kremlin on August 23, 1939. Then these documents were found.

 

It is quite obvious that Nikita Khrushchev’s announcement at the CPSU 20th Congress that Stalin intended to deport all Ukrainians to Siberia will also find documentary proof some day. After all, why do Kondrashin and other Russian historians not ascribe to this kind of documents Stalin’s telegram to CK KP(b)U Mendel Khatayevich, dated November 8, 1932, saying that “the Politburo is now considering the question of how to bring the Ukrainian peasant down to his knees?”

Russian authors keep saying that the Holodomor tragedy should unite, not disunite, peoples. But this will only occur when they abandon the hard ideological line and admit historical realities.

 

LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/261924/

The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
Republished in the Kyiv Post, Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, November 27, 2008

This weekend marks the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine, known as the Holodomor (death by hunger). Many governments, including those of Canada and the United States, have recognized the famine as an act of genocide by Stalin's regime against Ukrainians. Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko has issued a bill that would make it a criminal offence to deny that the famine was genocide.

After 75 years, we know much about this tragedy, but the academic community has yet to reach a consensus on the issue. A majority of western scholars -- at least judging from published articles and books -- denies that S