JOHN MARONE, KYIV
UKRAINE'S ‘HUNGER’ FOR HISTORICAL JUSTICE
There's nothing like a national tragedy to build a nation, especially if the details of the tragedy are buried in history, and the blame for it can be put on a regional bully.
Ukraine's Holodomor is such a tragedy.
Yes, at least three million hapless Ukrainians died of hunger, disease and privation in 1932-1933, and No, they shouldn't be forgotten - by anyone.
Additionally, most if not all of the blame lies squarely with the misguided policies of Joseph Stalin and his heavy-handed communist henchmen.
However, equating the Holodomor with the Jewish Holocaust is incorrect, inappropriate and wrong.
But that hasn't stopped Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko from prominently voicing the issue during his never-ending circuit of foreign visits.
During a recent trip to Bucharest, Yushchenko called on the Romanian parliament to help get the Holodomor recognized as genocide.
The Ukrainian president is expected to ask for the same during an upcoming state visit to Israel.
On October 30, Ecuador’s Congress reportedly assisted Yushchenko’s cause with a resolution, while the General Conference of UNESCO unanimously passed a resolution entitled “Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine on November 1”, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has boasted.
Ukraine hasn't had a parliament for months due to a tragicomic power struggle that doesn't look likely to end any time soon. Nevertheless, Yushchenko seems determined to forge his country's future by digging into its past.
"The crimes of the Stalin regime - the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, the major terror of the 1930s - should be fully condemned by the international community. It is the duty of all countries, political and public forces that accept the values of democracy," Yuschenko said in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on November 2.
The president has also dedicated 2008 as the year to remember Holodomor victims.
Memorials to the tragedy are scheduled to be built in Kharkiv and Kyiv next year.
It’s important for a nation still securing its sovereignty, continuing to find its place in the world, to establish its past, both the triumphs and the tragedies.
“This is why the resolution in the Rada about genocide is historically and politically important. It's a landmark. It reminds people of things that have happened, it reminds people of the importance of being independent and in charge of your own country,” former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski correctly noted during a roundtable in Washington D.C. last month.
The fact that the Ukrainian parliament only recognized the famine as genocide less than a year ago shows just how tricky the concept of national memory is. Moreover, the vote was close.
Ukraine’s east-west split is linguistic, religious, political and historical. Ethnicity and foreign relations also play a role.
Eastern Ukrainians identify more closely with Russia, which has inherited the legacy of all Soviet crimes. Forget the fact that Stalin was a Georgian and that Russians and countless other nationalities suffered no less than Ukrainians under Soviet rule.
If Ukrainians were the victims of a genocide, which literally means the (attempted) extermination of an entire people, then someone had to be doing the exterminating.
Like the post-War Germans, Russians are expected to accept their guilt and start acting nice and civilized.
The problem is that modern Russia is in no mood to reject its imperial past – in relation to Ukraine or anyone else. Quite the contrary, the Kremlin has set itself on a collision course with Western liberalism and its historical interpretations.
Moscow’s official position is that the famine, which affected Russia and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine, was the unfortunate result of a tough policy during tough times.
Forced collectivization was part and parcel of industrialization, which ultimately helped the Soviet Union defeat Nazi Germany, Russian historians argue.
Russian ombudsman Vladimir Lukin told a recent press conference that "attempts are being made to portray the great famine in Ukraine in the 1930s as an exclusive action directed against Ukrainians, which is, of course, absolutely untrue."
With more immediate and no less contentious issues still remaining to be hammered out with Russia, many international players are reluctant to irritate the great bear any more than necessary.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the case of Rwanda – a more modern and direct example of mass murder on the basis of ethnicity performed right under the UN’s nose. Almost a million men, women and children were, among other things, hacked up with machetes by their neighbors of a different ethnic group, while diplomats debated the definition of the term genocide.
Ukraine’s genocide claim comes closer – but is by no means a direct fit – to that of Armenian claim against the Turks.
Responding to a strong Armenian lobby at home but against all understanding of foreign affairs, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives approved a bill declaring that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War was genocide.
As with the Tutsis and Jews, Armenians were slaughtered on the basis of their ethnicity. At least 600,000 were killed in 1915-1916 by Turkish troops panicked by foreign invaders during another difficult historical moment.
There is no evidence to suggest that a large number of Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor were the victims of direct violence. Moreover, one would be hard pressed to prove ethnic hatred as a motive, excluding the claim by some Ukrainians that the orders from Moscow were made by mostly Jewish communists.
On the other hand, most scholars support the view that Moscow purposely intended to break the will of the Ukrainian peasant, whose fate was secondary to the interests of the party. In other words, the famine wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of a tough policy in tough times, but an example of willful indifference if not an intentional desire to destroy Ukrainian farmers.
This, however, is not the same as a premeditated and calculated plan to wipe out Ukrainians as a nation.
For example, the Nazis tracked down and murdered in the most methodical ways anyone of Jewish ancestry. Jews were considered sub humans.
This was not the case with Ukrainians in the Soviet Union.
As Solzhenitsyn aptly describes, the typical Siberian labor camp was a mosaic of persecuted people within the borders of the empire.
Does this mean Ukrainian lives lost during the Holodomor do not count for as much as Jewish lives taken during the Holocaust, or even Armenians slaughtered sporadically by Turkish troops? No. But it does mean that one does not have to compete with other tragedies to draw attention to his own. Attaching evocative words such as ‘genocide’ or ‘holocaust’ to the deadly persecution suffered by Ukrainians under Soviet rule does them no more honor.
It’s good that Yushchenko is championing the cause of persecuted Ukrainians, but the real fight is not abroad. And if it’s to be won, the president and others are going to have to accept the horrible reality of what genocide really means before others will.
John Marone, Kyiv Post Staff Journalist, Ukraine
November 7, 2007
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