NOW UKRAINE IS RE-SOVIETIZED!!!
Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine Unmakes Itself
The first thing Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovich did after his February 25 2010 inauguration was delete the link
to the Holodomor on the president’s official Web site. Yanukovich’s
predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, had made the Holodomor—the famine of
1932–33 produced by Joseph Stalin and responsible for the deaths of
millions of Ukrainian peasants—into a national issue, promoting what
Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously called “the struggle of memory
over forgetting” as part of his attempt to move the country toward
democracy. That Yanukovich turned his back so dramatically on this
movement to rehabilitate Ukraine’s tragic past indicated the extent to
which the recent election was as much about identity as it was about
politics.
This was no accident. Thanks to the 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukrainian
national identity has become synonymous with democracy and the West.
And thanks to Vladimir Putin’s construction of a newly assertive Russian
state, Russian identity has unfortunately become associated, as in
Soviet times, with authoritarianism and empire.
Yanukovich’s Party of
Regions has its electoral base in Ukraine’s southeastern rust belt, the
Donbas; the region produced, and is still proud of, both Communist Party
leader Leonid Brezhnev and Stalin’s favorite proletarian, the coal
miner extraordinaire Aleksei Stakhanov. It names its streets after
Stalinists, displays statues of the Soviet dictator, and retains its
Soviet-era identity as a Russian-speaking enclave with an authoritarian
political culture. When president-elect Yanukovich decided to turn back
the clock on Yushchenko’s Ukraine and reestablish its role as a client
of Moscow, it was natural that he should begin by shutting down
discussion of what historian Robert Conquest called Stalin’s “terror
famine.”
Yanukovich’s assault on Ukrainian identity, newly resurgent following
the Orange Revolution, has focused on education, culture, language, and
history. Various policy measures have already begun to squeeze the
authentically Ukrainian out of public life, education, and media.
University rectors have been co-opted into supporting the new,
Russocentric regime, while the only two holdouts—from the pro-Western
Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and the Mohyla Academy in
Kiev—have come under pressure from the authorities. But the central
target of the regime’s rollback of Ukrainian identity is history. As
Yanukovich well knows, all new nations develop identities based on their
understanding of history. Foundation myths, heroes, villains, defeats,
and victories are identified—and sometimes invented—so as to create
“narratives” that have implications for contemporary political
movements. Americans glorify the Founding Fathers, while the French
lionize their first revolution. Germans moved from sanctifying Otto von
Bismarck to admiring Konrad Adenauer after the catastrophe of the Third
Reich. So, too, have Ukrainians in the last twenty years been developing
a distinctly Ukrainian historical narrative as part of their
slow-motion embrace of democracy and the West.
A ny attempt to construct a distinctly
Ukrainian identity must inevitably address the recent past. Ukraine
today remains largely a product of the terror, violence, war, and
genocide of Russian czars, Soviet Communists, and German Nazis. A 2008
study by the Moscow-based Institute of Demography calculated that
Ukraine suffered close to 15 million “excess deaths” from 1914 to 1948:
1.3 million during World War I; 2.3 million during the Russian Civil War
and the Polish-Soviet War of the early 1920s; 4 million during the
Holodomor; 300,000 during the Great Terror and annexation of western
Ukraine; 6.5 million during World War II; and 400,000 during the postwar
famine and Stalin’s campaign against Ukrainian nationalism.
According to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, “The peoples
of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most,
since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible
1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s.
If Europe was, as [Columbia University historian] Mark Mazower put it, a
dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.” That
darkness continued until Stalin’s death in 1953. Although everyday
violence disappeared and the death camps were disbanded, totalitarianism
as a system of pervasive, oppressive rule stayed intact for three more
decades, surviving long enough to mold a new type of human being. What
Soviet propaganda called “the new Soviet man” is precisely the voter who
supports Yanukovich and Putin, yearns for the good old days of Soviet
greatness and cheap vodka, overlooks Stalin’s crimes against humanity,
and cannot imagine Ukraine as having an identity different, or separate,
from Russia’s.
As the excess deaths suggest, however, the Holodomor’s “murder by
starvation” remains the single greatest catastrophe endured by Ukraine
during Soviet rule. Any attempt to reconstruct a national Ukrainian
narrative must take a stand on a trauma of such proportions—especially
since all Soviet historians, propagandists, and officials assiduously
ignored the famine or dismissed it as an émigré delusion for decades.
Unsurprisingly, the first Ukrainians to draw attention to the tragedy of
the Holodomor were survivors who had fled to the West. In the
mid-1950s, they compiled two major volumes of survivor testimony and
other documentary materials called The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book
. They were dismissed as rabid anti-Communists and cold warriors by
much of the Western political and intellectual establishment. They
continued their efforts in the decades that followed, but with very
little resonance outside their own immediate émigré communities.
Things began changing by the early 1980s. Soviet studies had
discovered the “nationality question,” and academic research
increasingly shifted to the USSR’s non-Russian republics, including
Ukraine. At the same time, “revisionist” social historians were
reassessing Stalin and investigating the origins of Stalinism in the
early 1930s. As the fiftieth anniversary of the famine in 1983
approached, it became impossible for Western scholars not to recognize
the tragedy. Some continued to view it as the consequence of Stalin’s
policy of forced collectivization of the peasantry. Others insisted that
it was not just a by-product of agricultural policy gone haywire, but a
conscious political act that had to be viewed in the context of
Stalin’s vicious crackdown on Ukrainian national identity.
In 1986, the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University published Robert Conquest’s pathbreaking The Harvest of Sorrow
, the first systematic scholarly study of the Holodomor as a weapon of
Stalin’s terror. In 1988, the American historian James Mace, who
explicitly argued that the famine was an anti-Ukrainian measure,
compiled three volumes of documentation and testimony in the U.S.
Commission on the Ukraine Famine, a report delivered to Congress.
Conquest and Mace were denounced as anti-Communists, but this effort to
marginalize their work was subverted by Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost
policy, which exposed many black holes in Soviet history to scrutiny
not only by Russians but also by Ukrainians and other non-Russians. Once
Soviet historians began examining the horrors of the Soviet past and
concluding that Stalin was a monster, the famine could no longer be
claimed to be a conspiracy of Western anti-Communists and disgruntled
Ukrainian émigrés.
Following Ukraine’s independence in
1991, the quest for a distinctly Ukrainian historical narrative and
identity took on a new urgency, especially as Ukraine became open to
Western intellectual debates and testimony by the remnants of the
generation that had survived the famine. As the number of books and
articles published in Ukraine about the Holodomor grew exponentially, it
became an established historical reality: today almost no one denies
that a terrible human tragedy took place and that millions died. But
while the issue of whether or not the Holodomor happened was settled,
the question of why it happened developed into an even more
contentious issue argued by two opposing camps. Following in the
footsteps of James Mace (who settled in Kiev, where he continued to
write about the Holodomor until his untimely death in 2004), Ukrainian
national democrats generally argued that the famine was a genocide.
Their pro-Soviet, pro-Russian, and anti-democratic opponents, most of
whom eventually grouped around Yanukovich and the Party of Regions,
rejected this claim and the idea that the famine had been explicitly
anti-Ukrainian in favor of the more anodyne view that, as Yanukovich’s
minister of education and science, Dmytro Tabachnyk, succinctly put it,
“the Holodomor of 1933 was a general tragedy of the peoples of Ukraine,
Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.”
Reflecting the time lag between Ukrainian and Western intellectual
currents, Ukrainians began debating the Holodomor-as-genocide thesis
just as Western scholars were moving to accept it. A recently discovered
1953 speech by Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the
term genocide, contributed to the shift in the debate; Stalin’s famine,
he said, was “not simply a case of mass murder” but “a case of
genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a
nation.” According to Lemkin, the Ukrainian genocide consisted of four
components: “The first blow [was] aimed at the intelligentsia, the
national brain, so as to paralyze the rest of the body.” The second was
“an offensive against the churches, priests, and hierarchy, the ‘soul’
of Ukraine. . . . The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the
farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository
of the tradition, folk lore and music, the national language and
literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against
this body is perhaps the most terrible of all, starvation. . . . The
fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmentation of the
Ukrainian people . . . by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples
and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern Europe.”
Just as the earlier debates in the West over the famine had been
politicized, pitting “anti-Communists” against their critics, so too did
the debate over the Holodomor-as-genocide thesis in Ukraine become
profoundly political. First, it challenged the nature of Soviet reality.
Second, it became the centerpiece of Yushchenko’s nation-building
project after the Orange Revolution. And third, it undermined Russia’s
hegemony over Ukraine.
On the first point, if the national democrats were right to say that
the Holodomor was genocide, then Stalin, Communism, and the Soviet Union
were to blame, and the construction of a democratic and pro-Western
Ukrainian identity must necessarily entail rejection of all three as
comparable in their evil to Hitler and Nazi Germany. So the opponents of
the national democrats, whose identity remained pro-Stalinist,
pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet, were bound to struggle against such an
interpretation. Their battle was fought not only in large abstract
arguments but in small linguistic skirmishes. While national democrats
began referring to the war against Hitler as “World War II,” the
Yanukovich camp stuck to the Soviet term, “The Great Fatherland War,”
with the “Fatherland” being the Soviet Union, and not Ukraine. Since the
debate also reflected popularly held attitudes—according to a 2009
InterMedia survey, eighty-three percent of Ukrainians in the west,
fifty-eight in the center, twenty-eight in the south, and fifteen in the
east accept the genocide thesis—the Holodomor quickly became the main
focus of efforts by both national democrats and their opponents to
mobilize voters in the recent elections.
Complicating the issue was the fact that Yushchenko had made the
Holodomor-as-genocide thesis a central tenet of his nation-building
efforts, which mostly consisted of affirmative-action programs for
promoting Ukrainian as the country’s constitutionally recognized state
language, in public education and the thoroughly Russified media.
Yushchenko supported the construction of Holodomor monuments throughout
Ukraine, introduced the Holodomor into school textbooks, founded the
Ukrainian Institute of National Memory to research the Holodomor, built
the Holodomor Memorial (down the street from Kiev’s ancient Monastery of
the Caves and the Soviet-era complex celebrating the “Great Fatherland
War”), initiated a series of celebrations to coincide with the famine’s
seventy-fifth anniversary in 2008, and sought international recognition
of the Holodomor as genocide. Fourteen countries agreed, while the
European Parliament stopped short, calling it a crime against humanity.
A s the political tussle between
Yushchenko and Yanukovich heightened, especially in the run-up to the
presidential election of 2010, opposition to Yushchenko translated into
opposition to his nation-building project. Besides promoting awareness
of the horrors of the Holodomor, that project consisted of several other
important historical dimensions. The first was the claim that Ukrainian
history included the history of the state of Kievan Rus, which one
thousand years ago was one of Europe’s largest and most powerful
polities. The second was the rehabilitation of Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack
hetman (or leader) whose desire for greater independence from Russia led
him to join Sweden’s Charles XII against Peter the Great in the
disastrous Battle of Poltava in 1709. The third was the reassessment of
three controversial leaders of Ukraine’s anti-Soviet national liberation
struggles during the twentieth century: Symon Petliura, Roman
Shukhevych, and Stepan Bandera. Petliura was a democratic socialist and
lifelong philo-Semite who happened to head a thoroughly ineffective
government in 1918 and 1919, at just the time that terrible pogroms
swept the country. Shukhevych and Bandera were both leaders of the
interwar Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a radical nationalist
movement—similar in structure, tactics, and ideology to the Algerian
National Liberation Front, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and
the Jewish Irgun—that first tried to carve out an independent Ukrainian
state with the help of Nazi Germany and then, after Berlin cracked down
in 1941, conducted a hopeless struggle against both the Germans and the
Soviets.
National democrats argued that Ukrainians could not have a history
and an identity if they did not look for their roots in the distant past
and come to terms with events and individuals demonized by Russian
imperial historiography and Soviet propaganda. Supporters of the Party
of Regions and the Communists rejected the whole package of proposed
changes, insisting that Mazepa, Petliura, Shukhevych, and Bandera were
unmitigated “enemies of the people,” “fascists,” and “traitors,” and
that the Holodomor was a generalized human tragedy. When the Ukrainian
parliament voted in November 2006 to declare the Holodomor genocide, the
votes split predictably: the national democrats voted for the motion,
while the Party of Regions and the Communists voted against it.
History and historical interpretation entered the contemporary
political dialogue. Yushchenko’s opponents understood that in attempting
to rewrite Soviet and Russian versions of Ukrainian history,
rehabilitate those who had traditionally been seen as proto-fascist, and
carve out a distinct Ukrainian identity rooted in a democratic and
pro-Western political culture, the president was effectively challenging
Soviet and Russian identity as well as Russian claims to political
hegemony over Ukraine. As the Kremlin’s unofficial Ukraine spokesman,
Konstantin Zatulin, noted with alarm in 2010, “A significant portion of
Ukraine’s citizens has accepted nationalist clichés. These people quite
sincerely believe that Ukraine should have a language, history, and
heroes that are necessarily separate from Russia’s.” Russian
policymakers were fully aware of the ideological and political
implications of what Yushchenko and the national democrats were up to.
Putin expressed alarm and the Russian Duma passed a resolution in 2006
denying that the famine was genocide. Russian historians were mobilized
to produce textbooks emphasizing Ukraine’s common history with Russia
and to deny the Holodomor’s Ukrainian specificity, and the Kremlin began
funneling substantial sums of money to its supporters and intelligence
operatives in Ukraine.
It made perfect sense for Yanukovich to delete the Holodomor from the
presidential Web site in his first act as president: it was a silent
gesture, signifying to both the Kremlin and his own countrymen that his
Ukraine, unlike Yushchenko’s, would adopt pro-Soviet and pro-Russian
stances. The next logical step was for Yanukovich to inform the world of
his intentions. While attending an April 26 meeting in Brussels of the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, he stated that
“it
would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of
genocide against one nation.”
One day later, at a press conference in
Strasbourg, he gave an authoritarian definition of democracy as “order.”
Once those discursive adjustments had been made, the door was open for
Yanukovich and Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev—who had pointedly
refused to attend the national seventy-fifth anniversary observances of
the Holodomor in 2008—to visit the Holodomor Memorial in Kiev on May 17.
They were now commemorating an act of God, not an intentional genocide.
The Yanukovich regime has also signaled that it regards genocide
discourse as a political act. The minister of education and science has
already announced that he intends to purge history textbooks of
“delirious hyperbolization” about the Holodomor. The minister of
humanitarian affairs has ominously suggested that the Institute of
Historical Memory may need to undergo official review. In turn, the
newly appointed director of the institute, a Communist sympathizer from
the Donbas, has publicly stated that the famine was the “the result of
difficult circumstances” and intends to promote “a national memory” that
“unites” Ukrainians. The head of Ukraine’s Security Service has closed
the secret police archives, while another leading official has stated
that “people know all they need to know.”
The Holodomor has thereby been
transformed into a touchstone of political loyalty and a code
for what is permissible in talking about the Yanukovich regime. To
maintain that the famine was genocide or an anti-Ukrainian crime is
effectively to engage in dissent and declare one’s political opposition
to Yanukovich. And in Yanukovich’s Ukraine, as in Putin’s Russia,
dissent is risky business.
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