With the death, violence and terror all around us, why should Americans care about that horrible event? Even though the Holodomor took place almost a century ago, its lessons are important for understanding the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Lesson 1: In the fight with the Russian military and Russian-backed separatists, Ukraine not only defends its territory and sovereignty, but also its existence as a cultural entity and political concept
If Russia joins an alliance against ISIL or finds another way to exchange its cooperation for concessions regarding Ukraine, this would not result in political reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine but in a longer war, which would take more lives and result in more destruction and instability in Europe. The rift between Ukraine and Russia is much deeper and bloodier than their different attitudes toward the European Union.
Ukraine, unlike many in the West believe, did not happily join the Soviet family enchanted by the ideas of Marxism and Communism. It was captured and subjugated by Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and others.
In 1917, Ukrainian People`s Republic was established, first as an autonomous part of the Russian Republic and later as an independent entity. In 1919, it united with a recently established Western Ukrainian People`s Republic, which brought its borders closer to the borders of modern Ukraine.
A long and exhausting battle with the Bolsheviks followed. Even after Ukraine had become one of the republics of the Soviet Union (at that point only its eastern part), it was able to retain its cultural autonomy. The Holodomor of 1932-33 was a culmination of subduing Ukrainian resistance and destroying its national consciousness, which Stalin saw as a threat to his plans to create Soviet people and spread socialist systems around the world.
Ukrainian peasants, with a strong national identity and respect for private property rebelled. According to Ukrainian historians, through the 1930s about 1.2 million peasants took part in more than 4,000 mass protests. Armed with axes and pitchforks, they were rebelling against expropriation of their property and farms or “collectivization”. Successful, enterprising, hard-working farmers were robbed of everything they had and sent to frozen lands of Siberia with their whole families where many of them died. They were labeled “kulaks” by Soviet regime, the term used for rich peasants, but that came to encompass anyone except for poorest strata.
Just like in today`s Donbass, the power over life and death of their neighbors was given to the local marginalized elements. Despite hundreds of thousands sent to Siberia to die, resistance continued. Over half of all protests in the vast Soviet Empire happened on the territory of Ukraine.
Hunger became a weapon of the Soviet regime. “In 1932-1933, several million Ukrainians perished after being besieged by Soviet troops who confiscated not only bread but also anything edible from the Ukrainian households. People began to die from hunger. In June 1933 the death toll reached its climax of over a million a month,” says historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, Director of Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.
Because Holodomor and its consequences were hidden by the Soviet authorities, results of census were falsified and many deaths were not registered, its overall death toll is hard to calculate. Historians estimate it to fall somewhere between 3.3 and over 10 million perished from hunger and diseases caused by hunger.
There is a substantial body of research documenting that Holodomor was not due to poor harvest but a deliberate policy of exterminating the Ukrainian peasantry. Viatrovych points to three policies. Under the resolution on “protection of socialist property” people were sent to Siberia for as much as collecting a handful of grain left on the field after the entire harvest was collected. Blockades of Ukrainian villages prevented their starving residents from fleeing and finding salvation elsewhere. In November 1932, the Soviet authorities organized special teams of local police, security and members of Communist party to search and confiscate cattle and any food found in the households.
Children were the first to die. In some cases, parents killed some of their children to feed the rest. In many cases, whole families committed suicide. Dead bodies were littering the streets or buried in mass graves. Some villages had no survivors.
My own great-grand-mother Evdokia Kravchuk in 1932 was a 28-year-old mother of five. A well-educated daughter of the local official and a farmer, saw all of her parental family sent to Siberia as the “kulaks.” Her own two children starved to death and she found herself working as a slave (without money, papers or the right to travel) for a collective farm in Central Ukraine.
Holodomor is one of many acts of mass terror aimed at subduing Ukraine. There were mass repressions against the kulaks, starvations of 1921-23 and 1946-47, extermination of Ukrainian cultural elite in 1933-1937, as well as other individual and mass terror acts.
While the Holodomor and the current conflict in the Eastern Ukraine have a different nature and are driven by different forces, for many in Ukraine they are two events in a long chain of Russian aggressions aimed at destroying Ukraine as a political entity and stripping Ukrainians of their ethnic uniqueness.
“Many of us couldn`t understand why modern Russia defends old crimes of the Kremlin with such zeal, the crimes apparently committed by a different regime, – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said at the Ceremony of the commemorating of victims of Holodomor in Kyiv on November 30. – Now when Ukraine has been defending itself from Russian aggression for 21 months this answer is evident”. For the last more than 100 years, territory of the Russian Empire became larger or smaller, regimes changed but one thing remained constant, said Ukrainian President, “hatred toward Ukraine and unrestrained desire to wipe us, Ukrainians, out as a separate nation”. Holodomor, he believes, is “nothing else but a manifestation of centuries-long hybrid war that Russia wages against Ukraine”. Poroshenko expressed his belief that if Ukraine was able to defend its sovereignty in the early 20thcentury, Holodomor would have never happened.
Today’s events in Crimea and in the territories occupied by the Russian-backed separatists give little faith that, if Russia gets control over the rest of Ukraine, its policies would be much better than Stalin`s.
According to UN, official death toll from the military conflict topped 9.000. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch documented horrific tortures of Ukrainian POWs and the local population in the occupied territories. Ukrainians are put on trial in Russia where they, as Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov and Olexandr Kolchenko, get lengthy prison sentences. The Russian propaganda has whipped up its society into a state of hatred. Ukrainian culture is the first to be persecuted in the areas that fall under control of Russia. Speaking Ukrainian in the occupied areas of Donbass poses a mortal risk. According to the data of the NGO Free Crimea, the last Ukrainian-language school was closed in Crimea. Out of 3,500 Ukrainian-language classes only 40 remain.
Holodomor was the biggest loss in that centuries-long war. This time Ukrainians intend to win.
Lesson 2: Genocide is a long-term strategy
The International Commission of Jurists (1988) studied the evidence and established that Holodomor of 1932-33 was an act of genocide against Ukrainian nation. So did the Ukrainian parliament and the parliaments of 14 countries. Both chambers of the US Congress supported a resolution that recognized the Holodomor in Ukraine as an act of mass killing targeted against the Ukrainian nation.
Genocides not only allow achievement of the immediate political goals but also set the stage for the future. Residents of Donetsk and Luhansk areas, which saw heavy losses of Ukrainian population during the Holodomor, displayed the most pro-Russian attitudes in Ukraine. According to the poll released by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on March 10, 2014, 33% of Donetsk region residents favored an idea of Ukraine joining the Russian Federation, which is second only to Crimea (41%).
Extermination of Ukrainian population and heavy industrialization resulted in mass movement of ethnic Russians to the eastern and southern Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, in August 1933 an All-Resettlement Committee was established “in order to resettle collective farmers from Russia and Belarus to the Ukrainian villages depleted by the famine. By the end of 1933, over 100 thousand people were resettled”. Pro-Russian attitudes in modern Ukraine might as well be the result of replacing ethnic Ukrainian population with ethnic Russians.
The other consequence was that those Ukrainians who survived the Holodomor clearly saw that their ethnicity poses deathly risks. People were afraid to call themselves Ukrainians, speak their language and passed those attitudes on to their children. Stanford historian and a genocides researcher Norman Naimark points to the fact that Holodomor, which he believes had all signs of genocide, arrested development of Ukrainian national conscience in 30-50s. Only in 60s, he said, attempts were made to return status of Ukrainians as a separate nation within the Soviet Union.
Being Russian was safer and more prestigious. This attitude was pervasive. Even in 1992, when I was receiving my passport in Russia, a clerk wrote “Russian” in the graph “nationality” in my document. When I protested, saying that I am Ukrainian, she tried to convince me that she was doing this for my own good, so that I would have better chances in life.
Now ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars have been fleeing Crimea, as well as people of all nationalities many of whom with pro-Ukrainian, pro-Western attitudes are leaving the Donbas areas under the control of separatists. This also changes ethnic and ideological make-up of those areas and raises the same questions as the consequences of Holodomor: Do the people who stay or were relocated to those areas have legal and moral right to decide the fate of those regions?
Lesson 3: Inability to discuss difficult pages of history of the two nations, to admit crimes of ancestors leads to unresolvable conflicts
Even before the current war, Russians would become defensive and even angry when the issue of Holodomor is raised, especially in the context of genocide. You cannot put it on us because not only Ukrainians died, they say. A lot of Russians died, too.
Very few people who facilitated starving Ukrainian peasants are alive today. Most people`s ancestors had no direct involvement with it either. Why such an emotional reaction? If your ancestors were also victims of the cruelty of Soviet regime why not discuss, search for answers, condemn and cry together?
Instead the Russian government, which enjoys popular support, brands “Memorial,” an NGO dedicated to research and remembrance of victims of Communist repressions as a “foreign agent.” Stalin busts pop up around the country, his portraits are carried at government-approved demonstrations, and creeping rehabilitation of his policies is taking place in modern Russia. Today more than half of Russian citizens believe that Stalin played a positive role in history.
A ban basically on revisiting history of the WWII or the Great Patriotic War as it is called in Russia, went into effect in May 2014. The current policies of Russian authorities help to ensure that no honest historical discussions can take place, no lessons are learned, no wounds are healed, and thus any horror can be repeated.
The benefits of long, painful conversations about shared history can be seen in the experience of Ukraine and Poland. These two countries also have a long and bloody history. For the last 23 years, Ukrainian and Polish historians have been engaged in constant, active and productive dialogue about the most dramatic periods of their history. They participate in conferences and round tables, exchange archive documents and publish joint studies. As a result, painful memories become part of the history rather than continue to poison today`s relations between two neighbor countries who build together a shared European future.
In his book, former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko recollects his conversation with Vladimir Putin in 2008 about shared history and Ukrainian identity. Yushchenko described as he tried to convince Putin that Ukraine has its own past, its own heroes and its own view on the same events. Citing successful experience of Ukraine-Poland policy of reconciliation, he was offering to have similar discussions between Russian and Ukrainian historians. “Ultimately, he writes, Russia has to understand that Ukraine has no other claims but one: Evil should be called evil.” At that time Yushchenko thought that Putin heard him but all the events that followed proved that he did not. The chance of repairing relations between the two nations was lost.
Harvard historian Serhii Plokhii, who is originally from Ukraine, recalls that in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, any discussion between Russian and Ukrainian historians was extremely difficult. Since the beginning of 2000, he says, Ukrainian historians established working relations with some Russian historians, those who read in English and who were open for contacts with Ukraine and the West. However, while they had fruitful cooperation on the early modern and 19th century history it was still very difficult to have professional discussions on the topics related to the Soviet times, especially about Stalin`s repressions and Holodomor, Plokhii says.
There are many political, ideological and economic reasons behind the current hostilities between the two nations. However, if as intense and honest a conversation about the shared past with Russians, as Ukrainians had with Poles was possible, this war might have been averted.
In short, regardless of what Putin or his successors can offer to the world leaders in exchange for control over Ukraine, Ukrainians will not stop fighting. They have just too much at stake. Where foreign observers see a 22-month-long conflict with the death toll in the thousands, Ukrainians see centuries-long battle that already took the lives of millions.
This hostility brought the change in ethnic and ideological composition of the local population. Every decision about self-determination of those areas can`t be accepted without taking into considerations the reasons for the change. It is as relevant to the future of Donbas and Crimea as for the future of any region in Europe where a pro-Russian sentiment suddenly flares up.
Lastly, people see and perceive the world differently. No single conversation can change the future. While an open dialogue between Russia and Ukraine is unlikely now, it should resume immediately at all levels of society as soon as it becomes possible.
Tatiana Vorozhko is a host and a reporter for the Voice of America Ukrainian Service. This opinion is the author’s own and is independent of her employer.
