[aaus-list] Holodomor article by Peter Finn, Washington Post

[Jurij Dobczansky]

AFTERMATH OF A SOVIET FAMINE
Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians
Who Say Others Died, Too

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042602039.html

By Peter Finn, Washington Post Foreign Service
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C. Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page A14

MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes
over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by
one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which
left millions dead from starvation and related diseases.

Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians
call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide.

When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and
into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other
food before sealing off parts of the countryside. Without food and unable to
escape, millions perished.

Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, became "a
vast death camp."

"There is now a wealth of historical material detailing the specific
features of Stalin's forced collectivization and terror famine policies
against Ukraine," Yushchenko wrote in the Wall Street Journal late last
year.

"Other parts of the Soviet Union suffered terribly as well. But in the minds
of the Soviet leadership there was a dual purpose in persecuting and
starving the Ukrainian peasantry. It was part of a campaign to crush
Ukraine's national identity and its desire for self-determination."

There are no exact figures on how many died. Modern historians place the
number between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. Yushchenko and others have
said at least 10 million were killed.

But Russian politicians, historians and writers say Yushchenko and his
allies are attempting to turn a Soviet crime that also killed Russians,
Kazakhs and others into a uniquely Ukrainian trauma. They argue that the
famine was the awful but collateral consequence of ruthless agricultural
policies and the drive to industrialize, not a case of deliberate mass
murder.

"There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic
lines," the lower house of the Russian parliament said in a resolution
passed this month. "Its victims were millions of citizens of the Soviet
Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in
agricultural areas of the country."

Moreover, some Russians say, the push for the designation of genocide
has more to do with demonizing modern-day Russia in the West than
any desire for historical justice.

Since Yushchenko came to power in early 2005, the two countries have
repeatedly clashed over a host of issues, particularly his desire to
integrate Ukraine into Western institutions and away from Russia's orbit.

The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a front-page commentary in
the newspaper Izvestia this month, wrote that the "provocative cry about
'genocide' " took shape "inside spiteful, anti-Russian, chauvinistic minds."

"Still, defamation is easy to insinuate into Westerners' minds," he wrote.
"They have never understood our history: You can sell them any old fairy
tale, even one as mindless as this."

That broadside came a few days after President Bush, on a visit to Ukraine,
laid a wreath at a memorial to the victims of the famine. The United States
and several other Western countries have recognized the famine as genocide.

But historians remain divided over whether the famine meets the United
Nations definition of genocide, which defines it, in part, as the "intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group."

"Registry office statistics for 1933 show death rates in urban localities no
higher than average in contrast to the exorbitant death toll in the
countryside, not only in Ukraine but all over the Soviet Union," Andrei
Marchukov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History, wrote in an
article published by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. "People were
doomed not on the grounds of ethnicity but merely because they lived in
rural areas."

The issue has also divided Ukrainians, with Russian-speakers, who live
mainly in the eastern part of the country, dismissing the genocide charge as
grandstanding by Yushchenko. The president has also proposed a law that
would criminalize denial of Holodomor.

The pro-Russian party led by former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych
boycotted a parliamentary vote on a 2006 law recognizing the famine as an
act of genocide. His party has suggested using the word "tragedy" to
describe the famine.

"It happened on the territory of many countries," Yanukovych said. "Maybe
in Ukraine it had a greater effect, as Ukraine is a more agricultural
country."

Some Ukrainian historians, such as Stanislav Kulchitsky, an authority on the
famine who works at the Institute of History in Kiev, counter that while the
famine enveloped many regions of the Soviet Union, the "smashing blow,"
as he said Stalin called it, fell on Ukraine and Kuban, a region heavily
populated with Ukrainians.

"The mechanism was different in Ukraine," Kulchitsky said in a telephone
interview. He cited the sealing off of the Ukrainian countryside in
particular, saying there were no such efforts elsewhere.

Kulchitsky said the famine should be understood as part of a larger effort
to wipe out Ukrainian culture and nationalism that began in the 1920s. "It
was not industrialization or modernization," he said. "It was cold-blooded
killing by hunger."