[aaus-list] Washington Post on the famine debate

[Alexandra Hrycak]

Aftermath of a Soviet Famine
Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others 
Died, Too

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 27, 2008; A14
The Washington Post

www.washingtonpost.com

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."