On the Famine: Danile Bilak
Daniel Bilak is a lawyer in the firm Sergei Koziakov & Partners in Kyiv
It's been a very emotionally trying weekend here in Kyiv and throughout
Ukraine. This is really the first time that the country has marked the
events of 1932-33 on an appropriately national level. The President spoke
eloquently before the monument to the victims of the famine in front of the
Mykhailivsky Church of the Golden Domes. He spoke of the fact that this
catastrophic event in the history of the Ukrainian people was planned and
executed as a deliberate policy of Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian people as
an ethnic and national reality.
This was an important message, because Russia, as the legal successor to the
Soviet Union, does not recognize the famine as having been directed
specifically at Ukrainians. Russia maintians that the famine was not a
genocide (ie. directed at a particular race, ethnic group or nation), but an
aspect of Stalinist repression. Indeed, the present Communist Party of
Ukraine and the Party of the Regions (which forms Ukraine's government) also
reject this calamity as a genocide against their people. They refuse to vote
for a draft law put before the Verkhovna Rada by the President that would
recognize the famine as a genocide and would make denial of the famine a
punishable offence. Similar laws exist in various countries (including
Canada) with respect to the Holocaust.
On Saturday, in front of the Holodomor memorial, the President movingly and
emotionally recited some of the facts regarding Ukraine's holocaust, much of
which was detailed in a documentary film shown on national television
Saturday night. The following emerges:
- in one year, 1933, in villages throughout Soviet Ukraine, 17 Ukrainians
died every minute of the day - that's over 1000 people an hour, 25,000 per
day, almost 10 million during that year;
- that the average life span of a man during the period 1926 - 1937 was
calculated at 7 years and for a woman 11 years;
- that Ukraine in 1957 had 70% less population than it should have had based
on the rising birth rates in the country from 1900-1926;
- the census held in 1957 showed that Ukraine had lost one-quarter of its
population since the last published census held in 1926 (the results of the
1937 census were so awful that Stalin had them suppressed) ;
- that throughout the famine period of 1932-33, the Soviet Union recorded
massive grain exports.
The documentary showed shocking footage and described the horrors of the
famine through the testimony of survivors:
- the army was deployed to circle and cordon off villages and even whole
oblasts to prevent starving villagers from fleeing their homes. Those who
escaped were returned to face certain death;
- starving children were picked up off the street and carted off to special
homes and left to die;
- Soviet commissars went from house to house, first taking the peasants'
grain, then their animals, then their shovels, rakes, axes, and anything
else that they could use to feed themselves;
- people in the towns would drop dead in the middle of the street and at
the height of the famine, so many died that there weren't enough coffins to
bury people; the bodies were thrown into mass graves;
- in 1933 so many peasants were foraging for food and dying on the streets
of towns and cities like Kharkiv that the internal passport system (which
still exists and whose logic still baffles westerners)was designed in order
to ensure that villagers couldn't leave their villages and would die at
home;
- the commissars would try to catch people who had hidden food by using
tricks like arresting a child and since there was no food in the jails, they
would wait to see if the parents brought anything for the child to eat. If
they did, it meant that there was more to take from them. The parents were
then often shot or sent to labour camps;
- mothers forbid their children to go outdoors to protect them from
neighbours who, mad from hunger, would kidnap children to eat them.
This insanity took place only in Soviet Ukraine and in the predominantly
Ukrainian area of the Kuban in Soviet Russia bordering Ukraine. Although
there was a famine in the Volga region, in most of the neighbouring oblasts
of Russia and Byeolrussia (literally next door), the villagers were
relatively well fed. Many Russians were sympathetic to the plight of their
Ukrainian neighbours, but were prevented from delivering food by the Soviet
Army. One survivor, who was later interned in a Nazi concentration camp
(what this woman lived through!), said that the famine was much worse than
war. In war, a few of your neighbours die, she explained. In the famine
entire families and whole villages were wiped out. At least in the camps
they gave you a daily ration of stale bread, water, and a potato. The diary
of one village teacher described the transformation of her neighbours:
"starvation is slowly turning people into brutal, savage, dehumanized beings
capable of the worst crimes..."
There is finally in Ukraine an open discussion of what happened in 1932-33
and a rising appreciation of its affect on the Ukrainian psyche. In Soviet
times, the mere mention of a "famine in 1933" in Ukraine meant immediate
arrest and deportation to a labour camp in Siberia. The teacher whose words
are quoted above was sentenced to 10 years hard labour and 5 years internal
exile upon discovery of her diaries in 1945. Her words have been brought to
light by my friend Ihor Drizhchaniy, the head of Ukraine's Secuirty Service,
the SBU (the former KGB). He ordered over 5000 documents from that era
declassified and they are now on display in a special exhibition at
Ukrainskiy Dim, as well as on the SBU official web site.
Ihor is a true patriot and it is an honour for me to have him as my friend.
He has performed a tremendous service to the Ukrainian people. The materials
on display for everyone to read are as stunning as they are revolting. The
plans to exterminate Ukrainians are as clinical as anything the Nazis
documented regarding the Final Solution for the Jews. What emerges is that
Stalin feared the Bolsheviks were losing their control over Ukraine,
especially in the villages. Stalin realized that if the Bolsheviks lost
control in Ukraine, they would fall from power. Stalin feared both the
rising national identity among the peasants and the general populace (as a
result of the successful ukrainianization policies of the 1920's), as well
as Ukraine's rising population (which was growing as fast as China's at the
time). Ukraine's burgeoning national consciousness was already obstructing
Stalin's plans to create a new "Soviet Man" and the peasantry's rejection of
collectivization was beginning to erode Party discipline and Stalin's grip
on Ukraine. His plan was to rid the Party of these obstacles by destroying
the source of the obstruction, the Ukrainian village. By starving the
villages, Stalin would break the will of the Ukrainian nation and fill the
demographic hole by populating Ukraine's rich soil with Russians and other
ethnic groups from other parts of the Soviet Union. To a large extent,
Stalin succeeded. In the 1920's ethnic Russians made up only 7% of Ukraine's
population. By 1957, they made up over 20%.
The famine abated in late 1933 when Stalin felt that he had sufficiently
broken the spirit of the Ukrainian people and had reasserted Party control
over the countryside. He realized that he could not repopulate Ukraine
quickly enough to produce the food necessary to feed the rest of the Soviet
Union in the looming war in Europe. By the end of 1933, the collective farms
started giving out food to those peasants still able to work and most
Ukrainian villagers were starved into submitting to the collectivization
process. Stalin turned his attention to planning a reign of terror to
"cleanse" the whole of the Soviet Union of "counter-revolutionary" elements
in the Communist Party, which began in 1934, killing millions until the
onset of World War II.
In this horrific context, the Holodomor offers Ukrainians an opportunity to
discover common truths about themselves by asking what it was about being
"Ukrainian" that resulted in the perpetration of this heinous crime. The
Holodomor has attracted intense interest and generated serious dscussions
across the country. Scholarship on the subject is widely published and is
picked up in the popular press. The interest cuts across generations. It was
heartening to see large numbers of young families with small children
wandering the candle-lit squares in front of St. Sophia and St.
Mykhalivskiy. The whole nation marked the famine with a national moment of
silence following the President's address. People across the country put
candles in their windows to burn all night to mark the occasion. I was moved
to see young children carefully sheltering candles standing next to weeping
survivors of the famine, who pointed out where the candles should be set
before the Holodomor memorial.
A Hungarian friend of mine noted recently that the most remarkable thing
about the "Maidan" was that it was a peaceful revolution where the people
stood up to demand from their rulers respect for their dignity, and won.
They believed in the righteousness of their actions. That spirit has not
dissipated in the cynicism of the post-Maidan era. Perhaps the halo effect
of the Maidan and the facts of the Holodomor will stimulate Ukrainans to
come to terms with a common identity and their broader place in the world.
The article above has been reprinted from the UKL Ukraine List Newsletter of December 2006 with the kind permission of Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies The University of Ottawa
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