[return to index] [Ukranian Genocide Journal: Holodomor 1932-1933] ========================================================
2. JAMES MACE AND HIS MISSION

By Oxana Pachlowska, University of Rome La Sapienza
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
The Day Weekly Digest #6, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 20, 2007

It is awful when you have to say about a close friend whose loss has left
lifelong pain, "It is a good thing that he left this world without seeing
this."

That is what I told myself on Nov. 28, 2006, after the Verkhovna Rada
passed the law on the Holodomor. Yes, they passed the law but in a way
that stigmatized both individual MPs and the entire nation.

Mace departed from this life without witnessing this disgrace. He died
before Ukraine's ruling political force acknowledged itself-through its de
facto refusal to vote-as the legal successor to the authors of the Great
Terror, the culprits who tried to destroy Ukraine.

The voting clarified Mace's idea that Ukrainian society is post-genocidal.
What did he mean by this designation? He had in mind precisely a
post-genocidal society rather than a post-colonial one, as some researchers
maintain. After all, post-colonial societies typically had civilized
colonizers.

Post-colonial India has embarked on a democratic course and is turning into
an economic colossus. Even the Republic of South Africa, despite the former
system of apartheid, is freeing itself from the shackles of colonialism and
gaining economic weight. Civilized parent states had the courage to
relinquish their colonies at an opportune time and treat them as equals.

However, this is not the case with Ukraine. Unlike civilized parent states,
Ukraine's colonizer never thought of relinquishing its conquered
territories. On the contrary, the more it agonizes, the deeper it digs its
claws into countries, regions, and entire geopolitical areas. The claws
being "fraternal," this kind of colonialism is not likely soon to become
post-colonialism.

Perhaps this is why the visible colonial heritage in Ukraine is "diffused"
in the post-genocidal heritage, often invisible but nevertheless constantly
present, and not only in society's psychology but also in the stimuli,
complexes, and nightmares of its psyche.

Mace left us a tragic thought that will take us a long time to reflect on.
For years to come, its purport will remain a painful and hidden nerve of our
history.

The paradigmatic approach requires that the Holodomor be considered together
with two other cases of 20th-century genocide within the span of Christian
civilization-the Armenian and Jewish genocides. In addition to the countless
political and economic causes of these two genocides, there were also
cultural factors. It was not simply a matter of one nation destroying
another.

Rather, these were different ways of destroying Christian civilization. In
the case of the Armenian genocide, Muslim fundamentalism was the destructive
mechanism. In the case of the Holocaust, an atheistic monster that had
renounced God destroyed a nation that was the historical and cultural cradle
of Christian civilization and on whose territory the Christian God was born.

The Holodomor was similar in this respect: the anti-Christian world
destroyed the world of Christianity. The newly-created political Moloch
fought against God. Ruining and profaning temples, it destroyed a
civilization that was the last Christian stronghold on the already
immeasurable expanse of nihilistic Bolshevik barbarism.

Until this day the wound inflicted by the Armenian and Jewish genocides on
these nations remains incurable. These tragedies became the new starting
point for their history.

It is generally accepted that the Holocaust as genocide cannot be compared
to any other genocide. Is this correct? I don't know. I say frankly: I don't
know. Perhaps those who insist on the Holocaust's uniqueness have a point.
But equally unique is the Holodomor, even though this genocide was also
conducted in the same eschatological vein of Endlosung, or Final Solution.

The only difference was that the Holocaust was an act by killers with
unconcealed intentions. Germans were true to their meticulousness even
here-they had developed both theoretical and practical foundations for this
genocide.

In contrast to this, the Holodomor was more of a hallucinatory project
accompanied by rhetoric about the friendship of fraternal nations and other
clichés produced by the ideological schizophrenia of Russian communism.

In the former case it was all about the Aryan race; in the latter, about the
Soviet people as the final product of this criminal social engineering. In
fact, there is no difference here: in both cases all those who did not
conform to the corresponding paradigm were destroyed.

These two national catastrophes are clearly unique but from two different
perspectives. To the Jewish people the tragedy of the Holocaust became the
unifying energy needed for self-understanding, strengthening their identity,
and for a new perception of their place and significance in the world.

The Holocaust also became an overwhelming moral shakeup for the whole
world and, above all, for Europe. In the postwar period, Europe developed
the concept of genocide and posed the question of its own collective
responsibility for this crime. For the first time a crime against one people
was interpreted as a crime against the entire human race.

This idea became the foundation of a new ethos for both people and
20th-century historical science. The scope of the problem is not restricted
to Hitler and Nazism, which became the epitome of extreme inhumanity. This
conversion of the human being into a beast was condoned by all those who
connived at what was taking place and abetted the crime by means of their
consent, cooperation, and silence.

The world was forced to admit that one nation's tragedy should not be
restricted to its own history. Rather, only humanity's collective memory of
the tragedy can guarantee that it will never again be repeated.

This is the origin of Europe's atonement for wronging the Jewish
people-moral atonement that has spanned decades. Germany's path to a
democratic state began with the recognition of the crime it had committed,
its detailed recording, and constant, incessant, and dramatic atonement,
both individual and collective.

This is the kind of atonement that pervades every day and every minute-
German television channels regularly air programs on the history and
analysis of the Holocaust. Europe is also atoning financially. Jews were
finally given an opportunity to have their own state. For decades Germany
has been paying astronomical sums to the descendants of the six million
murdered Jews.

Of course, awareness of the Holocaust was an indicator that postwar Europe
had reached democratic maturity. But this understanding was achieved
because the Jewish community was able to organize and structure its protest,
self-protection, and, finally, its demand for atonement.

This is what happens when a nation has self-respect. This nation's drama
becomes the moral standard for the conscience of the entire human race.

For the Jews the tragedy of the Holocaust became a protective wall of their
memory and a symbol of courage, endurance, indestructibility, and
immortality. I remember the November 2005 demonstration in Rome in
protest against the threats of Iran's president to destroy Israel. After all
the official speeches in front of Iran's embassy, in the glow of streetlights
and the rustle of plane trees, an orchestra began playing Jewish tunes.

A pair of young Jewish sweethearts suddenly began dancing to the tune of
"Hava Nagila." Among the spellbound people and in front of journalists'
cameras, they danced with such passion and obliviousness that it was clear:
they were a thousand years old- and this was just the beginning.

In Europe awareness of the Holocaust became a moral standard of democracy
and a mandatory pass to the civilized world. At a Ukrainian studies
conference held in Italy, a well-known Slavist from Israel said that the
attitude of post-Soviet Ukraine to Jews will be its passport to the circle
of civilized countries.

It is hard to disagree with this statement. But then an interesting question
arises: to what world can Ukrainians' attitude to their own nation and
tragedies be a passport? It is probably a passport to the anti-world or, in
simple terms, to that part of the jungle where no passports are needed and
where history begins in the morning and ends in the evening. This is why it
is simply redundant.

This jungle is not as distant as one may think-government palaces are thick
with jungles. If the huge numbers of published (finally!) and reprinted
documentary evidence cannot help our MPs, or "people's deputies" as they
are called, to recognize the deaths of millions of our compatriots as
genocide (and thus, a crime against humanity), then they do not consider

Ukrainian society, which includes their own electorate, part of humanity.

Unlike the Holocaust, the Holodomor was one of the main factors that led to
Ukraine's loss of identity and rendered society's consolidation impossible.
Postwar Europe wrote the history of its catastrophes. Once again the postwar
USSR falsified history.

The Holodomor was one of the top-secret topics in this history. Therefore,
having lost its past for the umpteenth time, Ukraine turned out to be
incapable of implementing its design for the future.

Hitler sought to wipe out the Jews precisely as a nation because they were
scattered all over Europe, without a state or territory of their own. Stalin
also wanted to annihilate Ukrainians as a nation but this nation had its own
country and land. Hitler wanted to destroy the Jewish culture, but the
Biblical people had a culture that was spread all over the world and knew
how to preserve it.

In contrast to this, both past and contemporary Ukrainian culture was
contained in Ukraine. Therefore, parallel to the Holodomor, Stalin destroyed
the temples and books of the past as well as Ukraine's cultural, artistic,
and scholarly elite of the time.

The main idea of the Holodomor was to turn Ukraine into a non-Ukrainian
republic, and with time-into an anti-Ukrainian entity. As we can see,
Stalin's project succeeded. Accomplished only halfway, it nonetheless

succeeded. Stalin changed the genetic code of our nation.

It was not by accident that Ukraine was the arena of these events-Ukraine
was the second most rebellious part of the Russian empire (surpassed only by
Poland) and the most recalcitrant one in the Soviet empire. The Moloch of
the Stalinist empire suppressed this resistance in an unprecedented sadistic
and cynical way.

It did not kill directly, as was the case during the Holocaust, when a
person was at least able to oppose the killers or die with dignity. Russia
killed Ukraine by turning people into vegetative beings, reducing them to an
animal-like existence, and making them incapable of resistance, opposition,
and moral choice.

Vassily Grossman's novel Forever Flowing describes the wailing of people in
Ukrainian villages. People could not walk; they were only able to crawl to
the nearest train station, where this was possible, hoping for some merciful
hand to throw a piece of bread to them. The windows in Odesa-Kyiv trains
were then boarded up.

In keeping with the law "on five ears of grain," women and mothers were
shot right in the fields if they were caught picking a few ears of grain for
their dying children. And all this took place in the "breadbasket of
Europe."

It was the Holodomor that exposed the Russian world's total contempt for
the human being as such, for fundamental human feelings, and for any moral
dimension of human existence. Also uncovered was its pathological hatred
of so-called fraternal Ukraine.

Together with people's lives, the Holodomor took away the feeling of home
and the sense and culture of work. But above all, it destroyed love for the
land that was transformed from a life-giving resource into a boundless grave
devouring both the dead and the living, stirred by their groans, and
devouring new lives over and over again.

Instead of human feelings, society was overcome with fear-total, abject fear
of being oneself, speaking one's mother tongue, and remembering one's
dead.

It was the fear of existing. Since Stalinist times Ukrainian society has
been paralyzed by the fear of existing.

This led to the abyss of non-presence, non-work, and non-morals. This also
caused the greediness of some and the willingness for a half- starved
existence and constant poverty of others. As long as they leave us alone, as
long as they don't torment us. What freedom? What democracy? " We will
endure." Having endured the Holocaust, we can endure anything in this
world.

This is also where the rejection of our own culture stems from. It has
remained in our genome: the sentence for being part of this culture is
death.

Fear is the only and total legacy that the System left to Ukrainian society.
This humiliating heritage is being passed down from generation to
generation. It erodes language, dignity, and memory in people. It erodes
the human being in people.

This type of society is easy to rule. This society can get only one kind of
government for itself-the government of thieves, cynics, and plain
criminals.

The Holodomor destroyed not only a century-long supply of the country's
demographic and economic resources but also the Ukrainian rural cosmos
in its cultural, linguistic, and philosophical continuity and, most
importantly, its thousand-year-long ethos of Ukraine's relationship with the
earth.

The Ukrainian peasant would not put a loaf of bread on the table upside
down-you were not allowed to offend bread because it was given by God.
The one who managed to wipe from the face of the earth this rural world that
tended its God-given land was then able to lay waste to this land with the
help of Chornobyl and bury it under tons of radioactive waste.

Midas, the king of death: whatever he touches turns into death.

Who else besides the descendants of this collective Barbarian would be able
to loot the country the way they have done today? Who would be able to force
millions of people abroad in search of some humiliating way to earn some
money for the same piece of bread that was confiscated in the 1930s?

Who would be able to let grain rot in ports and then throw it into the Black
Sea? Who would be able to yield to Russia the security and independence of
the country-piece by piece, on a regular basis? Who would laugh in the face
of his own electorate?

One state official was recently quoted by The Ukrainian Truth on Feb. 9,
2007, as saying in his garbled mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, "Why don't
I hear applause, I wonder?...Somehow I don't see joy... on your faces."

Today we see this post-genocidal anti-Ukraine on every corner, once again
mainly in the ruling circles. This anti-Ukraine is robbing the state in
broad daylight. It is humiliating society, trampling on its graves, and
continuing the policy of Russification.

It calls intelligentsia a "narrow stratum" - a glaring Freudian slip, an
acknowledgement of one's own post- Soviet descent: where were intellectuals
a stratum doomed to destruction if not during the orgy of the
lumpenproletariat called the USSR?

This anti- Ukraine will do its utmost to prevent the state from taking a
single step toward Europe and keep it in the gray zone of geopolitical
non-existence- the only way to have a few more years for its final
despoilment.

Here is a picture of post-genocidal society in one isolated region- Kharkiv
oblast. When all of two MPs from the Party of Regions voted for the Law on
the Holodomor, Yevhen Kushnariov, one of the party's leaders, in an
interview with Radio Liberty magnanimously promised that the party would not
discipline the MPs. "For now this will have no consequences," he said (Dec.
9, 2006, www.pravda.com.ua).

In November 2006 in Kharkiv oblast, which was happy about Russian obtaining
the status of "regional" language, not one local government official
attended the official ceremony to commemorate the Holodomor victims. The
proceedings took place at the Ukrainian-Polish Memorial and near the Cross
to the Holodomor Victims. But 30,000 people came to Kushnariov's funeral.

Fact file: during three months of 1933, over 600,000 people died in Kharkiv
oblast. The total mortality count reached 2,000,000-one-third of all
peasants in the region. As can be seen from archival photographs, peasants
died on the city's central street. Every morning their bodies were dumped
into suburban ravines. Every evening the streets were covered with new
corpses.

Kharkiv was then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, so historians call the
city in that period "the capital of despair."

These things occurred during the Postyshev terror. Some streets in Kharkiv
are still named after the bosses of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who
carried out the genocide. Naturally, the city has a Postyshev Prospekt.

It was in Kharkiv, in 1933, that Mykola Khvylovy shot himself. He understood
that he was doomed and that Ukraine was destined for this bloody massacre.
At the cost of his own life Khvylovy sent a warning. By this one pistol shot
he put a period on the final page of the brilliant and tragic Executed
Renaissance.

I can add one more thing: it is good that Mace did not live to see the day
when a member of the Communist cadre was appointed director of Ukraine's
historical archives. He would feel hurt. As a person who loved Ukraine so
much, he would feel ashamed of the country.

However, as a scholar he would receive full satisfaction: his uncanny thesis
about our post-genocidal society has found complete confirmation.

To be a post-genocidal society means to have no memory. It means to have
one's memory in the off position. A society that has been destroyed this way
is a lobotomized society. The part of society that managed to withstand the
lobotomy does not possess sufficient psychological power and physical
strength to push aside this necrotic mass of stifled brain that is pressing
down and choking the living brain with its dead weight.

Mace was a scholar. He worked with facts and figures. He gave them rational
explanations. But I have always had the feeling that he came to this culture
because he had been called by the dead. Probably because they still have not
been buried-for they have not been mourned, and because they have been
forgotten.

He heard their voices. He heard them from afar, from a distant country and a
different continent. He learned their language. While despicable servants of
the System, barely able to stick a few insincere Ukrainian words into their
defective mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, were sneering at his accent, Jim
rolled his American "r" in the language of the dead who had called him, and
he talked with them freely.

Mace was opposed to any form of contempt for man. This was the algorithm
of his intellectual opposition to any manifestations of totalitarianism. In
this he was a true son of the finest democratic America that is built on the
spiritual heritage of Washington and Lincoln.

He had such an acute and passionate sense of justice and honesty that it
seemed to have burned him from the inside. It was this feeling that brought
him to Ukraine-a country that became, possibly like no other country in the
world, a victim of permanent injustice and unfair treatment.

In many countries, involvement in the Holocaust entails criminal
responsibility. France is planning to make denial of the Armenian genocide a
crime. One of the categorical conditions for Turkey's accession to the EU is
its acknowledgement of this genocide.

What we hear from the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine even now is "the so-
called genocide" and "Mace, the Holodomor dreamer."

Kyiv and other cities of Ukraine are choked by a noose of streets bearing
the names of its persecutors. Monuments to persecutors stand in all
Ukrainian cities.

Therefore, it is difficult to hope that a country like this will be reckoned
with in the world. Russia understands only the language of
force-contemporary official Ukraine can only speak to Russia from the
position of weakness and meekness. Europe understands the language of
self-respect. For today's official Ukraine this is a profoundly foreign word
that it does not know how to translate into its political doublespeak.

Official Ukraine, as it is today, i.e., lobotomized, will hardly find money
in the state budget for a Holodomor Memorial or for the Institute of
National Memory. It is erecting monuments to falsifiers of the elections
rather than to scholars who are restoring its history from the abyss of
oblivion.

This kind of Ukraine finds millions of dollars for idiotic pre-election
advertising and none for the publication of Mace's works. This is all the
more deplorable when we recall that Mace did not write exclusively about
the Holodomor-he researched the history of 20th-century Ukraine.

To publish his works means to make public a whole array of skeletons in the
Russian-Ukrainian political closet. In 1983 Mace published a book in the US
on the destruction of national communism in Ukraine. He wrote merciless
articles on the political nature of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Some of his results appear prophetic today. For example, Mace wrote about
the drama of Ukrainian socialism. "For better or worse, in 20th-century
Ukraine socialism was the most influential ideology." This is the opening
statement in a chapter of his book entitled Ukrainian Statehood in the 20th
Century (published in 1996).

Whereas the beginnings of Ukrainian socialism are associated with such
prominent figures as Mykhailo Drahomanov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, in its
present stage it features names one feels ashamed even to pronounce in this
series.

One can only say, "Jim, unfortunately, the most influential ideology in
Ukraine was indeed socialism!" The idealistic socialism of its first
adherent was a significant obstacle in the construction of the Ukrainian
state.

Further degeneration of this socialism and its fall from the level of the
European tradition to negotiations in the flea market of post-Soviet
politics have proved the political and moral fiasco of this ideology in the
history of Ukrainian statehood.

Mace's paper at the Kharkiv congress of the International Association of
Ukrainian Studies in 1996 was entitled "The Sociogenetic Legacy of the
Genocide and Totalitarianism in Ukraine and Ways to Overcome It."

Mace was fully aware that the genocide-produced pathological deviations in
Ukraine were proportional to the eschatological dimensions of the genocide
itself. They are difficult to eradicate because genocide derives its name
from its undermining effect on the foundation of a nation's gene pool.

Mace opened up before Ukrainian society the book of its Apocalypse and
read this Black Book aloud. But society did not really hear him because the
areas of its collective brain that are responsible for self- preservation,
self-protection, and survival had been neutralized and lobotomized.

On Nov. 26, as you light a candle to commemorate the tens of millions of
Ukrainians who were killed only because they had grown crops from time
immemorial, just look out of your window. You will see candles lit here and
there. Otherwise-the shimmer of TV screens blasting local or Russian pop
music.

It is difficult to say whether society will remain in this vegetative state.
Together with his fellow Ukrainian historians, Mace did everything possible
to revive the nerve tissue of the Ukrainian nation's brain-in order to make
it send signals, to make memory work, and to help society restore its will
to live.

Whether the national brain will indeed start working is not under Mace's
control. It is up to Ukrainian society-and Russian society, for that matter.
Russia became the self-appointed heir of the gold and diamond funds of the
USSR. It will become a civilized state only when it has recognized that it
is also the heir of the bloody fund of the USSR.

Many offensive remarks about Mace have been voiced from the rostrum of the
post-Soviet Verkhovna Rada. Looking at parliament we mostly see crowds of
vicious political corpses with glassy eyes.

Jim, however, is strangely alive. Perhaps he was privy to some kind of
mysticism, as were his ancient Indian ancestors. Maybe he knew the mystery
of overcoming death because everything that he occupied himself with was
tragedy. But he was rarely seen without a smile.

Even when he was resentful, with good reason, he exuded a powerful energy of
good will and inexplicable optimism that he alone possessed. Jim seemed to
believe, despite all indications to the contrary, that common sense would
prevail and man would overcome human-generated absurdities and phantoms.

I believe that all of us who in some way collaborated with Jim will always
measure our history by his work, his love for Ukraine, and his intellectual
integrity. Most importantly, we will refer to his deep conviction that
Ukraine is a nation of astonishing vitality and that one day it will get
over its post-genocidal legacy and become a conscious, noble, and orderly
European country-a country respected in the world, in particular because it
has self-respect.

After all, the Orange Revolution proved that this European Ukraine is
already nascent. Despite hardships, it is coming into being or, more
exactly, beginning to revive.

When I asked Jim to meet one of my Italian doctoral students, who was
researching Khvylovy, he said, "Oh, sure thing! A friend of Khvylovy is a
friend of mine!" - as if Khvylovy had not shot himself in 1933 but lived
somewhere near Jim, across the street, and from time to time they would get
together for a cup of coffee.

Now Jim is definitely drinking coffee with Khvylovy.

Some day we may be able to see Mace carved in stone on a Kyiv street.
Lively and passionate as he was, he would take it in good stride because he
does not need a monument. What was more important to him was a
monument that he himself worked on-a monument to millions of innocent
Ukrainians who were tortured to death.

Perhaps a monument to Mace is necessary above all for Ukraine. It would be
an important landmark indicating that the country is starting to awaken from
its post-genocidal state, which means that it is beginning to distinguish
destroyers from those whose love for Ukraine cost them their lives.

For our country this would be a small step but one that would bring it
closer to Europe. And this step would be taken thanks to the American,
James E. Mace. -30-
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LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/177534/
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4. THE FUTURE ACCORDING TO JAMES MACE
What a Ukrainian of Native American Indian descent has done for Ukraine

The Day Weekly Digest #6, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 20, 2007

On Feb. 18 Professor James Mace, the noted US researcher of the 1932-33
Holodomor in Ukraine, would have turned 55. He defended his doctoral
dissertation "Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National
Communism in Soviet Ukraine in 1918-1993" at the University of Michigan.

He taught at the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, and Illinois.
He was executive director of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, under
the aegis of the US Congress and the President of the United States.

The result of this selfless work was three volumes of transcripts of oral
testimonies by eyewitnesses and the commission's "Report to Congress."
The commission's findings state that the famine of 1932-33 was manmade,
deliberately engineered by the CC CPSU; most importantly, that it was an
act of genocide.

James Mace moved to Ukraine in 1993 and married a Ukrainian woman. He
worked for The Day from 1997 to 2004. As a rule, he marked his birthday at
the editorial office. On these occasions people brought flowers and funny
little gifts, but this did not interfere with the newspaper's work.

We realized that we were dealing with an extraordinary personality. Above
all he was our friend and comrade in arms in the difficult field of
journalism, a cheerful, open-hearted, friendly, and critical-minded man.

We always carefully prepared for his birthday, just as we did this time. We
offer our readers a collection of comments and reflections by students of
Ostroh Academy. Articles by Oksana Pachlowska, lecturer at La Sapienza
Rome University, and the writer Natalia Dziubenko-Mace, Jim's widow, will
appear in upcoming issues of The Day.

A few words about memory and gratitude are in order. We cannot remain
silent. On Nov. 13, 2006, the Verkhovna Rada held Government Day hearings
during which communist MP Petro Tsybenko, addressing pensioners'
problems, said that the government has no money for veterans but has found
money to erect a monument to James Mace.

We remind readers that our state has done little to perpetuate his memory.
It has not done the main thing: his books remain unpublished. In fact, if
not for the book about Mace that was published with funds raised by
journalists of The Day, his works would have never reached readers.

There are no more copies left of "Day and Eternity of James Mace." Has the
state arranged to issue another edition? We know nothing about such an
initiative. Therefore, Comrade Tsybenko's fears are overstated.

Also, setting the dead against each other is indecorous, to put it mildly.
Did these veterans' problems emerge just now or did they appear when
the communists came and stayed in power for 70 years?

Of course, their problems must be solved, just as it is necessary to
perpetuate the memory of all those who were tortured to death and otherwise
destroyed, just as it is necessary to express gratitude to an individual who
did so much for Ukraine. Fortunately, our society understands this. What
Ukrainian students have to say on the subject is proof of this.

The future is with James Mace.

[1] Daria SHVAIA, third-year student (Culturological Studies):

For some reason we often hear that the world is too small. We seem to
lack space or air, or maybe it's simply a feeling of isolation and
loneliness.

Yet few have considered the possibility that we are too distant from each
other and that this world is not so small.

Man feels like a grain of sand in a boundless desert of parallel and
adjacent dimensions. Small wonder that some people find themselves
lost "between two worlds."

Fortunately, sometimes it is the other way around. James Mace was one of
those who did not remain "Between Two Worlds" (the title of one of his
articles for The Day) but found a place in each of them.

I am amazed at what a single individual can accomplish for a nation,
especially when this nation is not his own - not geographically, mentally,
or culturally. Only the word "feat" can describe James Mace's activities in
Ukraine and beyond its borders, his constant care for this land.

Mace raised the matter of the Holodomor of 1932-33 on an international
level even when Ukraine did not recognize that horrific event as an act of
genocide.

In studying this problem, he did not confine himself to the boundaries of
dry and banal theorizing but tried to do his best to ensure that the
international community and the Ukrainian people (however paradoxical
this may sound) would disperse all the myths concerning those pages of
our history. Without a doubt he succeeded to a certain degree.

I am not sure that our nation perceived Mace as he deserved (in fact, he
realized the reason: the post-Soviet and post-Holodomor syndrome is still
affecting our mentality).

Yet I am sure that at least several students fortunate enough to have
attended his classes, several ordinary citizens who read his articles, and
some of those who simply leafed through the book "Day and Eternity of
James Mace" from The Day's Library Series will not leave his cause
unfinished. After all, we cannot live "between two worlds" at home.

[2] Iryna NAUMETS, third-year student (Documentation and Information):

In Ukrainian culture James Mace is a figure that prompts us Ukrainians to
revise our love of Ukraine.

The question that immediately springs to one's mind is: "How could a
Cherokee Indian from the US have developed such an interest in Ukrainian
history, such passionate concern for the cruel historical battles fought
over the Holodomor?" He was destined to unravel a tight knot of modern
history at a time when Ukrainians had almost forgotten about it.

In his published doctoral dissertation Mace clearly explained the failure of
national-patriotic ideas and the process of Ukrainization by their
incompatibility with the communist ideology.

In 1982, when he addressed an international conference on the Holocaust
and genocide in Tel Aviv, Mace was the first Western researcher to call
the manmade famine in Ukraine genocide.

James was frequently surprised by the fact that not all Ukrainians wanted to
know their history, that some of them were avoiding it, hiding from it. Why?
He said that history would catch up with them anyway. There is no denying
the truth of this statement because the future of a people is built on the
foundations of its history.

Remembering one's history means remembering one's parentage. James Mace,
like no one else, succeeded in reminding people about this. While at the
head of a US congressional commission set up to investigate the causes of
the Holodomor, he searched through the archives, accumulating historical
data.

Without a doubt his collaboration with Robert Conquest at the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute in 1983 resulted in what may be described as an
encyclopedia of facts on those heinous periods in Ukrainian history. Levko
Lukianenko, Chairman of the Association of Researchers of the Holodomors,
said that Mace had 200 hours of tapes containing Holodomor eyewitness
accounts.

Of course, while reconstructing history, Mace was able to feel that he was a
hero in it; he succeeded in returning to those events and living through
them wholeheartedly. This means that he was forced to think in Ukrainian, to
grow to love the Ukrainian people, share his destiny with that nation, share
a part of himself with it.

James did this. Through his work and desire to restore the Ukrainian
historical heritage he became an example of an American with a Ukrainian
heart.

     Farewell, beloved person, please forgive us!
     I fly to you like a tear...
     Ukraine! Light an eternal candle
     For widows and orphans,
     Light a candle!

These lines from a poem written by his widow Natalia Dziubenko-Mace were
carved on her husband's gravestone. They best convey our awareness that
Ukraine lost not only an historian, journalist, and university professor,
but above all one of its faithful and loving sons.

[3] Yulia SKORODA, second-year student (Documentation and Information):

Not long ago I obtained a copy of "Day and Eternity of James Mace" from
The Day's Library Series. I cannot say that I just happened to get one. I
had heard that sometime in February they would be marking the 55th birthday

of a man who had performed the feat of a lifetime for the sake of Ukraine,

a man who had no Ukrainian roots.

James Mace - the name kept nagging at my mind. I had heard something about
him. I was ashamed. I decided to fill in my intellectual gap. It is as
interesting to discover people as it is to discover countries and cities.

Every man is a new world, a planet in the universe. Mace was a journalist
and historian, a planet that had materialized once in the United States and
then shed its light on Ukraine.

This was a strange phenomenon, something that has yet to be comprehended;
Mace, a foreigner, becoming so deeply concerned for the destiny of Ukraine
and its lasting problems, including the Holodomor of 1932-33. Was he
interested in it as a historian? He was, to an extent.

The next question: "Was the pursuit of professional interests worth leaving
one's homeland?" I think that James would have said that Ukraine was his
homeland, and done so much more sincerely than many people who were
born and grew up here. He worked and lived for Ukraine until his dying day.

I remember the first Saturday of November 2005: the square in front of St.
Michael's Cathedral, where dozens, hundreds, and thousands of candles
were burning. It is a dazzling sight, especially when you come across it
unexpectedly. I wanted to visit Kyiv and walk up Andriivsky uzviz. My
younger sister was burning with countless other plans.

It was the Day of Remembrance for the Holodomor Victims in Ukraine.
Honestly, I couldn't remember anything about the event, but I promise that
now I know and will never forget. Now I know that James Mace personally
helped enter this date in our calendar, so that no one can every again deny
that the Holodomor took place in Ukraine.

[4] Oksana PRASIUK, fourth-year student (Documentation and Information):

James Mace was not Ukrainian by background, but after encountering
Ukraine's unparalleled tragedy for the first time, he could not remain
indifferent.

He sincerely shared the misfortunes of our long-suffering land, the tragedy
of the Ukrainian nation, the scope of which was unprecedented in world

history.

Holodomor: even now many of us whisper rather than say this word out loud,
as though they are ashamed of describing the greatest tragedy to befall our
people or scared to sound politically incorrect or insufficiently loyal.

James Mace was among the first to investigate the Great Famine of Ukraine in
1932-33, who spoke out loud about it as an act of genocide against the
Ukrainian people, aimed at exterminating this nation. He regarded this great
tragedy of the Ukrainian people as the root of all our current economic,
political, and social woes.

Decades later, the sufferings of millions of fathers, mothers, and children
who starved to death are a painful echo in our people's minds. Mace also
heard this echo. He placed on the altar of truth his academic career and
cloudless life in the US; he stayed in Ukraine because he felt himself a
part of its tragedy.

He found like-minded people who joined his efforts, with whom he shared his
ideas, whom he loved. This gave him the strength to struggle on; now he had
a podium from which to address the younger Ukrainian generation and teach
them to respect their people's past while combating the ghosts emerging from
past realities.

Making his way through obstacles of indifference, misunderstanding, and
bureaucracy, Mace continued to refute the myths about the Holodomor in a
simple and consistent manner. He revealed the truth about those horrible
times to Ukraine and the rest of the world. But was he heard at the time?
Can we heed him now?

[5] Iryna PIVEN, second-year student, Faculty of Romance and

Germanic Languages:

Writing about a man whose works have found such a vivid response in my
heart is a strange and unusual experience. I read them after his death. It
is
strange to write about a man who made someone else's tragedy his own,
who worked to reach his goal in such a selfless, devoted manner.

It is strange to realize that his objective lay in exposing all the facts,
hitherto kept secret by the authorities, about crimes that were perpetrated
not against his people, not against his country.

But no, James Mace, of all foreigners, fully deserves the right to be called
a Ukrainian. He became one through his research and keen sense of justice
that brought him so close to sharing the pain suffered by the Ukrainian
people; that made him actually feel that pain.

As an honest intellectual and impassioned journalist, Mace started
researching the history of Stalin's repressions and the Holodomor in 1981,
and from that time he dedicated the rest of his life to this quest. He wrote
that Ukraine is a country that experienced one of the greatest tragedies in
the history of civilization.

That was why he was assigned the post of executive director of the US
Commission on the Ukraine Famine and entrusted with drawing up a
report to the US Congress in 1986.

It turned out to be a bombshell, an eye-opener for the civilized world on
the scope of Ukraine's tragedy. After that James continued working on the
subject, unearthing fresh evidence, coming up with new, devastating facts.
Besides the questions of the genocide and the Holocaust, Mace
enthusiastically campaigned for the rights of the Ukrainian language, which
he spoke while he lived in Ukraine.

He always said that so long as Ukrainian remained a second-rate language
for Ukrainians, this nation would never be united.

James Mace was often asked why he, a typical American, as Mace called
himself, called his research into the genocide of the Ukrainian people his
vocation. Was it only because genocide touched a nerve in him, an American
Indian, so that he worried and cared so much about Ukraine's future? A

fter reading a number of articles and other publications by this journalist,
one becomes keenly aware of his spectacular personality, his ability to swim
against the current. Even when the rest of the world remained silent, Mace
did not. He said, "American citizens demanded research and this was my
destiny."

Mace spent too many years on his research work, so Ukraine became the
greater part of his life. "Your dead have chosen me," he wrote. This phrase
is still very much on my mind. It explains his vocation and increases my
respect for him.

I am very sorry that I was not familiar with Mace's creative legacy earlier.
He was a man who determined his own fate, a man who kept silent about
nothing, who concealed nothing.

His works cannot leave any reader indifferent, the more so because this
man assigned first place in his life to a foreign country; he accomplished a
feat and dedicated it to Ukraine.

[6] Natalia ANTONIUK, third-year student (Faculty of Law):

Yevhen Sverstiuk once said: "That James Mace is unrivaled is obvious; he
is a godsend to Ukraine. But we will realize all this only after he is
gone." His words are extremely significant and perhaps most relevant today.

Words of truth voiced several years ago are being comprehended only now.
This is the way it always is: we appreciate what we had only after losing it
forever.

For Mace this meant simply the beginning of a large and enduring project,
something they wanted to sink into oblivion. What he did for the Ukrainian
people - the nation, in his own words - is invaluable.

Who was James Mace? Perhaps for many Ukrainians he was simply a person
who became the subject of active discussions only in the last two years.
There are even plans to erect a monument to commemorate the 55th

anniversary of his birth in Kyiv.

Or perhaps he was the proverbial rich American uncle, who invested in new
projects in our state. Sad but true: we know little or nothing about James
Mace. This is a problem not only for our government but us.

This prominent scholar deserves our gratitude for being among the first to
raise the issue of the 1930s Holodomor. He was not afraid to show the causes
of the Ukrainian Holocaust; he mustered the civic courage to declare to the
rest of the world that we Ukrainians are not a terra incognita, not a
Third-World country, not a godforsaken people.

James Mace was the first to challenge the universally accepted German
concept of Ukrainians as the Naturvolk - natural, less civilized people. He
wanted us to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide and could not
understand why we were not willing to do so.

He was always alarmed by the fact that for some inexplicable reason the
Soviet-engineered famine was no longer troubling Ukraine; that it was
regarded as a matter of course. All the works that Mace gathered to convince
the West (not Ukraine!) can be described as a huge archive of oral Ukrainian
history. We know that there was nearly no documented confirmations of a
famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.

This brilliant individual can be venerated only for the fact that he was one
of a handful of foreigners working in Ukraine who dared declare himself a
patriot of Ukraine. He did so when red flags were still fluttering over all
official buildings.

His ethnic background should be defined as "American Indian Ukrainian."
It must have been the martial spirit inherited from his forefathers that
spurred him into action, trying to prove the truth to one and all.

He wanted to preserve at least our nation and not allow it to vanish the way
his own people were dying out. James Mace determined his life priorities; he
decided to investigate the Holodomor the Ukrainian way. He considered
himself a true son of Ukraine. He said he couldn't study that tragedy
through half-measures, just as he couldn't be 50 percent Ukrainian.

Today we can only say thank you to this man. Perhaps the long-suffering law
recognizing the famine of the 1930s as an act of genocide would not have
been passed if we hadn't had James Mace.

I have only one question. It is rooted in the following lines of a
well-known song: "Would he want to be a Hero of Ukraine/ In a country
that has no use for heroes?"

[7] Maksym KARPOVETS, third-year student (Culturological Studies):

I think James Mace is a unique figure in his understanding of contemporary
world problems and Ukraine's place in them. Reading his concepts, articles,
and simply his reflections on what was happening in the world at the time,
you get a better understanding of things you never considered before or
which you simply ignored.

You will agree that we are a selfish nation: everyone thinks about himself,
lives within his four walls, and does not pay attention to what is happening
around him.

Mace destroys this shell, trying to show how every individual is vulnerable,
suffering, and feeble; that only a human being can help another human being,
not otherwise. This is the essence of Mace's humanism.

In fact, James Mace was an example of his own humanism. It is hard to
overestimate what he did for Ukraine and its future.

I am still unable to grasp the strength of the spirit and dedication of a
man who risked his academic career and prestige for the sake of his struggle
to make the world understand the problems of our state and raise them to the
international level; problems that we Ukrainians were hiding from others.

Mace deserves not only gratitude and respect from sentient citizens in our
country but understanding, something that he talked about so often, which
just as often was ignored.

What have I personally gained by reading Mace and becoming aware of the
scope of what this man accomplished? Above all I am awestruck by his
dedication, his belief that what he was doing was right. After all, faith,
such a usual thing one would think, is rejected by the postmodern
information society.

It is as though faith is totally unnecessary; as though all that matters is
strict determinism and methodology. This is unfortunate.

Mace always believed in himself and in what he was doing. And, in my
opinion, this could only sow grains of hope in the hearts of journalists,
politicians, thinkers, and ordinary, average citizens.

We must do everything so that Mace's thesis "We saved everything we
could, but sometimes it is difficult for us to understand for whom" acquires
a different character, so that we will always understand for whom and
against whom we are trying to save this difficult but so very beautiful world.
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LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/177535/
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[return to index] [Ukranian Genocide Journal: Holodomor 1932-1933] ========================================================
5. THANK YOU, GREAT HUMANIST - AND FORGIVE US
James Mace's birthday is approaching, we remember him
& try to understand the phenomenon of his personality.

COMMENTARY: Viktor Kostiuk, Head of the Journalism Department
Zaporizhia National University, Zaporizhia, Ukraine
The Day Weekly Digest #6, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 20, 2007

With James Mace's birthday approaching, we remember him and try to
understand the phenomenon of his personality.

Tens and hundreds of our compatriots are known to have proved their creative
potential outside their native land - "Our blossoms are all over the world,"
as the saying goes - asserting the existence of the country of Ukraine. But
what made a successful American scholar move to a young and little known
country?

The scholarly activity of the young Oklahoman began from a tragedy, or more
precisely, from the realization of a tragedy that had befallen a distant
nation.

Eyewitness testimonies, archival materials, and mass media publications on
the Ukrainian Holodomor helped him understand its nature and consequences
and gave him grounds to declare to the entire world that genocide had been
committed against the Ukrainian people.

Mace moved to Kyiv in the early 1990s. What bound him to Ukraine was a
pain in his huge heart rather than business interests. In 1994 he wrote in
the newspaper "Literaturna Ukraina," "Today, when I hear scholastic debates
on whether Ukraine is building a socialist or capitalist society, I wish it
would be the society of liberated people." In his opinion, a liberated
person is an informed individual who is free of fear.

His knowledge of Ukraine's realities led him to the following conclusions:
"A country with the most fertile land in the world, immense mineral
resources, and with a better- educated labor force than the US has become a
laughing-stock. The economy is unable to maintain such a large government.

The country keeps sinking into debt and is wasting loans intended for
investment. Its environmental conditions are the worst in Europe. The
population is shrinking; people are losing hope for better days. At the end
of the 20th century Ukraine is the same 'sick man of Europe' as the Ottoman
Empire was a hundred years ago."

Having deeply immersed himself into the past and present of our country,
Mace the researcher asserts, "Ukraine is a post-genocidal society."

After researching the Holodomor for many years, Mace began to consider
himself a Ukrainian. One is led to wonder: if a person who is so deeply
concerned about our problems and so sincerely interested in the good of our
people is Ukrainian, what percentage of Ukrainianness do our politicians,
business people, journalists, artists, and each one of us have?

But the heart of the great humanist could not bear the post-genocidal
manifestations of our everyday life. The Ukrainian land that was so dear to
his heart became his final refuge.

A worthy way to honor the 55th anniversary of James Mace's birth would be
to acknowledgment his achievements. In the next days much will be said and
written about his life, research, and compassionate publications.

I believe that what we need to say about Mace is not words of praise but
gratitude. Thank you, great humanist, for stirring our society, which made
our parliament finally recognize, not without a lot of huffing and puffing,
the Holodomor of 1932-33 as genocide.

Forgive us, James, for transferring power into the hands of people who break
publicly made promises, who despise the state language and the things our
nation holds sacred, who disregard freedom of press, and who impersonate a
political opposition while playing soccer or tennis together.

My students and I will refer again and again to your publications because
they shape social optimism, teach us critical thinking, and encourage people
to be humane.

For the second year in a row, journalism majors at Zaporizhia National
University are using James Mace's "A Tale of Two Journalists" in their
classes. For them this is "an active way of contemplating the past, present,
and future" (Larysa Ivshyna).

Below are extracts from papers written by this year's freshmen students.

[1] Without a doubt James Mace may be called a true Ukrainian and our
national hero. The kind of openness and honesty that he had about the
Genocide and Holodomor of 1932-33 is not found in any history textbook,
and this is truly hard to believe. Unfortunately, Maces' knightly and
scholarly courage did not find acceptance either in the US or Ukraine.

But we are happy that today this person is acknowledged in our country as a
prominent scholar. James Mace was a true journalist and a real man, who was
not afraid of making the truth known to people. This is what journalists
should be. We need to look up to him and strive to be as honest as he was. -
Natalia PERELETA

[2] It is very unfortunate that James Mace's name does not ring a bell with
most Ukrainians. I did not know anything about him until I enrolled in our
university.

He was an American but decided to throw in his lot with a country that at
first was foreign to him and later became his true Fatherland. It was his
love for our country and people that made him tell the truth with no fear of
consequences. - Natalia BUHAR

[3] Reading the biographies of such people as James Mace, you think,
"There he is, a hero of our time." He is worthy of being called a real man.
It is hard to imagine that in times of discord and feuds there was a man who
was not indifferent to our people's lot.

His Tale is a postulate of human dignity and journalistic honesty. It
demonstrates the everlasting confrontation of truth and evil. I am taking my
first steps in journalism, but I can say that Mace is an example on which
the spiritual development of future journalists must be based. -

Yevhen DORONIN

[4] Journalists often like to think of themselves as fearless advocates of
society's right to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth. The Pulitzer Prize was established in order to honor those who
follow this principle.

But what do we do with journalists like Walter Duranty, i.e., those who
conceal the truth and openly despise any conceivable journalistic ideals?
The answer is obvious: shame, contempt, etc.

Just like Gareth Jones, one of the characters of his story, James Mace
always had the courage of his convictions in expressing his views on
Ukrainian history and ethics. The Holodomor was a terror for the whole
nation and a murky period in the 20th century.

Even Western nations have acknowledged this. Holodomor denial is the
most immoral of all crimes. Isn't it time to cleanse our consciousness?
Isn't this an opportune moment for establishing the truth? - Maria MELNYK

[5] James Mace is one of the few people who demonstrated the true paradigm
of the journalistic profession. With considerable skill and using the
examples of Duranty and Jones, he managed to show the fleeting glory of
Duranty wearing the laurels of a lie, and the "everlasting failure" of Jones
wearing the laurels of truth.

Some may say this is a paradox of existence, but consider: when a person
with a serious illness deliberately infects others, that is a crime. When a
deceitful journalist deliberately infects society with the "disinformation
virus," doesn't it make sense to sound the alarm?

Sooner or later, lies will out, so a young journalist should learn from
Duranty's mistakes in order not to tremble at death's door in fear of
eternal damnation. It is regrettable that journalists do not take an oath
like doctors do. Maybe then they would understand the scope of their
responsibility. - Halyna YATSENKO

[6] James Mace's journalistic legacy is simply awe-inspiring. It clearly
reflects the author's deep knowledge of Ukrainian culture and history. The
reader is favorably impressed by the zeal with which the author comes to the
defense of justice and truth. The breadth and depth of his thinking as well
as the simplicity of exposition make Mace's publications accessible to all
readers.

He devoted many years of his life to researching the history of Ukraine, a
country that was not his native land. I believe that every journalist,
especially a budding one, needs to read A Tale of Two Journalists.

This is a case where a future professional has to learn from real- life
examples, to understand and be aware of every aspect of journalism, not
just its positive sides.

I believe that "A Tale of Two Journalists" helps one appreciate the immense
importance of the journalistic profession. In journalism, as in any other
public sphere, there will always be the dilemma of choosing between two
different ways to achieve a goal-the principled, honest way or the
unscrupulous, slippery one.

I believe that every budding journalist needs to read this story and make
his or her own choice - whether to live in harmony with fame, which is
sometimes sullied, or with one's own conscience. - Yana POLSKA

[7] Of course, not every leading journalist has read this story. But this
does not mean that the problems it describes have no relevance today. In
his story the author not only talks about ethics in journalism or its
absence, but also discusses facts from Ukrainian history that were kept

secret for a long time.

Much has been said and written about the Holodomor, but how much is there
that we still don't know? Yes, you can conceal official data and figures.

But what do you do with millions of murdered people? How is it possible to
conceal the names of those who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the
truth?

James Mace's publications are thus not simply collections of an observer's
comments but an opportunity for Ukrainian society to look at its present in
the light of the past. - Kateryna SHYIAN

        MACE'S INDIAN BLOOD BELONGS TO THE SAME
                          GROUP AS UKRAINIAN BLOOD
[1] By Mykhailyna KOTSIUBYNSKA, literary critic

"For me the name and image of James Mace are one of the purest and most
moving phenomena of the human race that I have ever come across. I was
fortunate to know people like that - Vasyl Stus, the Svitlychnys - Ivan and
Nadia - Alla Horska, and others.

"Ukraine called to Mace from across the sea and from a different continent,
and he answered the summons. He said, "I was called by your dead." But the
living also called him.

"He accepted their sufferings and hopes as his own, learned their language,
and did his utmost to make the global historical tragedy of the Holodomor
known to the international community. He became a kind of eyewitness of the
Holodomor at the trial of history, and he opposed ignoramuses and enemies
that are still there even now.

"He left prosperous America and came to live in unstable and unpredictable
Ukraine. He did not idealize our country. He was deeply moved by all its
problems, and he never referred to it with the arrogant phrase "this
country" because it was already his country. He worked to make it more
humane."

"After learning of Mace's American Indian descent, I felt that he became
even closer to me. I have always had a special feeling for the romanticism
of the American aboriginals and was interested in this original culture.

"In the 1960s I became acquainted with the works of Pauline Johnson, a
Canadian writer and a vivid personality. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and
she wrote about Indians.

"Translating her works into Ukrainian, I was able to draw closer to the
fascinating world and noble heroism of Indian legends. In her dignified
personality and creative work I saw some kinship with her contemporary,
Lesia Ukrainka.

"They even died the same year, each of an incurable illness. So it has
always seemed to me that Mace's Indian blood belongs to the same group as
Ukrainian blood."

"The dirty smear campaign aimed at blackening James Mace's name will have
a boomerang effect on its instigators because it testifies, above all, to
the troglodytic level of their consciousness. To Mace the love and tribute of
all those who cherish Ukraine will be an eternal protection and a guarantee
of remembrance."
              AT THE PRICE OF HIS OWN LIFE HE SHOWED
                     HOW TO LOVE ONE'S OWN PEOPLE
[2] By Valerii STEPANKOV, professor, Kamianets-Podilsky University

"To my great regret, I did not have an opportunity to talk or even meet with
Professor James Mace. Therefore, I cannot share my personal recollections of
this remarkably conscientious and courageous man. As a scholar, I knew about
his significant body of research on the Holodomor, that terrible tragedy of
the Ukrainian nation.

"His articles alone (primarily in "The Day"), which were later published as
the book "Day and Eternity of James Mace," struck me as open and sincere,
showing his unconcealed feelings for Ukraine and respect for its past, as
well as his honesty and fervent determination to make the truth of this national
tragedy known to the intellectual and political elite of today's Ukraine.

"Equally striking was the nagging pain in his heart caused by the callous
indifference of most government officials to the history of the people whose
interests they were supposed to advocate and defend.

"In this way my imagination began to outline the image of a person whose
actions, on the one hand, increasingly commanded respect and, on the other,
left me wondering about the inner motives behind them."

"I could not understand what made a foreigner and well-known scholar, who
could freely enjoy all the comforts of a democratic society in his native
country, come to work in Ukraine, which many of our people dreamed of
leaving in search of a better life.

"More than that, he fought our bureaucracy, paying dearly to break through
the wall of our indifference, if not contempt, for our national memory,
self-identity, and self-respect in order to bring forth the citizen in each
one of us.

"He sounded the tocsin of consciousness to make those who still had one wake
up from the lethargic sleep of apathy toward their own nation and help them
comprehend the scope of the 1932-33 genocide, and learn the lessons needed
to overcome its consequences.

"I searched for an answer to the question: why did James Mace take our
tragedy closer to his heart than most of us Ukrainians do? I found the
answer in the fact that he was a descendant of an Indian tribe that had
virtually disappeared from the face of the earth.

"Therefore, an understanding of this kind of tragedy was in his blood.
When he was studying the Ukrainian Holodomor, he was terrified by its
scope.

"The Ukrainian tragedy turned out to be so close to the tragedy of his own
people that he transferred his love to Ukraine (as a mother does after
losing her children) and with all his strength sought to keep it from going
down the same path as the one taken by his tribe.

"He became a more aware Ukrainian than most of us are, and at the price of
his own life showed us how to love one's own people and defend its dignity.

"I want to believe that the time will come when, having learned to treat
itself as a historical entity and to respect itself and its dignity, the
Ukrainian nation will consider James Mace one of its finest sons."
THE MAN WHO BROKE THROUGH THE WALL OF SILENCE
[3] Anatolii DIMAROV, writer
"A man who burned his heart in the fires of love for Ukraine. A man whose
voice was heard throughout the world. A man who did more than all the
parliaments of the world together.

"A man who became a plenipotentiary representative of the victims of the
Holodomor, an unprecedented genocide that claimed millions of lives. It was
engineered to destroy an entire people whose only fault was that it bore the
name of the Ukrainian nation and stubbornly lived on instead of vanishing;
whose very existence sent the bloody executioner into fits of violent rage.

"A man who broke through the dead wall of silence that was painstakingly
erected around the horrible event, which nearly wiped an entire nation off
the face of the earth.

"A man whose heart was stirred day and night by the ashes of our brothers,
sisters, and parents murdered by starvation.

"This man was James Mace, an American citizen who became a Ukrainian. He
came to knock on the door of our sleeping conscience and memory and make
himself heard. He gave his whole life to Ukraine.

"He did not simply do everything possible to have the US Congress
acknowledge the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33 as genocide, so that other
parliaments would follow suit.

"Mace tore himself away from a comfortable life in a wealthy country and
came to Ukraine, a country steeped in penury, in order to awaken our anti-
national parliament in which the communists opposed any reference to the
Holodomor, to say nothing of its recognition as genocide.

"Could we expect anything else from the heirs of those thugs who tore away
the last potato from a hungry child's mouth only to crush it under their
dirty boots? They swept peasants' households clean of every last grain and
buried people alive because they did not have the patience to wait until
they starved to death.

"Even today the bloody executioner of Ukraine who started the genocide is
dearer to them than their own fathers. Even today they carry Stalin's
portraits, pressing them gently to their empty hearts at their wicked
rallies.

"Now they begin to defame the late James Mace and smear his name with
mud-a name that is holy to every conscious Ukrainian.

"Those are corrupt people without honor or conscience, made insane by their
fury at Ukraine-a country that has just risen from its knees and is freeing
itself from the colonial yoke that for three torturous centuries rubbed its
neck sore and made it bleed.

"But they will not succeed in spitting on our Mace. Mace lives! Mace is not
answerable to death or decay. He is knocking at the door of our hearts and
our memory."
         EVEN CURSES BECOME SIGNS OF RECOGNITION
[4] By Stanislav KULCHYTSKY, professor, deputy director of the

Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

"I was acquainted with James Mace for two decades, but for the first five
years we knew each other only from our publications. At first there was a
distance between us, which was determined by the nature of our upbringing
and fundamentally different life experience. I not only felt this reserve
but studied it, analyzing the worldview of people who were formed on the
other side of the Iron Curtain.

"Each representative of this group with whom I was in frequent and long-term
contact has left a trace in my heart: Professor Bohdan Osadchuk from Berlin,
Professor Roman Serbyn from Montreal, the Canadian historian Orest Subtelny,
who is known to everyone here, and James Mace. Without a doubt, Mace's
influence was especially strong-not only because of our frequent meetings
but also because of his intellectual level.

"In the second phase of our acquaintance we reached a common understanding
of the social order in which the terror by famine was possible. He made me
pay attention to the national aspects of the Holodomor, whereas I insisted
on the importance of studying the socioeconomic aspects of the tragedy.

"It is clear now that we also need to study the all- Union famine of 1932-33
as a socioeconomic phenomenon because the January 1933 food expropriation
campaign in Ukraine was made possible only by this famine.

"James Mace called me a friend and colleague, but actually we became friends
only once we began to agree on professional matters. He may have been the
first to feel that we were drawing closer to each other because he was very
open with people.

"The people who knew Mace well have recently witnessed his entry into the
pantheon of national memory as one of the most prominent figures of
Ukrainian history at the turn of the last two centuries of Ukrainian
history.

"After his untimely death Mace begins to receive that which our society did
not give him while he was alive. Even curses heaped upon his head from the
rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada and in communist newspapers become signs
of recognition.

"The Day began publishing the third series of my articles that were written
in the last two years. This series is devoted to a reappraisal of Stalin's
terror by famine and is entitled "The Holodomor of 1932-33 as Genocide:

Gaps in the Evidentiary Basis."

"In these articles I show that the young American researcher, James Mace,
was the first postwar scholar who understood that the Stalinist terror in
Ukraine, including terror by famine, did not target people of a certain
ethnic origin or occupation.

"Rather its objective was to destroy the citizens of the Ukrainian state
that came into being after the disintegration of the Russian empire and

survived its demise in the form of a Soviet state.

"I affirm that Mace formulated this idea long before he became the executive
director of the US Congress Commission on the Ukrainian Holodomor.

"At the international conference on the Holocaust held in Tel Aviv in 1982
he was the first to call the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 genocide and
formulated the main objective of Stalin's terror by famine: to destroy the
Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social organism.

"The same formulation appears in his paper that he presented in 1983 in
Montreal at the first international conference on the Ukrainian famine of
1932-33.

"Mace's formulation is clearly subsumed under the legal concepts contained
in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide adopted on Dec. 9, 1948.

"In the remaining time before the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor we must
sound the alarm as much as possible to convince the international community,
and above all the Russians, that our position is well-grounded and sincere.

"I am certain that this can be done. I am also certain that James Mace's
scholarly legacy will make this task easier if it reaches broad segments of
the Ukrainian and international communities.

"I will not mention all of Mace's work - if it is ever published, it will
take up five or six volumes. I will dwell here only on the most important
thing: the testimonies of Holodomor eyewitnesses.

"In the summer of 1990 I published a review in the large-circulation
bilingual journal Under the Banner of Communism, entitled "How Did It
Happen? Reading the Documents Produced by the US Congress
Commission on the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33."

"The three-volume edition of oral testimonies was still not published at the
time, so I used a computer printout that Mace brought me during his first
visit to Ukraine.

"The subsequent 17 years witnessed a steady increase in the sociopolitical
and academic value of this collection of testimonies, which was published in
the original language (90 percent were in Ukrainian).

"Perhaps we could have surpassed the compilers in the method of processing
testimonies, even though I have grave doubts about this when I read the
books published in Ukraine.

The three-volume edition was prepared according to the strict canons of oral
history, which was a new trend in historical source studies at the time.
These are now classic canons, but our scholars still have not mastered them
properly.

"But this is not the problem. The eyewitnesses of the famine were questioned
by Mace's assistants in the mid-1980s. After more than a quarter of a
century, how many long- lived eyewitnesses with wonderful memories can
today's researchers expect to find?

THREE VOLUME EDITION NEEDS TO BE REPRINTED
"In the mass media and at various official meetings held in connection with
the 60th and 70th anniversaries of the Holodomor I insisted, sadly in vain,
that the three-volume edition of testimonies needs to be reprinted because
it was published in 1990 by the US government printing house in Washington
in a minuscule number of copies. Let us hope that this problem can be
resolved.

"After all, it is not the dead who need the truth about the Holodomor. We,
and our children, need it as part of our national memory."
WE ARE GRATEFUL TO THE DAY FOR ITS HARD WORK
[5] By Andrii MATSIIEVSKY, director of School no. 2, city of

Haivoron, Kirovohrad oblast

"Our staff is deeply and sincerely grateful to James Mace, who as an
American, for many years raised the question of the Ukrainian Holodomor
like no one else in the world and wrote hundreds of articles and books.

"He continued his work at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, enduring unjustified
rebukes, mainly from communists who pointed to his origin and tried to
tell him where he should go.

"American that he was, he was also a great Ukrainian. The descendants of
those 10 million Ukrainians who died during the Bolshevik-engineered
Holodomor are grateful to him.

"We are also grateful to "The Day" for its hard work - the publication of
the book "Day and Eternity of James Mace."

"We are fascinated by how James Mace conducted his research in the US.
This was his responsibility in the US Congress Commission on the Ukrainian
Holodomor.

"For decades he endured the cavils of those who were unwilling to speak the
truth. Among them were many politicians, primarily in Russia and Ukraine,
and communists in Canada, a country with the largest Ukrainian diaspora.

"James Mace began his research on the Ukrainian Holodomor in 1981, when no
party documents had been published yet on this tragedy. Ukrainian Americans
voiced their demand for this kind of research.

"Mace spoke about himself in the words of Martin Luther, "Here I stand; I
cannot do otherwise." Thanks to Mace, the world learned about the genocide
against the Ukrainian people.

"He became a great friend, advocate, and defender of Ukraine. Future
generations will certainly be thankful to him for his work. We bow our heads
to the memory of James Mace, who departed from this life so early."
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LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/177520/

      KULCHYTSKY AND UKRAINE LAGGING BEHIND
Research activities of Kulchytsky and Mace have very clear chronological
boundaries. The former focused on the Ukrainian history between WWI and
WWII.

The latter's focus looks narrower from the chronological point of view - the
emergence and death of national communism in Ukraine in the 20s - early 30s
and the Great Famine of 1932-1933. However, for a good quarter of the
century Mace was a diligent student of Ukrainian history and civilization.

Their professional careers also showed some divergence. After his graduation
from the Odesa Mechnykov university department of history and move over
to live in Kyiv, Kulchytsky took his postgraduate course, working also as a
researcher at the Ukraine's Academy of Sciences Institute of Economics.

"Economic history is my only focus in science - I haven't done anything else
in my life," he said. While at the Institute of Economics he was deeply
involved with the industrialization of the USSR. His interest in this topic
grew when he started to work at the Institute of History.

Later on, when the Ukrainian historian tackles the Great Famine of
1932-1933, the American researcher will engage in polemics with his
Ukrainian colleague. In his articles (they had never met face-to-face),
James Mace criticized Kulchytsky for concentrating too much on the
economy. Kulchytsky responded by saying the economy has always
been and will always be a major approach.

Being a self-critical and sensible person, Kulchytsky had to admit finally,
saying, "When I wrote my first book on the Famine titled 'The Price of a
Great Turning Point', I looked at many things but couldn't get their true
meaning."

Mace read the book, commenting that it has an "exaggerated economic
edge." Kulchytsky's book was published by Politizdat publishers in 1991,
a short time before Ukraine proclaimed its independence.

For his part, untangling knotty puzzles of Ukraine's modern history, Mace
concentrated on the national issue.

In his doctoral dissertation "Communism and the Dilemmas of National
Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine in 1918-1993" defended
in the University of Michigan in 1981 and then published by the Harvard
University Press, Mace explained the reasons for the collapse of national
patriotic ideas and of the process of Ukranianization by their
incompatibility with the communist ideology.

"For me, this view was absolutely strange, same as everything connected
with national communism, the Communist party and the system of power,"
Kulchytsky wrote. "At the time, I focused on the economic crisis per se. It
provoked the developments which led to the 1933 Holodomor. Without the
economic approach, it is impossible to study the Holodomor. I didn't realize
at the time that the economic approach alone was not sufficient."

The book, regarded by Kulchytsky as a watershed in his research work,
contains a definition of genocide. "I used the word in its direct meaning -
the extermination of the people. For me it was a synonym of the
Holodomor. I didn't give it any legal meaning.

Now it has acquired an international legal sense. With time, digging into
the nature of Soviet totalitarianism, I became aware of its true meaning,"
he said.

Existing in the conditions of a liberal totalitarian regime, Soviet Ukraine
lagged years behind on the realization of its greatest national tragedy,
even more so with the recognition of the Famine as genocide. The almost
10-year delay coupled with the pressure of the communist regime and impact
of former stereotypes explains the situation Kulchytsky found himself in.

For his part, James Mace was the first among Western scholars to describe
the manmade famine in Ukraine as genocide back in 1982, addressing an
international forum on the Holocaust in Tel-Aviv.

"The aim of the Holodomor, as far as we understand it, was to annihilate
the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and public organism, to reduce
Ukrainians to the status described by Germans as naturvolk (or primeval
people - Auth.)," Kulchytsky noted.

Incidentally, this important work of Mace was first published in my
translation and 25 years later it came out in the Ukrainian historical
journal, #2, 2007 thanks to personal cooperation from Stanislav Kulchytsky.

Kulchytsky and Mace began to study the issue of Holodomor under
different circumstances and for different reasons. The Ukrainian scholar
operated on the orders from the authorities, something that totally
changed his life.

When in 1986, due to the potent campaign of the American diaspora, the
congressional and presidential commission to investigate the Famine in
Ukraine was set up, the Communist party nomenklatura in Kyiv viewed it
as a preparation for a large-scale subversive act in the run up to the 70th
anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine.

Kulchytsky recalls that, alongside with other researchers, he had been
summoned to the Communist party central committee and instructed to
work on the so-called anti-famine commission. "The commission, in fact,
produced negligible results," he recalls, "but examination of archives
exposing the ruthless crime of the Stalin regime, had changed my views
in the course of one year."

Based on his research, Kulchytsky prepared a report to the central
committee in the fall of 1987 which was shelved for a long time. "The
nomenklatura spurned my report, and my vision of the famine was just
my personal opinion."

James Mace took up the issue of Holodomor in early 80s on the heels of
his doctoral dissertation on the national communism. At that time, Roman
Szporluk, Professor of History of Central and Eastern Europe at the
University of Michigan and Mace's tutor, introduced him to Ukrainian
immigrants who had survived the Holodomor.

Mace, an American Indian, was so much emotionally overwhelmed by their
recounts that he felt the pains of Ukrainian as his own. "Your dead have
called me," he said after some time.

Jointly with Robert Conquest, James Mace headed the Harvard project on
Holodomor. In 1986-1990, Mace was named executive director of the
congressional and presidential commission to investigate the Famine in
Ukraine.
                       GLASNOST AND THE RED SEAL
Stanislav Kulchytsky first heard about the work of the commission and Dr.
Mace in 1987 when the commission report was received by the Academy of
Sciences Institute of History via Ukraine's foreign ministry. Both scholars
had known about each other since mid 80s and kept track of their activities
by their publications.

They met for the first time when Dr Mace came to Kyiv in early '90s. Mace
wasted no time about coming to the Institute of History. He handed over to
Kulchytsky three volumes of evidence of famine survivors prepared for
publication by the US commission. The Ukrainian scholar published his
review of the documentary materials in "Under the Banner of Leninism"
journal, now Polityka i Chas.

Interestingly, Kulchytsky could lay his hands on the 1988 report published
by a state publishing house in Washington only in 1991.At the time, he was
in charge of writing off documents from the Communist party central
committee archive, and the US report was a kind of a reward for his dull
work. According to Kulchytsky, the commission report was received by
the central committee office on May 9, 1988.

As all the archives were closely guarded by the ministry of state security,
small wonder he couldn't see it earlier. The situation has not changed
despite the declared policy of Glasnost and Perestroika.

Even Kulchytsky, a leading specialist in a state-run research institution,
who was invited to present his expert opinion in front of the central
committee political board members, had only restricted access to archives
with anti-Soviet documents, viewed as extra dangerous stuff by communist
ideologists.
               ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC
Stanislav Kulchytsky was eager to get acquainted with the unique 500-page
document, the bulk of which was written by James Mace. Especially with
the chapter titled "Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on Ukraine" which
reviewed the articles on the Holodomor published in early 1988 by the
diaspora-targeted News from Ukraine (its complete version came out in
print under the title "On the situation in the Ukrainian agriculture (1931-
1933)" in the Ukrainian-language issue of this paper - "Visti z Ukrayiny."

James Mace described the publication as "an indicator of permissible
research boundaries for Soviet Ukrainian historians" in the aftermath of a
speech on Dec. 25, 1987 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet power
in Ukraine made by the CPU first secretary Vladimir Shcherbitsky. In it,
Shcherbitsky for the first time broke the taboo set by Stalin and
recognized that there was a famine in Ukraine in 1933.

"The article in the News from Ukraine which was in fact a report to the
central committee, created wide repercussions, mostly in the negative vein,"
Kulchytsky recalls. " The positive lied in the fact that I touched on the
topic [of Holodomor - AUR], the negative was that I justified the central
committee policy. That was what Mace spotted in the English translation
of the article, quoting it almost verbatim in the congress report."

The article produced wide repercussions in the West. After its publication
by the Ukrainian Historical Journal Dr Mace analyzed it in detail in his
fundamental work "How Ukraine was allowed to remember" which was
published in the Ukrainian Quarterly, an American journal.

Mace called it the first scientific article by Kulchytsky about the Famine.
Mace gave Kulchytsky credit for concluding that the primary cause of the
Famine was the Moscow-ordered grain seizures rigorously controlled by
members of the so-called emergency commissions sent from Russia.

Analyzing another article published in Sept. 1988 by the News from Ukraine,
Mace stressed that its author was the first to shed light on the existence
of such commissions and, therefore, provided additional information for
Western researchers.

J. Mace emphasized an important evolution in Kulchytsky's views as
mirrored in his article "1933: the tragedy of famine" published in #2-5
issues of The Literaturna Ukrayina in 1989. Same year, the article was
reprinted by the Znannya Publishers. It was Kulchytsky's response to
a barrage of criticism leveled against his earlier publications.

In the opinion of the American researcher, it was crucial that Kulchytsky
had denounced as Stalin's and his circle of party and state leaders' gravest
crime the use of emergency commissions to forcefully seize grain, to punish
the villages for grain shortfalls as well as the blockade of Ukraine and
criminal and cowardly news blackout imposed by Stalin on the situation in
Ukraine's rural areas.

"Kulchytsky presented the issue as a Soviet historian, his research was
equally political and scientific. As soon as his access to the archives
widened, he stopped being a Soviet historian and became just a historian."
Mace commented.

James Mace praised Stanislav Kulchytsky on several counts.
[1] First, Kulchytsky sent a report to Shcherbitsky to pursuade him to
recognize the famine in Ukraine.
[2] Second, he authored research works, newspaper articles and radio
broadcasts which, although not absolutely frank, included all the facts
one was permitted to discuss at the time.
[3] Third, he made a breakthrough by publishing questions in The Silski
visti newspaper for the book "33: Famine. A book of people's memory,"
written by Vladimir Manyak and his wife, journalist Lidia Kovalenko.

More than once Mace took the side of Kulchytsky. He shielded him from
the attacks of blood-thirsty radicals, realizing that Kulchytsky's goal was
to influence the party nomenklatura into acknowledging the tragedy of the
Holodomor. Dr. Mace called Stanislav Kulchytsky a self-sacrificing
Ukrainian scholar.
"FRANKLY SPEAKING, I WAS A DIE-HARD COMMUNIST
Kulchytsky never portrayed himself as a man without sins. Nor did he beat
his breast begging repentance for his past work.

Answering my question about his reaction to the fact that some of his
conclusions eventually proved false, he quietly replied, "I guess, my answer
would be unexpected. I study the history of Ukraine every day. And every
year I come up with discoveries, first for myself.

It is quite natural, because we have been brought up in line with a very
specific set of guidelines and stereotypes. There is no getting rid of them
overnight. My perception of the world is still changing. I haven't become
an anticommunist.

I just perceive things as they were and I am often the first to present this
or that opinion. I do not care at all if my past views are different from my
present ones. It refers to my past evaluations of the famine given in my
publications in the 60s-70s.

At that time, there were many facts I didn't know about. I must admit I was
a die-hard communist at the time. My reports (as an expert with a doctoral
degree I was requested to submit my evaluations to the central committee)
are stored in archives.

I also have them at home but I have no time to analyse them. When I got
wind that Roman Serbyn, a renowned scholar of Ukraine's history and
professor of the Montreal university, set out to analyse the rethinking of
the national history in Ukraine, I handed over these materials to him."

Getting back to his friend and colleague James Mace, Stanislav Kulchytsky
says, "He was not involved in tutoring me. He helped me to get rid of the
Soviet professor stuff in me and become just a professor."

Issue One, Article Seven, Washington, D.C., February 25, 2007

After reading the article by Ihor Lutsenko "Holodomor: ill-conceived
renaming" and participating in debates on the Ukrayinska Pravda forum I
keep thinking about huge numbers of self-proclaimed writers around us.

Let me quote just one excerpt which denies that the Holodomor was a
genocide: "The dispute about whether or not to identify the Holodomor and
genocide is definitely counterproductive. Millions of people died horrible
deaths."

Isn't it an excuse to view the event as no less cruel and worthy of
historical denunciation than the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi Germany,
the regime unrivaled for cruelty in the past history?

Isn't this crime worth of being recognized as a separate precedent in
history, of becoming a kind of a yardstick by which lesser similar crimes
can be measured? Doesn't it deserve a special name?

Therefore, the dispute must be stopped. Because it is fraught with a
dangerous trap - "It's unimportant whether it is a genocide or not: the
crime does not become less horrible."

On the other hand, attempts to score political points by reforming the
historical memory with the help of foreign-coined cliches will only
aggravate things." This was met by forum participants with enthusiasm:
someone is telling the truth.

I am convinced that Ihor Lutsenko does not write his articles on economic
issues for Ukrayinska Pravda off the cuff or at random, as someone without
any professional training. On the contrary, he was supposed to base his
arguments on statistics and appropriate references.

Surprisingly, when forum debates focused on such sensitive issue as the
Holodomor, both Lutsenko and forum participants believed they were
entitled to present their weighty opinion to the effect that the Holodomor
in Ukraine is not a genocide and that there is no need to tailor the
Ukrainian tragedy to the crime of genocide.

Why not first get acquainted with a cornerstone document on this issue -
the UN Convention on prevention of and punishment for genocide of
Dec. 9, 1948.

So, don't lets follow the example of wannabe writers and turn to the
document that underlies all national documents on genocide.

Article I of this Convention says that a genocide, regardless of whether it
occurs in peace or in war, is a crime that violates international laws and
entails preventive measures and punishment for its perpetration. How is
genocide defined by the Convention?

The answer is found in Article II. I quote: "A genocide means any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

     (a) Killing members of the group;
     (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
     (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
          to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
     (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
     (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Therefore, the gravest crime committed by the Bolshevik regime in the
Ukrainian SSR in 1932-1933 was the deliberate infliction on practically all
peasants (most of them ethnic Ukrainians) of conditions of life calculated
to bring about, in whole or in part, physical destruction of peasantry as a
basis of the Ukrainian ethnos.

As proven by numerous evidence, the Holodomor was targeted not only
against ethnic Ukrainians but also against the Poles, Azov area Greeks,
Moldovans, Black Sea area Germans and Jews.

Hence, it shows that there existed the intent to annihilate, fully or in
part, the Ukrainian people (that is, residents of the former Ukrainian
Soviet Republic) as well as the specific ethnic group.

The direct connection between the manmade famine and anti-Ukrainian
policy is evidenced by a secret resolution of the Central Committee of
the USSR Communist party and the Council of People's Commissars
"On grain procurement in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and in the Western
region" which orders, in addition to grain confiscations, a stop to the
policy of Ukrainization.

It runs: "Instead of a correct Bolshevik-style national policy in some areas
of Ukraine, Ukrainization was implemented mechanically, without taking into
account the specific features of all regions, without a proper personnel
policy based on appointing Bolsheviks - which made it easy for bourgeois
nationalist elements, Petlura [a prominent Ukrainian nationalist of the late
10s-early 20s - AUR] supporters and other hostile elements to set up their
legal cover-ups, counterrevolutionary groups and organizations."

Had there been no other documents, this one would be sufficient. Anyone
with even a slight knowledge of the Bolshevik parlance would understand
that the Communist party acknowledged that all things Ukrainian were, by
definition, anti-Bolshevik.

Now, let's focus on Article III of the UN Convention. It says that such
acts are subject to punishment:

     a) a genocide;
     b) conspiracy to inflict a genocide;
     c) direct and public incitation to inflict a genocide;
     d) attempt to inflict a genocide;
     e) complicity in a genocide.

Finally, other articles regulate the extradition and punishment mechanisms
for persons guilty of the abovementioned crimes. There is nothing about any
concrete motives for a genocide: the UN is not interested to know them - it
is the business of investigators and judges.

The Convention takes into account just the fact of the genocide. As we see,
a genocide is not limited to crematoriums and executions only - a terror by
starvation also belongs here.

Incidentally, one of the factors which led to the Holocaust was terror by
starvation, and a large number of Europe's Jews in 1939-1945 died from
starvation in ghettos and camps.

Similarly, a large number of the Holodomor dead died from Cheka
operatives bullets or in prisons and concentration camps. The whole of
the Soviet Ukraine was turned into a huge ghetto from December 1932
through the summer of 1933, with the republic's borders tightly sealed
off to prevent "uncontrolled traffic of humans."

It seems likely that Ihor Lutsenko and numerous contributors on the
Ukrayinska Pravda forum merely confused two notions, a genocide and
the Holocaust.

The term "genocide" is closely related to the term "Holocaust," as
maintained by the author of this term, a Polish lawyer and then political
emigrant to the United States Rafael Lemkin who based his concept of
genocide on the studies of the extermination of Armenians during WWI
and Jews during WWII.

Since that time, the annihilation of Roma by the Nazies, the extermination
of the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda in 1994 and ethnic cleansings in the Balkans
have been recognized as genocides.

It makes nonsensical the declarations by Ihor Lutsenko that Ukrainians are
trespassing on a totally different territory by trying to push for the
recognition of the Holodomor as genocide and, in so doing, by equating
"one horrible crime with the other already condemned, patented and branded
crime."

Just read again carefully the title of the UN Convention - "On prevention
and punishment of the crime of genocide ." If a genocide had already been
"condemned, patented and branded", the Convention would be needless.

Now, let's consider another declaration by Ihor Lutsenko which is absolutely
nonsensical. He says the Nazi regime was unrivalled for its large-scale
cruelty. How about the Bolsheviks? Were they less cruel? Who had a larger
spin, Hitler or Stalin?

Judging by arithmetic standards (which is, in my opinion, an immoral thing
to do), the most cruel totalitarian regime in the 20th century was that of
Pol Pot in Cambodia. It annihilated a third(!) of Cambodians in three years
in the name of "a bright future."

The problem is if the Holodomor can be compared with the Holocaust? It
cannot, the president of Israel believes. But we have the right to disagree
with him - if only for the reason that he knows very little about the
Holodomor.

About death from starvation of tens of thousands of Jews living in small
towns whose only sin was that they lived on the same land with Ukrainians
and that their youth became permeated in the years of Ukrainization with the
dangerous virus of freedom.

In a similar fashion, we can compare Bykivnya [scene of mass murders of
Ukrainian political opponents by the NKVD - AUR] and Babyn Yar [scene
of mass murders of Jews and many others by the Nazis near Kyiv - AUR].
These were the crimes of totalitarian socialists that reveal stunningly
similar organization.

However, there is one point for which those speaking about a multitude of
holodomors can be criticized, the point which escaped Ihor Lutsenko's
attention. There was a basic difference between the 1921-1923 famine and
the Holodomor.

[1] In the first case, the 1921-1923 famine was based on the Lenin-Trotsky
carrot-and-stick policy of exposing the population to the horrors of the
famine to offer seemingly good things like the food tax [replacement of
confiscation from farmers of all extra food with a fixed tax payable in
food - AUR], the new economic policy, NEP, [allowing to start small
businesses - AUR], Ukrainization in exchange for loyalty and participation
in fanning the Communist revolution all over the world.

[2] In the second case, the Holodomor was a total terror, without any
carrot, deliberately aimed at destroying the bigger part of the nation.

When feeding stations were set up in kolhosps, the starving Ukrainian
peasants had to go there for food so they could work in the fields to
Stalin's benefit. They had to sing praises of the leader of all peoples,
crushing their individual and national dignity.

There was only one Holodomor, with social terror by starvation or just
callous grain-procurement policy being quite different things.

Generally speaking, the efforts to deny the fact of the genocide in Ukraine
(no matter what the motives for the denial are) are quite remarkable from
the social and psychological points of view.

Such efforts actually confirm the fact of the genocide, since the rejection
of obvious tragic circumstances in the life of your nation stems either from
the ignorance of one's own history or from the subconscious reluctance to
accept the historical truth and overcome its tragic consequences. -30-
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LINK: http://maidan.org.ua/static/mai/1164644902.html