examination of
authoritarianism and the starvation that killed millions could be
dangerous.
By James Marson, Contributor to The Christian Science
Monitor
The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, MA, Tuesday, May 5, 2009
KIEV, Ukraine - In 1933, Mykola Bokan
travelled across the Chernihiv Region of Ukraine taking photographs of
his starving compatriots. These were the victims of Holodomor, the
"death by starvation" unleashed by Stalin that killed millions across
Ukraine. The same year, Mr. Bokan was arrested and sent to a prison
camp for 10 years. He didn't survive his sentence.
"Stories like this deepen our knowledge of our own history," says
Volodymyr Vyatrovych, director of the archives at the state security
service, or SBU, the KGB's successor in Ukraine. "That's why we want
the maximum number of people possible to get to know these documents."
In January, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered state
archives to declassify, publish, and study all documents relating to
Holodomor, the Ukrainian independence movement, and political
repressions during the Soviet period from 1917 to 1991.
There's a lot of work for Mr. Vyatrovych and his colleagues to get
through: He estimates there are 800,000 documents from which to remove
the "secret" seal.
"As a totalitarian system, the Soviet Union relied on the KGB. That
means that these documents shed light on all aspects of Soviet life,"
he says.
The aim of the work is to make the documents available at digital
reading rooms across the country and the Internet, and to publish
collections. Vyatrovych says the publicity drive has already boosted
interest, and not just among historians. "More and more people are
coming to find out about relatives," he says.
Unlike many ex-Soviet states, such as neighboring Poland, Ukraine has
seen limited attempts at lustration. The country's history, for
centuries intertwined with its eastern neighbor Russia, is politically
sensitive because of the polar opposite interpretations that people
follow.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, for example, which fought in
World War II, was portrayed in the Soviet Union as Nazi collaborators.
To many in Ukraine, however, they are freedom fighters and symbols of
the anti-Soviet independence movement.
But since Yushchenko's dramatic rise to the presidency in the wake of
the Orange Revolution in 2004, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians
took to the streets to protest a rigged vote, he has made a concerted
effort to draw attention to Ukraine's history. His main focus has been
on promoting recognition of Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian
people.
Although famine struck a number of areas in the Soviet Union as a
result of Stalin's initiative to create collective farms, many
historians argue that the famine was exacerbated in Ukraine in order to
quell separatism and punish Ukrainians.
"Promoting a reappraisal of our history is one of Yushchenko's greatest
achievements," says Stanislav Kulchytsky, one of Ukraine's most famous
historians, who is best known for his pioneering work on Holodomor.
"Sadly, it brings his popularity down, as many people are stuck in the
old views they were brought up on."
The opening of the archives has not passed without controversy. Olha
Ginzburg, a Communist Party member and head of the state archives
committee, claims that all necessary files have already been
declassified, and has opposed the publication of archival documents.
Vyatrovych counters that this may be true of some archives, but
certainly not of his. "Some political forces don't want the documents
to see the light of day because it will affect their popularity."
Some pro-Russian opposition politicians have criticized Yushchenko's
drive as nationalistic and dangerous. But Vyatrovych says fears of
social tensions are exaggerated.
"My colleagues in other ex-Soviet countries said that when they opened
their secret service archives, people also told them not to do it as it
would cause a civil war," he says. "But it didn't happen, and won't
happen here. It's a myth."
HISTORY
AS POLITICS
Yushchenko's portrayal of Holodomor as
genocide of the Ukrainian people has also raised hackles at the highest
levels in Russia. Confrontations – particularly over gas – have erupted
frequently since the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, as Russia has reacted
angrily to what it sees as Ukraine's realignment with the West.
When Yushchenko organized a 75th-anniversary commemoration last
November, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev refused to attend, accusing
his Ukrainian counterpart in an open letter of "[using] the so-called
'Holodomor' … to achieve short-term political goals." A number of
countries, including the United States, have recognized Holodomor as
genocide.
While Yushchenko has pushed a highly critical approach to Soviet
history, Russia has in recent years gone some way towards
rehabilitating Stalin's image, portraying him in school textbooks as an
"effective manager" whose actions were "entirely rational."
Ukrainian historians complain that access to some Russian archives is
much more restricted than it was in the '90s, and numerous requests for
cooperation have been rejected.
In February, a group of Russian archivists and historians presented a
book of historical documents that they said showed that the famine was
not directed specifically at Ukrainians. Vyatrovych welcomed the move,
saying he is not concerned by the interpretation.
"We are pleased that we have provoked them to take this step," he says.
"The most important thing is that the documents are put out there. They
speak for themselves, and much louder than any interpretation that is
attached to them."
But not everyone is listening. Professor Kulchytsky, the expert on
Holodomor, complains that older generations aren't open to revising
their Soviet views. "It was easy to end the economic totalitarianism
after 1991," he says. "It's much harder to end totalitarianism in
people's heads."
Yushchenko's focus on history has also irked many at a time when he is
deeply unpopular at home and the economic crisis is hitting harder in
Ukraine than anywhere else in Europe.
But Vyatrovych is adamant that his work has more than academic
significance. "The mobilization of society to solve the many problems
we have is only possible if it isn't torn apart," he says. "And we can
only achieve that if we come to a better understanding of our past."
LINK:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0505/p06s04-wogn.html?page=1\
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[
return to index] [Action Ukraine
Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]
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16
. LEMKIN ON THE
UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
'Soviet
Genocide in Ukraine'
Journal of International Criminal Justice, Oxford Journals
Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, Vol. 7 (No.
1), 2009; pg. 123-130
We publish below a piece by Raphael Lemkin (1901–1959) on
the genocide of Ukrainians perpetrated, according to Lemkin, by the
Soviet authorities between 1926 and 1946. This document was kindly
brought to our attention by Roman Serbyn, Professor of History at the
University of Québec at Montreal, who also supplied a transcript of the
original text and wrote an introductory note.
The document was known to Lemkin specialists and experts in
genocide, although most scholars have tended to ignore it, or to play
it down (notable exceptions are J. Cooper, Ralph Lemkin and the
Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 253, as well as J.-L. Panné, ‘Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un
sans-pouvoir’, in Rafaël Lemkin, Qu’est-ce qu’un génocide? Présentation
par Jean-Louis Panné (Monaco: Édition du Rocher, 2008)). It seemed to
us that this short article by Lemkin sheds much light on his view of
genocide as the annihilation of a ‘national
group’.
a.c.
.
LEMKIN
ON THE UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
'Soviet
Genocide in Ukraine'
Introductory Note: by Roman Serbyn, Professor of History, Universite du
Quebec a Montreal
Raphael Lemkin's essay, ‘Soviet Genocide in Ukraine’, is one of the
earliest writings on the subject by a non-Ukrainian scholar. A note
‘Begin here’, scribbled in before the second paragraph, which begins
with the words ‘What I want to speak about’, suggests that the text was
originally composed for Lemkin's address at the 1953 Ukrainian Famine
commemoration in New York.
Later Lemkin added it to the material he was gathering for
his elaborate History of Genocide which was never published. (1)
Lemkin's views on the Ukrainian tragedy are virtually unknown and
hardly ever figure in scholarly exchanges on the Ukrainian famine of
1932–1933, or on genocides in general. (2) Yet his holistic approach to
the Soviet regime's gradual destruction of the Ukrainian nation is
enlightening and makes a valuable, if belated, addition to scholarly
literature.
R. Lemkin was born in 1900 to a Jewish farming family in the village of
Bezwodne, near the medieval Rus’ town of Volkovysk, now part of the
Grodno region of Belarus. Before World War I the territory belonged to
Russia, but after the break up of the Tsarist Empire it was
incorporated into Poland. (3) Lemkin studied philology and law at the
University of Lviv, where he became interested in the Turkish massacres
of the Armenians during World War I.
After studying on a scholarship in Germany, France and
Italy, he returned to Poland and pursued a career in the Polish courts
of law, mainly in Warsaw. He continued his preoccupation with the
problem of legal sanctions against perpetrators of mass exterminations
and developed his ideas, which he later presented at various
international conferences.
In 1930, Lemkin was appointed assistant prosecutor at the
District Court of Berezhany, Tarnopil Province of Eastern Galicia
(Western Ukraine) where he must have become aware of the
collectivization, ‘dekulakization’ and the eventual Great Famine then
devastating Soviet Ukraine. Some time later he obtained a similar
position in Warsaw, where he also practised law and continued his
writings on international law.
After the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet troops in 1939,
Lemkin fled to Vilnius and then to Sweden where he lectured at the
University of Stockholm. In early 1941, he managed to obtain a visa to
the USSR, but then via Japan and Canada went to the United States. In
April 1941, he was appointed ‘special lecturer’ at Duke University Law
School in Durham, North Carolina. In 1944 he published "Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe," which he had started writing in Sweden. (4) The study
is a thoroughly documented exposé on German crimes in Europe.
The book contains the first mention of the term ‘genocide’,
which has become a generic name not only for the Nazi atrocities but
for all mass destructions. The author's relentless lobbying, backed by
the prestige of the book, finally succeeded in swaying the United
Nations Organization to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, whose fitting 60th anniversary we
are commemorating this year.
After World War II, Lemkin devoted his life to the further development
of legal concepts and norms for containing mass destructions and
punishing their perpetrators. After the fall of Nazism, Lemkin saw the
main threat in Communism, which had overrun his native Poland. Towards
the end of his life, he had close relations with the Ukrainian and
Baltic communities in the United States. In 1953, he took part in the
commemoration of the Great Famine by the New York Ukrainian community.
His essay on the Ukrainian genocide shows his empathy for
the plight of Ukrainian victims of Communism and Russian imperialism,
not only of the Great Famine of the early thirties but also of the
periods that precede and followed this tragic event. Lemkin's essay,
based on personal observations and supplemented with emotionally
charged testimony provided by the Ukrainian community, may appear
sketchy and naïve today.
Yet his comments offer an insight that is often lacking in
the work of recent authors who can benefit from the documentation
unavailable to Lemkin. He rightly extends the discussion of Ukrainian
genocide beyond the peasants starving in 1932–1933, and speaks about
the destruction of the intelligentsia and the Church, the ‘brain’ and
the ‘soul’ of the nation. He puts emphasis on the preservation and
development of culture, beliefs and common ideas, which make Ukraine ‘a
nation rather than a mass of people’.
Lemkin's essay is being reproduced here with minor updating of
terminology (Ukraine instead of ‘the Ukraine’, Romanian instead of
‘Rumanian’ and Tsarist instead of ‘Czarist’) and the transliteration of
Ukrainian names from Ukrainian.
"SOVIET
GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE"
By Rafael Lemkin (5)
‘Love
Ukraine’
You cannot love other peoples
Unless
you love Ukraine. (6)
Sosyura
The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the
advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their
policy of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring
uniformity out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians
— presently disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it
has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the
Kremlin — one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the
operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the
process of ‘union’ that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the
‘Soviet Man’, the ‘Soviet Nation’ and to achieve that goal, that
unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the
nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe.
What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet
genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the
destruction of the Ukrainian nation. This is, as I have said, only the
logical successor of such Tsarist crimes as the drowning of 10,000
Crimean Tatars by order of Catherine the Great, the mass murders of
Ivan the Terrible's ‘SS troops’ — the Oprichnina; the extermination of
National Polish leaders and Ukrainian Catholics by Nicholas I; and the
series of Jewish pogroms that have stained Russian history
periodically. And it has had its matches within the Soviet Union in the
annihilation of the Ingerian nation, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the
Crimean Tatar Republics, the Baltic Nations of Lithuania, Estonia and
Latvia. Each is a case in the long-term policy of liquidation of
non-Russian peoples by the removal of select parts.
Ukraine constitutes a slice of Southeastern USSR equal in area to
France and Italy, and inhabited by some 30 million people.7 Itself the
Russian bread basket, geography has made it a strategic key to the oil
of the Caucasus and Iran, and to the entire Arab world. In the north,
it borders Russia proper. As long as Ukraine retains its national
unity, as long as its people continue to think of themselves as
Ukrainians and to seek independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious
threat to the very heart of Sovietism. It is no wonder that the
Communist leaders have attached the greatest importance to the
Russification of this independent[-minded] member of their ‘Union of
Republics’, have determined to remake it to fit their pattern of one
Russian nation. For the Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian.
His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion — all are
different. At the side door to Moscow, he has refused to be
collectivized, accepting deportation, even death. And so it is
peculiarly important that the Ukrainian be fitted into the Procrustean
pattern of the ideal Soviet man.
Ukraine is highly susceptible to racial murder by select parts and so
the Communist tactics there have not followed the pattern taken by the
German attacks against the Jews. The nation is too populous to be
exterminated completely with any efficiency. However, its leadership,
religious, intellectual, political, its select and determining parts,
are quite small and therefore easily eliminated, and so it is upon
these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has
fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced
labour, exile and starvation.
The attack has manifested a systematic pattern, with the whole process
repeated again and again to meet fresh outbursts of national spirit.
[1] The first blow is aimed at the intelligentsia, the national brain,
so as to paralyse the rest of the body. In 1920, 1926 and again in
1930–1933, teachers, writers, artists, thinkers, political leaders,
were liquidated, imprisoned or deported. According to the Ukrainian
Quarterly of Autumn 1948, 51,713 intellectuals were sent to Siberia in
1931 alone. At least 114 major poets, writers and artists, the most
prominent cultural leaders of the nation, have met the same fate. It is
conservatively estimated that at least 75% of the Ukrainian
intellectuals and professional men in Western Ukraine, Carpatho–Ukraine
and Bukovina have been brutally exterminated by the Russians (ibid.,
Summer 1949).
[2] Going along with this attack on the intelligentsia was an offensive
against the churches, priests and hierarchy, the ‘soul’ of Ukraine.
Between 1926 and 1932, the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, its
Metropolitan (Lypkivsky) and 10,000 clergy were liquidated. In 1945,
when the Soviets established themselves in Western Ukraine, a similar
fate was meted out to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. That Russification
was the only issue involved is clearly demonstrated by the fact that
before its liquidation, the Church was offered the opportunity to join
the Russian Patriarch[ate] at Moscow, the Kremlin's political tool.
Only two weeks before the San Francisco conference, on 11 April 1945, a
detachment of NKVD troops surrounded the St George Cathedral in Lviv
and arrested Metropolitan Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several
priests. (8) All the students in the city's theological seminary were
driven from the school, while their professors were told that the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its
Metropolitan was arrested and his place was to be taken by a
Soviet-appointed bishop. These acts were repeated all over Western
Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland. (9) At least seven
bishops were arrested or were never heard from again. There is no
Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area. Five
hundred clergy who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were shot
or arrested.
Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed
by hundreds, while the number sent to forced labour camps ran into the
thousands. Whole villages were depopulated. In the deportation,
families were deliberately separated, fathers to Siberia, mothers to
the brickworks of Turkestan and the children to Communist homes to be
‘educated’. For the crime of being Ukrainian, the Church itself was
declared a society detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, its
members were marked down in the Soviet police files as potential
‘enemies of the people’. As a matter of fact, with the exception of
150,000 members in Slovakia, the Ukrainian Catholic Church has been
officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy dispersed
and deported.
These attacks on the Soul have also had and will continue to have a
serious effect on the Brain of Ukraine, for it is the families of the
clergy that have traditionally supplied a large part of the
intellectuals, while the priests themselves have been the leaders of
the villages, their wives the heads of the charitable organizations.
The religious orders ran schools, and took care of much of the
organized charities.
[3] The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the
large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the
tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature,
the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is
perhaps the most terrible of all — starvation. Between 1932 and 1933,
5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd
Congress decried on 28 May 1934. (10)
There has been an attempt to dismiss this highpoint of
Soviet cruelty as an economic policy connected with the
collectivization of the wheat-lands, and the elimination of the kulaks,
the independent farmers, was therefore necessary. The fact is, however,
that large-scale farmers in Ukraine were few and far-between. As a
Soviet politician Kosior (11) declared in Izvestiia on 2 December 1933,
‘Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger’, and it was to eliminate
that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet
state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed.
The method used in this part of the plan was not at all
restricted to any particular group. All suffered — men, women and
children. The crop that year was ample to feed the people and livestock
of Ukraine, though it had fallen off somewhat from the previous year, a
decrease probably due in large measure to the struggle over
collectivization. But a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they
got one to order, by plan, through an unusually high grain allotment to
the state as taxes. To add to this, thousands of acres of wheat were
never harvested, and left to rot in the fields. The rest was sent to
government granaries to be stored there until the authorities had
decided how to allocate it. Much of this crop, so vital to the lives of
the Ukrainian people, ended up as exports for the creation of credits
abroad.
In the face of famine on the farms, thousands abandoned the rural areas
and moved into the towns to beg food. Caught there and sent back to the
country, they abandoned their children in the hope that they at least
might survive. In this way, 18,000 children were abandoned in Kharkiv
alone. Villages of a thousand had a surviving population of a hundred;
in others, half the populace was gone, and deaths in these towns ranged
from 20 to 30 per day. Cannibalism became commonplace.
As C. [read instead W.] Henry Chamberlain, the Moscow correspondent of
the Christian Science Monitor, wrote in 1933: The Communists saw in
this apathy and discouragement, sabotage and counter-revolution, and,
with the ruthlessness peculiar to self-righteous idealists, they
decided to let the famine run its course with the idea that it would
teach the peasants a lesson.
Relief was doled out to the collective farms, but on an inadequate
scale and so late that many lives had already been lost. The individual
peasants were left to shift for themselves; and much higher mortality
rate among the individual peasants proved a most potent argument in
favor of joining collective farms.
[4] The fourth step in the process consisted in the fragmentation of
the Ukrainian people at once by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign
peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians throughout Eastern
Europe. In this way, ethnic unity would be destroyed and nationalities
mixed. Between 1920 and 1939, the population of Ukraine changed from
80% Ukrainian to only 63%.12 In the face of famine and deportation, the
Ukrainian population had declined absolutely from 23.2 million to 19.6
million, while the non-Ukrainian population had increased by 5.6
million. When we consider that Ukraine once had the highest rate of
population increase in Europe, around 800,000 per year, it is easy to
see that the Russian policy has been accomplished.
These have been the chief steps in the systematic destruction of the
Ukrainian nation, in its progressive absorption within the new Soviet
nation. Notably, there have been no attempts at complete annihilation,
such as was the method of the German attack on the Jews. And yet, if
the Soviet programme succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the
priests and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as
if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it
which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common
ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made
it a nation rather than a mass of people.
The mass, indiscriminate murders have not, however, been lacking — they
have simply not been integral parts of the plan, but only chance
variations. Thousands have been executed, untold thousands have
disappeared into the certain death of Siberian labour camps.
The city of Vinnitsa might well be called the Ukrainian Dachau. In 91
graves there lie the bodies of 9,432 victims of Soviet tyranny, shot by
the NKVD in about 1937 or 1938. Among the gravestones of real
cemeteries, in woods, with awful irony, under a dance floor, the bodies
lay from 1937 until their discovery by the Germans in 1943. Many of the
victims had been reported by the Soviets as exiled to Siberia.
Ukraine has its Lidice too, in the town of Zavadka, destroyed by the
Polish satellites of the Kremlin in 1946. (13) Three times, troops of
the Polish Second Division attacked the town, killing men, women and
children, burning houses and stealing farm animals. During the second
raid, the Red commander told what was left of the town's populace: ‘The
same fate will be met by everyone who refuses to go to Ukraine. I
therefore order that within three days the village be vacated;
otherwise, I shall execute every one of you.’ (14)
When the town was finally evacuated by force, there remained only 4 men
among the 78 survivors. During March of the same year, nine other
Ukrainian towns were attacked by the same Red unit and received more or
less similar treatment.
What we have seen here is not confined to Ukraine. The plan that the
Soviets used there has been and is being repeated. It is an essential
part of the Soviet programme for expansion, for it offers the quick way
of bringing unity out of the diversity of cultures and nations that
constitute the Soviet Empire. That this method brings with it
indescribable suffering for millions of people has not turned them from
their path. If for no other reason than this human suffering, we would
have to condemn this road to unity as criminal. But there is more to it
than that.
This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of
genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and
a nation. If it were possible to do this even without suffering we
would still be driven to condemn it, for the family of minds, the unity
of ideas, of language and of customs that form what we call a nation
that constitutes one of the most important of all our means of
civilization and progress.
It is true that nations blend together and form new nations
— we have an example of this process in our own country — but this
blending consists in the pooling of benefits of superiorities that each
culture possesses. (15) And it is in this way that the world advances.
What then, apart from the very important question of human suffering
and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet plans is the criminal
waste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet national unity is
being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures, but by the
complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one — the
Soviet.
NOTES:
(1) Raphael Lemkin Papers, The
New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundation, Raphael Lemkin ZL-273. Reel 3. The paper
by Lemkin reproduced here has been published in L.Y. Luciuk (ed.),
"Holodomor - Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet
Ukraine" (Kingston, Ontario: The Kashtan Press, 2008), Appendix A, and
will be republished in a new Journal: "Holodomor Studies (2009)."
(2) A notable exception is J.L. Panné, ‘Rafaël Lemkin ou le
pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir’, in R. Lemkin (ed.), "Qu’est-ce qu’un
génocide? Présentation par Jean-Louis Panné" (Monaco: Édition du
Rocher, 2008) 7–66.
(3) Bibliographical data gathered from R. Szawlowski, ‘Raphael
Lemkin (1900–1959) The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of
"Genocide" ’, 2 "Polish International Affairs" (2005) 98–133; Panné,
supra note 2.
(4) R. Lemkin, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of
Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress" (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944),
xii–xiii.
(5) If no indication to the contrary is given, footnotes are
by Prof. Serbyn.
(6) Verse by Volodymyr Sosyura added in pencil. Sosiura wrote
the patriotic poem in 1944, during the German–Soviet war. At first it
was praised by the authorities, but in 1948 it was condemned for
Ukrainian nationalism. The two verses in the Ukrainian
original: [would not reproduce
here]
(7) According to the 1959 census there were then a little over 40
million people.
(8) The Charter creating the United Nations was signed by the delegates
of 50 countries, including the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, at the
Conference held on 25–26 April 1945.
(9) The Curzon Line proposed by the British as a border between Poland
and the Soviet state after the First World War eventually served as the
basis for the post-World War II border between Poland and the USSR. The
border left a large Ukrainian minority in the Polish state.
(10) On 28 May 1934, Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York introduced a
Resolution (H. Res. 309) in the House of Representatives, in
Washington. The document stipulated that ‘several millions of the
population of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic died of
starvation during 1932 and 1933’. The resolution further proposed:
that the House of Representatives express its sympathy for all those
who suffered from the great famine in Ukraine which has brought misery,
affliction, and death to millions of peaceful and law-abiding
Ukrainians;
‘that ... the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ...
take active steps to alleviate the terrible consequences arising from
this famine,
‘that ... the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics Government ... place no obstacles in the way of American
citizens seeking to send aid in form of
money, foodstuffs, and necessities to the famine-stricken regions of
Ukraine.
The Resolution was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations
(Resolution reproduced in "The Ukrainian Quarterly" (1978)
416–417).
(11) Erroneously identified by Lemkin as ‘Soviet writer
Kossies’, Stanislav Kosior was the First Secretary of the Communist
Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP(b)U). In a speech delivered at the
Joint session of the Central Committee and the Central Control
Committee of the CP(b)U, on 27 November 1933, Kosior stated that ‘at
the present moment, local Ukrainian nationalism poses the main
danger’.
(12) There was no census in 1920. The official figures from the 1926
and 1939 census are somewhat different from Lemkin's. In 1926, there
were 22.9 million ethnic Ukrainians in Ukrainian SSR and the falsified
1939 figure showed 23.3 million, or an increase of 435,000 ethnic
Ukrainians. However, the rise in over-all population of Ukrainian SSR
by 3.3 million reduced the ethnically Ukrainian portion from 80% to
73%.
(13) On 10 June 1942, 172 males over the age of 16 years were
liquidated, the women and children deported and the village of Lidice
razed to the ground in reprisal for the assassination of the Nazi
dictator of Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. Zavadka Morokhivs’ka,
Sianits’kyi povit, Lemkivshchyna, now Zawadka-Morochowska, in
Poland.
(14) From W. Dushnyck, "Death and Devastation on the Curzon Line" (note
by R.L.).
(15) Lemkin had in mind the United States.
---------------------------------------------------
NOTE:
The Journal of International Criminal Justice aims to promote a
profound collective reflection on the new problems facing international
law.
Established by a group of distinguished criminal lawyers and
international lawyers, the Journal addresses the major problems of
justice from the angle of law, jurisprudence, criminology, penal
philosophy, and the history of international judicial institutions. It
is intended for graduate and post-graduate students, practitioners,
academics, government officials, as well as the hundreds of people
working for international criminal courts.
LINK:
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18
. DEADLY
ORPHANAGE
The building where over 700 children
starved to death in 1932–33 is still there
By Olha Bohlevska, Zaporizhia, The Day Weekly Digest
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Hard facts have been established, revealing the horrible
truth about the death of small inmates of an orphanage in downtown
Zaporizhia 75 years ago. The city learned the tragic story after the
city council’s commission on toponyms began discussing the possibility
of installing a memorial sign dedicated to the inmates of the
Children’s Home who died in 1932–33.
The evidence, which was discovered almost accidentally, is
hair-raising: over 700 inmates of the orphanage, aged between one day
and four years, died within a year and a half. Most often the cause of
death, as recorded in the archives, was emaciation, intoxication,
gastritis, and others. In fact, the small children died of chronic
undernourishment. The horrible specter of the Holodomor caught up with
them where they were supposed to be rescued and cared for.
Children’s cases were found in the archives a year ago, long
before the official measures regarding the Holodomor, by Anatolii
Peniok, an amateur ethnographer and foreman at the Zaporizhstal
Steelworks. “We learned about the death of 30 orphanage inmates back in
1993 but were unable to locate the institution, he says, so I decided
to find it and started digging up the state archives.”
Leafing through public registry files of what was at the
time Stalin district, reading handwritten entries faded with time,
Peniok came across a large number of death certificates relating to
infants and pointing to the same location: Children’s Home at 7 Rosa
Luxembug St., or just a children’s home, without an address but with
the same names of the medical staff.
He checked the records from May 21, 1932, through Nov. 30,
1933 and meticulously copied the children’s names, drawing up a list of
755 names. Peniok feels sure that a further study of these documents
would reveal quite a few silent tragedies.
YURII
DNIPROSTROI AND BERNARD SHAW
I have followed in the footsteps of the
above-mentioned foreman and the archivists who were tasked with
answering a request from the Zhovtnevy district city state
administration, and studied the demographic records. I could not help
crying as I turned the pages of archival documents. Not a single day
would pass at the orphanage without a small inmate’s death; sometimes
five to six deaths were registered within 24 hours. Nine children died
on May 21, 1933, when the famine was exacerbated by a measles epidemic.
The names of many children are proof of their status as foundlings
(e.g., Yurii Dniprostroi, Ivan Stantsiiny, Mykola Fevralsky, Frosia
Yuzhna, Nina Dyspanserna, etc.). After exhausting the list of ordinary
names, the orphanage’s personnel turned to those of past celebrities:
Bernard Shaw, Anna Akhmetova (sic), Lesia Ukrainka, and so on. Yet
children died all the same.
A MAN
WITH A FULL BELLY THINKS NO ONE IS HUNGRY
Peniok’s discovery became known to Dr.
Fedir Turchenko, who holds a Ph.D. in History and is a member of the
Zaporizhia City Council’s commission on toponyms. He was in charge of
the Zaporizhia volume of the National Book of Memory: victims of the
1932–33 Holodomor in Ukraine.
He was stunned by the functionaries’ cynicism at the time:
“That orphanage was … on Rosa Luxemburg St., where there also was the
prosecutor’s office, district council, finance department, and other
institutions. The Soviet bureaucrats could not have been ignorant of
what was happening in a building they passed by every day on their way
to work.”
Referring to official documents, Dr. Turchenko notes that the
children’s homes in what is now Zaporizhia oblast and what was then
part of Dnipropetrovsk oblast had some 40,000 inmates. Peasant parents
would often purposefully abandon their babies in that relatively
well-supplied industrial area, hoping the foundlings would be spared
death by starvation. Vain hopes.
Turchenko is sure that the Soviet civil servants did not suffer from
the famine because they received food from special distribution centers
that did not cater to the public at large. Proof of this is an archival
directive establishing food rations for the senior officials of the
Melitopil district executive committee (the first figure indicates the
amount per the head of the family and the second one, per a dependent
of up to 14 years of age): 600-800/400 grams of bread and 1.0/0.5
kilogram of cereals were part of the daily rations.
The monthly rations included 3.5 kilograms/500 grams of
meat; 1.5 kilogram/400 grams of sugar, etc. It stands to reason that
the bureaucrats in Zaporizhia did not have poorer rations than their
counterparts in the province.
A
MEMORIAL PLAQUE
The street that used to bear the name of
Rosa Luxemburg now boasts the name of another revolutionary, Felix
Dzerzhinsky. Building No. 7 now accommodates the state treasury
department and a veterinary clinic. Historians do not have direct
evidence that this building once housed the orphanage, but the
probability is very high.
It is an old structure, located at an intersection, just
like that Children’s Home in the 1930s. Be that as it may, the
initiators of the memorial project believe that the main thing is not
the exact address but the memories of innocent children’s souls.
“It would be improper to remind people who work here of the sad events
of the past every day,” says Mykhailo Levchenko, a member of the
commission on toponyms, “so we agreed on a memorial plaque on the wall
joining building No. 7 and the next building.”
The initiative of the city council members and the public has been
supported by the experts at the city’s architecture and urban planning
directorate. Hopefully, the red tape that started last spring will
finally end and memories of the children who happened to be born in
that horrible period will not sink into oblivion.