NEW
ERA IN HOLODOMOR STUDIES, NEW BOOK PUBLISHED
HURI NEWS, Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute
(HURI),
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2009
CAMBRIDGE, MA - As part of its commemoration of the
seventy-fifth anniversary of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine in
1932–1933, the Institute hosted an international conference on 17–18
November 2008 entitled The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and
Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present.
The conference was opened by Institute Director Michael
Flier, who described the pioneering HURI Famine Project of the 1980s
and the Institute’s more recent efforts to commemorate the Holodomor.
A symposium in 2003 marked the seventieth anniversary of the
tragedy, and in late 2007, a two-day symposium was held to discuss
research conducted since the publication of Robert Conquest’s
groundbreaking book, "Harvest of Sorrow," in 1986.
NEW
BOOK PUBLISHED
To coincide with the 2008 conference, the Institute also
published "Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet
Context," a book containing papers presented at the 2003 symposium, as
well as new articles on the study of the Holodomor, on the current
state of source material, and on the legacy of the Famine in Ukraine
today (see information below for ordering information).
As Flier put it, the goal of this latest conference was to
examine the Holodomor “viewed as a historical event intrinsically and
comparatively…to contextualize the Holodomor and consider its
consequences in the short term, midterm, and long term.”
Flier then introduced Andrea Graziosi (University of Naples “Federico
II”), who described his conception of a new agenda for study
of the Holodomor. “Over the last twenty years, since Conquest published
his book, we now have a coherent, very believable picture of what
happened.”
Now, Graziosi argued, it becomes necessary to explore “what
happened after the Holodomor - that is, the consequences, [which] have
never been studied. We could contribute not only to [the study of]
Ukrainian history, but to European history, because the more
we know about European history—from the end of the nineteenth century
and the great Armenian massacres of the 1890s, through the beginning of
the 1950s and the death of Stalin—the more we see traumas of great
magnitude.… And studying what happened after these
traumas—historically, not as political debate—is of great importance in
understanding the history of each country and people.”
The introductory program for the conference was completed
with a few words by the Consul General of Ukraine, Mykola Kyrychenko,
who described the efforts of Ukrainians to gain worldwide recognition
for the Famine as a willful act of genocide on the part of the Soviet
regime.
FIRST
SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
The first session of the conference,
chaired by George G. Grabowicz (Harvard), provided a look at the most
recent scholarship on the Holodomor. Liudmyla Hrynevych (Institute of
the History of Ukraine) presented her research on the span of time
leading up to and including the Famine of 1932 -
1933, emphasizing how an examination of the earlier famine of
1928–1929 brings a deeper understanding of the Holodomor itself.
Next, Hennadii Yefimenko (Institute of the History of
Ukraine) explored the nationalities question, in his opinion
inseparable from the economic and agricultural policies of the Kremlin
at the time. Ultimately, he argued, the Kremlin blamed the Famine on
nationalist factors in Ukraine in an effort to consolidate its imperial
power.
Next, Brian Boeck (DePaul University) presented a case study
of Soviet nationality policy in the region of Kuban in the Northern
Caucasus, an area that had a significant Ukrainian population dating
from the late eighteenth century.
In Kuban, archival material is just now being explored and
scholarly publications are still lacking, but Boeck sifted through the
available information to paint a grim picture of the Famine’s impact in
that region and to demonstrate how Kuban’s mixed Ukrainian-Russian
character drew the particular attention of the Soviet regime. The
discussant for the session was Nicolas Werth (National Center for
Scientific Research, Paris).
SECOND
SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
The second session, chaired by Terry Martin (Harvard), concerned the
immediate aftermath of the Famine and the run-up to World War II. Yuri
Shapoval (Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies) discussed
the repressions carried out by the GPU (secret police) in Ukraine in
the following years, 1933–1934.
The goal of Soviet officials was to crush whatever
opposition there was to Soviet power in Ukraine, and this was carried
out by the GPU; first, by arresting those accused of resisting the
government seizure of grain and other foodstuffs; second, by carrying
out the seizures; and third, by arresting those accused of
dissatisfaction with the regime’s procurement policies and of broader
acts of counterinsurgency. In this way, the grain procurement policy
led directly to the widespread repression of nationalist sentiments in
Ukraine.
Next, Stanislav Kulchytskyi (Institute of the History of
Ukraine) described the aftereffects of the Famine in the villages of
Ukraine, and Hiroaki Kuromiya (Indiana University) reported on what
happened in Ukraine’s cities. Kuromiya took a broad approach, focusing
on high-level diplomatic documents concerning Ukraine. In his opinion,
Stalin’s signing of a nonaggression pact with Poland in 1932 opened the
door for his actions against Ukraine, since he knew that Poland would
not interfere.
Finally, Alexander Babyonyshev (pseudonym Sergei Maksudov;
Harvard) looked at the impact of the Famine on the individual in
Ukraine: collectivization destroyed the peasants’ ties to the land and
their core principles of self-worth and pride of ownership - in effect,
their spirits were broken. A summary and discussion of the session was
provided by Oleg Khlevniuk (State Archive of the Russian Federation).
THIRD
SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
The third session was chaired by Mark Kramer (Harvard) and addressed
the period of World War II. Roman Wysocki (Maria Curie-Skłodowska
University, Lublin) discussed the situation in Poland and western
Ukraine. Despite being “the best informed people in Europe about what
was going on in Ukraine, ” the Poles deported refugees fleeing the
Holodomor back to Soviet Ukraine and undermined the efforts of
Ukrainians in Poland to provide relief to famine-stricken areas.
Karel Berkhoff (Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
Amsterdam) gave an overview of how Germany initiated its own famine in
Ukraine in 1942–1944, seizing grain to supply the Reich. Next,
Oleksandra Veselova (Institute of the History of Ukraine) described how
the postwar famine of 1946–1947 was also engineered by the Soviet
regime. Roman Serbyn (University of Quebec at Montreal) served as
discussant for the panel.
The first day ended with a special performance of selections from the
opera Red Earth (Hunger) by Virko Baley, Jacyk Fellow in Spring 2007.
FOURTH
SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
Session four, chaired by Associate Director Lubomyr Hajda, dealt with
the population losses resulting from the Famine and the ongoing
demographic impact of the tragedy. Hennadii Boriak (Institute of the
History of Ukraine) discussed recent archival discoveries dealing with
the demographic impact of the Famine.
Despite methodical attempts by the Soviet regime to
eradicate all evidence of the massive scale of the starvation of the
Ukrainian peasantry, which Boriak characterized as deliberate
“archivocide,” relevant material has been found among the all-Union
statistical records in Moscow, in the repository of the Ukrainian
Ministry of Justice, and in the archives of the affected oblasts. Based
on these documents, statistical projections can now be made of direct
population losses totaling some three to four million.
Jacques Vallin (National Institute of Demographic Studies,
Paris) looked at the impact of the Famine in the late 1930s and the
period immediately preceding World War II, concluding that by the late
1930s Soviet Ukraine had suffered a global population loss of some 4.6
million.
His colleague, France Meslé, discussed population losses in
the longer term. According to her research, the population of Ukraine
today would be slightly over 80 million if it had had a history similar
to any of the countries in western Europe in the twentieth century. By
contrast, the 1991 Ukrainian census counted approximately 48 million.
And although the generation affected by the Holodomor is
rapidly disappearing, Meslé pointed out that there are still clear
signs of the population anomalies caused by the events of 1932–1933.
The discussant for the session was Oleh Wolowyna (Informed Decisions,
Inc.).
FIFTH
SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
The fifth session was chaired by Roman Szporluk (Harvard) and addressed
the impact of the Holodomor on present-day Ukrainian culture. Valerii
Vasylyev (Institute of the History of Ukraine) described how Soviet
elites in Ukraine from the 1950s to the 1970s viewed the Holodomor.
Using memoirs of party authorities, he described how they
survived the Famine in their youth; then he showed how they later
engaged with the trauma through documents that have been preserved in
Ukraine’s archives. There is much evidence that the intelligentsia was
fully aware of the manmade nature of the Holodomor and was disturbed by
that fact, although it was ultimately the Ukrainian diaspora
that pressed for the world to recognize what had happened.
Heorhii Kasianov (Institute of the History of Ukraine) then
discussed the invention of tradition and memory, and how a canonical
narrative about the Holodomor has formed in contemporary times both in
Ukraine and in the diaspora.
The narrative has proceeded from denial to recognition of
the event, then to recognition of the manmade nature of the event, its
anti-Ukrainian motivation, and finally to acknowledgment of the Famine
as genocide.
Next, Volodymyr Dibrova (Harvard) provided an overview of
how Ukrainianness itself - language, culture, and identity - was a
victim of the Holodomor. Grabowicz was discussant for the panel.
SIXTH
AND FINAL SESSION OF THE CONFERENCE
The final session was a roundtable panel, led by Serhii Plokhii
(Harvard) and including Graziosi, Szporluk, Felix Wemheuer (University
of Vienna), and Timothy Snyder (Yale University). Graziosi spoke on the
role played by the Famine in the eradication of the peasants as a class
in Ukraine, and Szporluk contrasted the impact of the Holodomor on
Ukraine with the consequences of the 1917 Revolution on Russia.
Wemheuer then described how the famine that raged during
China’s Great Leap Forward in 1958–1961 compares to the Holodomor, and
Snyder explored the links between 1932–1933 and the later actions of
the Third Reich against Ukraine and the Soviet Union.
The conference concluded with a keynote address by Werth, who declared
that in the years since the opening of the Sovietera archives,
“historiography has finally arrived, albeit late and tortuously, to a
more satisfactory overall understanding of the processes which led to
these murderous famines.”
CONFERENCE
PAPERS WILL BE PUBLISHED:
Plans are also being made to publish the papers in a special
volume of "Harvard Ukrainian Studies" edited by Graziosi and
Hajda.
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
34 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
617 495 4053; Fax 617 495 8097
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3.
"HUNGER BY DESIGN: THE GREAT UKRAINIAN
FAMINE
AND
ITS SOVIET CONTEXT"
New book published by Harvard University
Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI)
HURI NEWS, Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute
(HURI),
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Spring 2009
CAMBRIDGE, MA - "Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian
Famine and Its Soviet Context" was released as part of the Institute’s
larger effort to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the
Holodomor of 1932–1933.
The volume contains some of the papers presented at the
Institute’s 2003 symposium on the Famine, including Sergei Maksudov’s
largescale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era;
Niccolò Pianciola’s description of the denomadization famine in
Kazakhstan from 1931 to 1933; and Gijs Kessler’s study of events in the
Ural region from the same period.
Also included in the book are a foreword by Associate Director and
symposium organizer Lubomyr Hajda; Andrea Graziosi’s remarks on the
present state of Famine scholarship and how it addresses the question
of genocide; Hennadii Boriak’s assessment of the current state of
source material, and an essay by George Grabowicz on the legacy of the
Famine in Ukraine today.
The volume offers new contributions to scholarship on the
Famine as well as a tribute to those scholars who first broke ground in
the field in the 1980s.
NOTE:
Order the new book, "Hunder by Design" The Great Ukrainian
Famine and Its Soviet Context"
(ISBN 978-1-932650-05-1 $24.95) from any bookseller or Harvard
University Press: 800 405 1619;
www.hup.harvard.edu.
The Harvard Ukrainian Studies journal can be ordered directly from
HURI: e-mail,
[email protected].
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4.
SPECIAL HOLODOMOR ISSUE OF THE HARRIMAN REVIEW PUBLISHED
Harriman Institute at Columbia University,
New York, in cooperation with CIUS
Papers from "The Holodomor of 1932-1933" Conference in Toronto, Nov,
2007
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, Feb 4, 2009
TORONTO - The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies has had a
long-standing interest in furthering research on the Holodomor and
organizing academic discussion of that great tragedy.
In fulfilling this goal, CIUS, together with the Petro Jacyk Program
for the Study of Ukraine (University of Toronto) and the Ukrainian
Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, sponsored a 75th
anniversary conference on the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide in
Toronto in November 2007 under the title "The Holodomor of 1932–33."
The conference organizers invited four prominent scholars from
Ukraine to discuss the current state of Famine studies in the homeland.
The papers presented at that event have now appeared in a special
"Holodomor" issue of The Harriman Review, published by the Harriman
Institute at Columbia University in New York as part of the Famine
commemoration by the Ukrainian Program at that university.
Review editor Dr. Ronald Meyer invited the senior manuscript editor of
the CIUS Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine project, Andrij Makuch, to
serve as guest editor for this special issue.
Frank Sysyn, head of the CIUS Toronto Office and acting head of
Columbia’s Ukrainian Program, wrote the preface to the volume, noting
in particular the advance in Holodomor studies since the 50th anniversary of that event
in the early 1980s.
The articles focus on questions of the Famine as a public issue in
contemporary Ukraine, recent writing on Holodomor history, and the
location of source materials for present and future research about the
events of 1932–33.
JOURNALIST
AND SOCIAL CRITIC MYKOLA RIABUCHUK
In his article "Holodomor: The Politics of
Memory and Political Infighting in Contemporary Ukraine," the renowned
journalist and social critic Mykola Riabchuk writes about the cynical
and manipulative manner in which the post-Soviet Ukrainian leadership
treated the Famine issue.
The matter was given a certain amount of attention insofar as it
afforded legitimacy on the national question to the country’s new
masters, but it was never vigorously pursued before Viktor Yushchenko
came to power.
LIUDMYLA
HRYNEVYCH
Liudmyla Hrynevych, a senior scholar at the Institute of History,
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), examines "The Present
State of Ukrainian Historiography on the Holodomor and Prospects for
Its Development."
Her article provides a short overview of how the Famine was dealt with
- or not dealt with - in historical writing prior to 1991. She then
looks at developments in Holodomor historiography since that time, with
a separate treatment of how the matter has played out in ideological
popular writings.
TWO
ARTICLES ON ARCHIVAL MATTERS
The last two articles deal with archival
matters. "Holodomor Archives and Sources: The State of the Art" by
Hennadii Boriak, formerly director and then deputy director of the
State Committee on Archives of Ukraine and now a department head at the
NANU Institute of History who oversees its multivolume Entsyklopediia
ukrains′koi istorii project (in both hard copy and electronic forms),
looks at the current situation in Ukraine, where considerable effort
has been expended to make archival material on the Famine more readily
accessible.
He also makes some keen observations regarding illustrative
materials about collectivization and the Holodomor, as well as the
usefulness of death registers and district (raion) newspapers in
studying the Famine.
"Archives in Russia on the Famine in Ukraine" by Iryna Matiash,
director of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Archival Affairs and
Document Studies, looks at holdings in repositories in Russia. She
indicates that they contain a great deal of material dealing with the
Famine, but the full extent of Russia’s Holodomor-related holdings has
never been fully ascertained, let alone researched.
The November 2007 conference included commentaries by a number of
prominent Western specialists - Lynne Viola (University of Toronto),
Terry Martin (Harvard University), and Dominique Arel (Chair of
Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa). Their remarks do not appear
in this volume, but they can be viewed on a Webcast of the entire
conference proceedings, which can be found at the University of
Toronto’s Munk Centre site (see
http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Webcasts.aspx).
COPIES
OF HOLODOMOR SPECIAL ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE Copies of this special issue of The Harriman Review (vol.
16, no. 2 [November 2008]) can be obtained for US $10.00 (S&H
included) from The Harriman Institute, 420 West 118th Street, MC 3345,
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA (attn.: Dr. Ron Meyer).
Alternately, this publication is readily available online at the
Harriman Web site (see
http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/research/harriman_review.html).
Andrij Makuch, Toronto Office, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
430 Pembina Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G
2H8
Telephone: (780) 492-2972 Fax: (780) 492-4967; e-mail:
[email protected],
web:
www.ualberta.ca/cius
=======================================================
Mr. E. Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs, Washington
Office,
SigmaBleyzer, Emerging Markets Private Equity Investment
Group;
President/CEO, U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC)
Publisher & Editor, Action Ukraine Report (AUR)
Founder/Trustee: Holodomor: Through The Eyes Of Ukrainian
Artists