Abstract
Events in Ukraine during 1932–3 have been surrounded by controversy. Did a famine occur that took millions of lives? If a famine occurred, did natural causes (poor harvest and drought) and the destruction of livestock and seed grain during collectivization bring it about, or did the seizure of food by the Soviet authorities cause the famine? If the actions of Soviet authorities caused the famine, did they consist of a misdirected programme to secure and export foodstuffs for the industrialization campaign, a failure to respond to early reports of famine and an inability to mount effective countermeasures, or did they constitute a wilful policy not to provide assistance, a campaign to conceal famine and a callous refusal to accept foreign assistance? If the latter was the case, were the general ruthlessness of the Stalinist system and the regime’s disdain for the peasantry in the face of a disaster it had brought on by its own misguided policies the reasons, or did a preconceived plan to starve the peasantry exist? If the famine was the outcome of a preconceived plan, was the plan directed at the peasantry of the entire Soviet Union, or was it aimed at Ukraine and Ukrainians in particular as part of a destructive campaign against the Ukrainian nation? Notes
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Marco Carynnyk, ‘Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, the United States and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933’, in Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, eds., Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933 (Edmonton, 1986 ), pp. 109–38.
One cannot agree with Paul Robert Magocsi’s assertion about the famine that ‘Since the 1960s, textbook histories of Russia and the Soviet Union have taught thousands of North American college students the basic facts’. Paul Magocsi, ‘Famine and Genocide’, The World & I (April 1987): 417. As evidence, he quotes a phrase in Riasanovsky’s textbook ‘[in 1933] a frightful famine swept Ukraine’. Nicholas V Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York, 1963), p. 551. In fact, even the date is not given in Riasanovsky’s text.
In addition, the passage does not consider causation, magnitude or consequences. Magocsi also cites a passage from Basil Dmytryshyn, The USSR: a Concise History 4th edn (New York, 1984), p. 171, which has three sentences with a fuller description, albeit with no discussion of magnitude. It should be noted that Professor Dmytryshyn is a Ukrainian emigrant. Later in his review article, Magocsi himself maintains that ‘The need to strengthen the case put forth in The Harvest of Sorrow is not unimportant because the Soviet denial that a famine ever occurred and skepticism about claims to the contrary seem to prevail... Whereas histories of the Soviet Union published in the West have generally mentioned the famine, it has been buried among the many atrocities of Soviet society during the Stalin era’ (p. 422).
Donald Treadgold’s frequently used textbook, Twentieth Century Russia 7th edn (Boulder, San Francisco, London, 1990) (the name itself reveals Western attitudes towards the Soviet Union and the difficulties faced by non-Russian studies) demonstrates the limited attention devoted to the famine. There is only one mention of the famine which is lumped together with collectivization. ‘At least five million peasants died in the process of collectivization and the resultant famine (the figure Stalin revealed to Churchill at Yalta was ten million).
No wonder that there were Russians who survived the horrors of World War II who could not talk of their the fifth edition of Sidney Harcave, Russia: a History (Philadelphia and New York, 1964), p. 603, Harcave stated: Those conditions [peasant inexperience with collective farming, inadequate tools, and the lack of livestock for farming and food owing to slaughter by rich peasants] added to crop failures in 1931 and 1932, helped to bring about serious famine in parts of Ukraine and the North Caucasus in the winter of 1932–1933. No mention is made of the seizure of foodstuffs or the regimes refusal even to admit the existence of the famine. Systematic study of textbooks and widely read general works is needed to establish what the general public, students and scholars knew about the famine until the experiences years before, during collectivization, without losing their composure’ (p. 272). Not only is the tragedy implicitly made ‘Russian’, but the geography of the famine is not discussed. The section on Ukraine in this period (pp. 278–80) makes no mention of the famine at all. In the fifth edition of Sidney Harcave, Russia: a History (Philadelphia and New York, 1964), p. 603, Harcave stated: ‘Those conditions [peasant inexperience with collective farming, inadequate tools, and the lack of livestock for farming and food owing to slaughter by rich peasants] added to crop failures in 1931 and 1932, helped to bring about serious famine in parts of Ukraine and the North Caucasus in the winter of 1932–1933’. No mention is made of the seizure of foodstuffs or the regime’s refusal even to admit the existence of the famine. Systematic study of textbooks and widely read general works is needed to establish what the general public, students and scholars knew about the famine until the 1980s.
Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, The New York Times rebuffed the efforts of the Ukrainian community to have his picture removed from a place of honour in the paper’s offices and some of the paper’s discomfort with the famine issue may have been due to its embarrassing position. Subsequently, Duranty’s disgraceful role in professional journalism was fully researched by S. J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist (Oxford, 1990).
See also, Marco Carynnyk, ‘Making the News Fit to Print: Walter Duranty, The New York Times and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933’, Serbyn and Krawchenko, eds., Famine in Ukraine pp. 67–96.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: a New Civilization (London, 1937).
For a discussion of the revisionists and their criticism of the totalitarian school, see Jane Burbank, ‘Controversy over Stalinism: Searching for a Soviet Society’, Politics and Society 19, no. 3 (1991): 325–40. Examining the work of the revisionists at a time when glasnost in the Soviet Union was leading many Soviet citizens to search for a history of the groups and issues the revisionists had avoided, Burbank maintained, ‘My point is rather that western revisionists err both in sticking to the old story of socialist transformation and in holding to a single story line’ (p. 336).
See the study by Mykola Kovalevs’kyi, Ukraina pid chervonym iarmom: Dokumenty i fakty (Warsaw—Lviv, 1937). An article in the western Ukrainian daily Dilo in 1934 discussed the significance of the famine in changing the nationality balance in the Soviet Ukraine. ‘Skil’ky liudei pomerlo holodovoiu smertiu?!’ Dilo 6 December 1934.
One of the few studies by a non-Ukrainian author to appear on the famine in this period was Dana Dalrymple, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–34’, Soviet Studies 15, no. 3 (January 1964): 250–84 and ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–1934: Some Further References’, Soviet Studies 16, no. 4 (April 1965): 471–4.
Semen Pidhainy, ed., The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book 2 vols. (Toronto-Detroit, 1953–5);
Dmytro Solovij, The Golgotha of the Ukraine (New York, 1953);
M. Verbyts’kyi, Naibil’shyi zlochyn Kremlia: Zaplianovanyi shtuchnyi holod v Ukraini 1932–1933 rokiv (London, 1952);
Olexa Woropay, The Ninth Circle: In Commemoration of the Victims of the Famine of 1933 (London, 1954);
and Mykola Haliy, Organized Famine in Ukraine, 1932–33 (Chicago, 1963).
Evidence could also be found in the émigré memoirs of the highly placed Soviet official Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: the Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York, 1946) and I Chose Justice (New York, 1950).
Roma Hadzewycz et al. eds., The Great Famine in Ukraine (Jersey City, 1983);
Walter Dushnyck, 50 Years Ago: the Famine Holocaust in Ukraine (New York—Toronto, 1983);
Wasyl Hryshko, The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933 (Toronto, 1983);
Stephen Oleskiw, The Agony of a Nation: the Great Man-Made Famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933 (London, 1983).
See S. Maksudov [Aleksandr Babenyshev], ‘The Geography of the Soviet Famine of 1933’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 2 (1988): 52–8 and his article ‘Ukraine’s Demographic Losses, 1927–1938’, in Serbyn and Krawchenko, Famine in Ukraine 1932–33 pp. 27–44.
Bohdan Krawchenko, ‘The Man-Made Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine’, Conflict Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1984): 29–39.
Serbyn and Krawchenko, eds., Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933.
Miron Dolot, Who Killed Them and Why?: In Remembrance of Those Killed in the Famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine (Cambridge, MA:, 1984);
Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: the Hidden Holocaust (New York—London, 1985).
See James Mace, ‘Famine and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine’, Problems of Communism (May—June 1984): 37–50; James Mace, ‘The Man-Made Famine of 1933: What Happened and Why’, in Israel W. Charny, ed., Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide (Boulder, 1984 ), pp. 67–83.
See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the Thirties revised edition (New York, 1973).
Robert Conquest, Dana Dalrymple, James Mace and Michael Novak, The Man Made Famine in Ukraine (Washington, D.C., 1984), printed by the American Enterprise Institute.
See Vladimir N. Brovkin, ‘Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: a Challenge to Revisionists’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 11, no. 1–2 (June 1987): 234–45 and R. H. Johnson, Canadian Slavonic Papers 29, Nos. 2–3 (June-September 1987): 348–9. Johnson states that: ‘The centrality in this study of the Ukrainian hetacomb seems, to this reviewer, justified’.
Alec Nove assumed that there were over five million victims and called Conquest’s estimate of seven million well within the bounds of possibility. Alec Nove, ‘When the Head Is Off... ’The New Republic (3 November 1986): 34–7. In the early 1980s, a debate emerged on economic statistics and on demography and death losses during the Stalin period. Although it occurred just as the famine issue was being raised, it did not originate as a response, and the influence of public activity on its course remains to be examined. The debate began over the Soviet economy and forced labour statistics. It was initiated by S. Rosefielde in ‘The First “Great Leap Forward”’Slavic Review 39, no. 4 (December 1980): 559–582.
and the articles by S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Labour in the Soviet Union, 1929–1956’, Soviet Studies 33 (April 1981): 265–95, and ‘Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics’, Soviet Studies 35 (April 1983): 223–232.
More direct attention to population statistics resulted in further debate that came to be focused more frequently on the famine See Steven Rosefielde, ‘Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union: a Reconsideration of the Demographic Consequences of Forced Industrialization, 1929–1949’, Soviet Studies 35, no. 3 (July 1983): 385–409;
Steven Rosefielde, ‘Excess Collectivization Deaths, 1929–1933: New Demographic Evidence’, Slavic Review 43, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 83–8;
Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘A Note on S. Rosefielde’s Calculations of Excess Mortality in the USSR, 1929–1949’, Soviet Studies 36 (April 1984): 277–81;
Steven Rosefielde, ‘New Demographic Evidence on Collectivization Deaths: a Rejoinder to Stephen Wheatcroft’, Slavic Review 44 (Fall 1985): 509–16;
Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘New Demographic Evidence on Excess Collectivization Deaths: Yet Another Kliukva from S. Rosefielde’, Slavic Review 44 (Fall 1985): 505–8.
Also see B. A. Anderson and Brian Silver, ‘Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR’, Slavic Review 44 (Fall 1985): 517–36. (This article mentions a publication on the Ukrainian famine to which Mace, Conquest and Dalrymple contributed. It may be seen as an outcome of the Harvard Famine Project, and it discusses the new attention given to the Ukrainian famine, pp. 518, 532–4). The Slavic Review then published a compendium entitled ‘Ongoing Discussion’, which included letters by Robert Conquest, Stephen Cohen and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, pp. 295–9 and Steven Rosefielde, ‘Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR: A Rejoinder to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver’, pp. 300–6 and Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, ‘Tautologies in the Study of Excess Mortality in the USSR in the 1930s’, pp. 307–13, in the Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986 ).
J. Arch Getty, ‘Starving the Ukraine’, London Review of Books 9, no. 2 (22 January 1987): 7–8.
For a review written in a scholarly tone that is largely negative concerning Conquest’s estimate of the number of victims, his assertion of Ukrainian specificity, and his attribution of causes to Communist ideology, see R. W. Davies, Detente, nos. 9–10 (1987): 44–5.
The volume was published in Toronto in 1987 by Progress Publishers. The introduction contains a long citation from Getty’s review to support the linkage of the famine issue with a campaign to divert attention from war crimes (p. 3). Tottle admitted that a famine had occurred, but attributed it to drought and kulak sabotage. He argued that figures cited by Conquest and others were wildly exaggerated, but he did not provide his own figures. He maintained that epidemics and not hunger caused many deaths without discussing the relationship of the two phenomena (pp. 92–4). Also see his review ‘The Realm of Subjectivity’, Canadian Dimension (March 1987): 36–7. A response published by Jars Balan questioned why so much of the left continued to pretend that the Ukrainian famine had never happened and why the Ukrainian question was usually dismissed as being irrelevant, non-existent or the exclusive concern of rightist nationalists Canadian Dimension (October 1987): 2, 46. For a discussion on the role of the Communist Party of Canada and the authorization of Kyiv in publishing the book, see Petro Kravchuk,Our History: the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Movement in Canada, 1907–1991 (Toronto, 1996 ), pp. 248–51.
Jeff Coplon, ‘In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: a 55 Year Old Famine Feeds the Right’, The Village Voice (12 January 1988): 28, 30, 32. Coplon’s ideological fervour resulted in his use of inflammatory language and distortion of the facts. He characterized the Ukrainian National Association as having a ‘hard right tradition’ (in fact, it had a mixed constituency) and imputed that the World Congress of Free Ukrainians had fascist antecedents. Ukrainian nationalism was described historically as a ‘narrow, urban middle-class movement’ that had little support among the peasantry, an assertion clearly unfounded for western Ukraine and questionable for eastern Ukraine after World War I. Coplon admitted that hundreds of thousands and possibly one or two million Ukrainians died during the famine, but he quoted Getty’s review to maintain that the blame was not on one side. Among others, Coplon quoted Douglas Tottle. In assembling statements against Conquest’s book, Coplon also quoted Moshe Lewin as saying ‘This is crap, rubbish’ and ‘I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors until it becomes a pathology’. Roberta Manning of Boston College had the most intemperate remarks attributed to her. Speaking of James Mace, she is quoted as saying, ‘I doubt he could have gotten a real academic job. Soviet studies is a very competitive field these days — there is much weeding out after the Ph.D. If he hadn’t hopped on this political cause, he would be doing research for a bank, or running an export-import business’. It is of interest that Professor Manning, whom Coplon described as a ‘veteran Sovietologist’, had no monograph on Soviet history at that time, while Dr Mace had published the generally well-received volume Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: 1983). While Coplon may not have quoted the scholars accurately, the letters published in The Village Voice about the article include none from the scholars quoted.
James E. Mace and Leonid Heretz, eds., Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932–1933: Oral History Project, vols. 1–3 ( Washington, D.C., 1990 ).
At the Second Congress of Famine Researchers in December 1994, the political significance of the famine was very much in evidence. The deaths of the activists Volodymyr Maniak and Lidia Kovalenko, who had organized Memorial’s collections of materials, had obviously weakened activities. Still, it was reported that 48 famine monuments were planned. The political nature of the issue was clear in the remarks of Levko Lukianenko, a long-term political prisoner under the Soviets and a leader of the current democratic national opposition who, according to News from Ukraine, maintained that ‘the research of the famine is deliberately hampered by former members of the occupation bodies of power. Today, they hold office again and feel responsible for the crimes committed’. Lukianenko was elected chairman, and vowed to appeal for recognition for the crimes of Russian communism against the Ukrainian nation. News from Ukraine no. 1 (1995). For the current state of the discussion, see Dzeims Meis (James Mace), ‘Politychni prychyny holodomoru v Ukraini (1932–1933 rr.)’, Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhumal no. 1 (1995): 34–48.
Stephen Wheatcroft has raised his estimates of famine losses throughout the Soviet Union from 3–4 million to 4–5 million based on statistics of death registrations. Although he discusses the high rates of mortality throughout Ukraine, he does not give a figure for how many of the deaths were in Ukraine. See ‘More Light on the Scale of the Repression and the Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s’, in J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (n.p., 1993), pp. 280, 282–3, and Alec Nove’s article, ‘How Many Victims in the 1930s?’, in Soviet Studies 42, no. 2 (April 1990): 355–73. Stanislav Kulchyts’kyi argues that Wheatcroft’s use of death registry statistics underestimates the number of deaths because the statistics are inaccurate. Using the 1937 census and the shortfall of population in Ukraine after migration, he estimates 3–3.5 million deaths and 1–1.3 million unborn who would have been born had the famine not occurred. ‘Ukraine’s Demographic Losses from the Famine in 1932–33 According to the General Census of the Population in 1937’. Unpublished paper, 1994.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sysyn, F. (1999). The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3: The Role of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Research and Public Discussion. In: Chorbajian, L., Shirinian, G. (eds) Studies in Comparative Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27348-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27348-5_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27350-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27348-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)