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Kiev Journal
A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
KIEV, Ukraine - A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named
Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an
insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed
millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural
disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.
Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.
The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the
famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement
lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial
itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame,
seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.
"It is a sign of our respect for the past," Professor Kulchytsky said.
"Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when
it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations
on."
The concrete memorial was dedicated last November, the 75th anniversary
of the famine, in a park in Kiev, on a hillside overlooking the Dnieper
River in the shadow of the onion domes of a revered Orthodox Christian
monastery. More than 100 feet tall, the memorial will eventually house a
small museum that will offer testimony from survivors, as well as
information about the Ukrainian villages that suffered.
In the Soviet Union, the authorities all but banned discussion of the
famine, but by the 1980s the United States and other countries were
pressing their own inquiries, often at the urging of Ukrainian immigrants.
In response, Communist officials embarked on a propaganda drive to play
down the famine and show that the deaths were caused by unforeseen food
shortages or drought. Professor Kulchytsky said he had been given the
task of gathering research but concluded that the famine had been man-made.
"I became convinced that everything was not as I once thought," he said.
He refused to falsify his findings and instead released them publicly,
escaping punishment only because glasnost had begun under the Soviet
leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
The famine is known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor - literally, death or
killing by starvation - and the campaign to give it recognition has
played a significant role in the Ukrainian quest to shape a national
identity in the post-Soviet era. It has also further strained relations
with the Kremlin, another of the festering disputes left by the breakup
of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange
Revolution of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered
because he wanted to decimate the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out
aspirations for independence from Moscow.
The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said
Professor Kulchytsky, who is deputy director of the Institute of
Ukrainian History in Kiev.
Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has
somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the
horrors of that time.
"It is difficult to bear," he acknowledged. "The documents about
cannibalism are especially difficult to read."
Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the
Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged
war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended
that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially
quarantining and starving many villages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/world/europe/16kiev.html?_r=1&hp