Genocide in the Ukraine: Its Secret Belongs to Humanity

Ukrainians share a horrible secret with Jews, Armenians, Cambodians and other victim-survivors of genocide. It is the secret of memories that can be told but never shared. It is a secret not because those who keep it would have it so, but because those who have not experienced it cannot fully comprehend it, no matter how they try.

Unlike the others, Ukrainians bear a double secret--the interior one of what they experienced, and the world’s ignorance of it.

The facts are stark: In 1932-33 millions of people in the Ukraine starved to death in direct consequence of government policy. The figure usually given is 7 million, but that is only an educated guess, as are the figures of 6 million Jews, 1.5 million Armenians and so forth. When murder is committed on such a scale, even the perpetrators lose count, and scholars are left with fragmentary evidence, a jigsaw to put together as best they can.

The significance of genocide is in any case more qualitative than quantitative, more in the nature of the act itself than in the number of its victims. The individual victims are secondary to the real victim: a nation, a religion, a race--an integral part of humanity.

Like the Cambodian genocide, the Ukrainian was ultimately unsuccessful. Like Cambodia, the Ukraine continues to exist--but as a conquered nation, occupied and controlled by foreigners.

Ukrainians, now numbering more than 42 million, constitute one of 15 republics in the multinational Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, second in population only to the capital republic of historic Russia. When the Russian and Austrian empires disintegrated during World War I, the Ukraine declared its national independence, as did all the nations lying between the ethnic territories of Germany and Russia. Lenin and the Russians were able to conquer the Ukraine only after a protracted struggle and substantial concessions to national aspirations. For a decade, Ukrainians were to the Soviet Union what Poles later became to the Soviet Bloc--the perpetual thorn in the side of the larger entity, most conscious of their national identity, most assertive of their prerogatives and least willing to follow Moscow’s example in organizing their internal life.

The majority of Ukrainians lived in the countryside, in a centuries-old agrarian tradition, and that was where the opposition to Moscow arose. At the end of the 1920s the Soviet Communist Party announced the “collectivization of agriculture on the basis of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” as the official phrase went. With “collectivization,” farmers lost claim to their land, and were forced to bring the fruits of their labor to a central point so that the state could more easily take its share. To many villagers this was practically indistinguishable from the conditions of serfdom under which their grandparents had toiled. “Kulaks” was a sort of generic category for rural “class enemies,” and state policy required their “liquidation” because only through the elimination of village leadership could the ability to resist be broken. At the same time, a thorough purge of other indigenous leaders--priests, writers, teachers--began.

By mid-1932 the war had virtually been won; 80% of the farmland had been collectivized. At least 200,000 farm families--1 million individuals--had their property seized; most were killed or exiled to Siberia or Central Asia.

The huge quotas imposed on the Ukraine by the authorities in Moscow could not be met. The Ukrainian Communist Party predicted a catastrophe and begged for relief. Meanwhile, Moscow was dumping a million tons of grain on a depressed Western market.

Despite superhuman effort, the Ukraine slipped further behind its quota. Moscow dispatched a virtual army to assist--mainly urban outsiders. After the 1932 harvest was taken from the collective farms, the grain collectors went around to farm houses. They searched every nook and cranny for concealed foodstuffs, even tearing up stoves to find bags of flour scrapings that desperate farmers had mixed with finely ground leaves. The slogan was: “The struggle for bread is the struggle for socialism.”

The population was utterly deprived of sustenance. Each survivor has his or her own story of those days. Most were saved by their cleverness in outwitting the commissars. Others exchanged small gold or silver mementos--a wedding ring, a silver crucifix--for food at special stores set up for this purpose.

For those not so fortunate, the sentence was death by starvation. Whole villages succumbed. Those who were children at the time remember being told not to go out alone for fear of being eaten by neighbors crazed by starvation. Those who lived in the cities recall that much of the meat in urban markets was thought to be human.

The Ukraine and the adjacent Cossack territories of the Caucasus were written off; the border between them and Russia proper was closed. Famine did its work in secret.

Only in the wake of World War II did sizable numbers of eyewitnesses flee to the West, but by that time few people cared to hear their story. The Ukrainian famine virtually disappeared from public awareness, almost as if it had never happened.

Why did it happen? Historians must turn to circumstantial evidence and try to judge the tree by its fruits. The famine was localized in areas with populations that had proved to be particularly stubborn in opposing the social and national policies of Stalin: Ukrainians, Cossacks, Tatars and Volga Germans. The famine was imposed, and the reason becomes clear when we see what accompanied it: strict centralization; the withdrawal of all concessions to non-Russian national groups; Russification in language, thought and ideology. Everything that hinted at nationalism was eradicated.

The famine was a forceful blow against the very body of Ukrainian nationhood. It transcended the millions of individuals who died, as the nation itself became the primary victim. This is the hallmark of genocide.

Memory of such tragedy is a difficult thing, even when the regime that committed the atrocity is no more. The Jews who lived through the Holocaust have amply documented the terrible psychic cost that must be paid by those who survive such inhumanity. Ukrainians have an additional burden, in that the regime that victimized them is still very much in power.

Yet survivors always bear the debt of remembrance, the duty of ensuring that those who died will not be forgotten. It is for this reason that the Ukrainian-American community lately has found a renewed determination to tell the story of its people’s tragedy. Even though what happened in the Ukraine 50 years ago remains beyond our full comprehension, the secret of the Ukrainian genocide belongs to humanity as a whole, for any genocide diminishes all of humanity.