The Politics of Genocide

By Lisa Shymko

Recently, Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yushchenko, traveled to Israel—a nation for whom the term “genocide” has become an indelible part of its collective memory—and asked the Israeli government to endorse a UN resolution recognizing the Soviet-era forced famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine as an act of genocide. For Israeli officials and members of the Knesset, it will not be an easy decision to make, since Jewish leaders have long maintained that the Holocaust was unique and should not be equated with other genocides.

Israelis have also hesitated to endorse the Ukrainian position, for fear of straining Israel’s delicate relations with Russia. Ehud Olmert is hoping to convince Russia to use its geopolitical influence in the Caspian Basin to stave off a military confrontation with Teheran over its nuclear program. Yet so far, as Moscow undertakes a series of cozy deals with Iran and Syria, Vladimir Putin has done little to appease Israeli concerns.

Will Israel hold off on backing Ukraine’s UN resolution in an attempt to woo the Kremlin? Only time will tell. One thing is clear, the Russians do not want to see improved relations between Israel and Ukraine. Historically, Moscow has benefited from the painful rifts of the past, and the Kremlin is not happy to see Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko proposing a more dynamic Ukraine-Israel relationship.

Recently, Ukraine’s President announced the return of 1,000 Torah scrolls previously confiscated from Ukraine’s Jewish communities during the communist regime. Yushchenko has also proposed legislation to criminalize the denial of the Holocaust.

This year the international community will begin commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the 1932-33 state-sponsored famine in Ukraine, masterminded by Joseph Stalin. The premeditated policy of forced grain seizures targeted Ukraine’s anti-Soviet rural population and resulted in mass murder by starvation.  As Ukraine’s independent-minded rural population faced sweeping food confiscations enforced by the notorious OGPU-NKVD secret police, the desperate resorted to cannibalism.

But few in the West were aware of the genocide. While Ukrainians starved to death, Moscow dumped millions of tons of cheap grain on Western markets. When Western journalists like the Welsh reporter Gareth Jones, stationed in the USSR in the 1930’s, secretly traveled to Ukraine, uncovering information about the decimation of entire rural towns and villages, pro-Soviet apologists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times published fabricated stories of well-fed peasants in an attempt to suppress the truth.

Those in Ukraine’s Communist Party who dared to speak out, were meticulously purged by Stalin. Mass executions of Ukraine’s intellectual elite followed. The result was a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. By 1933, as a result of Stalin’s State Decree, all territories previously populated by Ukrainians, now de-populated by the forced famine, were systematically settled by ethnic Russians.

Ironically, as the international community prepares to vote on a UN General Assembly resolution introduced by Ukraine that would condemn Stalin’s actions in Ukraine as nothing less than genocide, Russia— the self-appointed successor state of the Soviet Union— has vowed to oppose the passage of such a resolution.

The Kremlin has yet to come to terms with its genocidal past.  In a recent article published by Russia’s Novosti news service, the Russian author, Andrei Marchukov, referred to the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine as “propaganda” and called recent efforts to uncover previously censored information on the tragedy “sensation whipped up over bygones.” Bygones indeed!

It is estimated that at least 7 million perished as a result of Stalin’s induced famine in Ukraine. According to research presented at a 2001 Population Conference in Brazil, historian Mark Tolts, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, stated that, up until recently, it had been difficult for historians to reach an exact figure on the number of victims, since Stalin personally falsified the Soviet Union’s demographic data after the 1932-33 famine. In fact, according to Tolts, three successive heads of the Soviet Central Statistical Administration were executed by Stalin, in a deliberate attempt to cover-up the shocking human losses.

Recently, Ukraine declassified over one hundred documents pertaining to the 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine and repressions of the 1930’s from its Security Service Archives. The documents are eye-opening because they show that international humanitarian aid was systematically denied to Ukraine’s starving population. But countless more Soviet-era documents remain locked in Russian archives, inaccessible to Western historians.

The Kremlin’s image is in need of a major makeover. Allegations of state-complicity in the assassinations of Alexander Litvinenko in Great Britain and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow, have done little to enhance Russia’s international image as a democratic, peace-loving nation. More recently, the Kremlin has failed to crackdown on home-grown racist youth gangs, responsible for a series of cross-border attacks on Jews and visible minorities in Russia and Ukraine.

Last week, Russian politician Grigory Yavlinsky called on the Russian government to undertake “a de-Stalinization program” to remember the millions of victims of Soviet repression. Russia’s Memorial Human Rights Society issued a statement asking the Russian government “to acknowledge past crimes and offer apologies to the victims,” including the former Soviet Union’s repressed ethnic groups.

It’s time for Russia to make peace with its past, by showing a willingness to make peace with its neighbors. Acknowledging Stalin’s genocidal complicity in the 1932-33 state-sponsored Famine in Ukraine would be an important first step.

Lisa Shymko is a Canadian political scientist and Director of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine established by Canadian Friends of Ukraine.