The Holodomor is Recognized Officially, but Unofficially…?

By Taras Paslavskyi, Kharkiv

Just a couple of days before the vote in the Ukrainian Parliament on the bill that recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, the Kharkiv Regional Institute of Public Administration of the National Academy of Public Administration, attached to the Office of the President of Ukraine, organized and held a “scientific and practical” conference on the Holodomor. The conference on November 22 was titled “The Pages of Memory: the Tragedy of the Ukrainian People 1932 –1933.”  Its objective was to shed some “scientific” light on the causes of the Holodomor, its victims and perpetrators and the “practical” effects of the Holodomor on Ukraine today.  The National Academy invited me to attend this conference as an observer.

A number of local scholars, politicians and guest speakers from the regional administration and the Verkhovna Rada, or Parliament, presented their views and research papers on this topic.  Many of them, however, politicized the issue by pointing fingers at each other. They tried to explain why the bill on the Holodomor was not introduced into legislation earlier or apologized for its late introduction. Others defended the position that the famine occurred due to an inefficient centralized government administrative policy, and they argued that in order to avoid any future threats of famines there is a need for Ukraine’s current central government to grant more autonomous administrative power to regional governments.

Still others expressed their views that legislation on the Holodomor alone will not improve people’s awareness or attitudes towards it, especially when they are surrounded by communist monuments and emblems, and when some of the Soviet leaders/perpetrators, like Postyshev and Kosior, are romanticized and their names are given to local streets.  At the conference, calls were also made by a passionate and conscientious group of speakers to change the names of these streets named after the communist leaders involved in the Holodomor.  Unfortunately, these calls were to no avail as they passed over individuals’ heads as the audience, predominately composed of students, was yawning and acting bored during challenging and sensitive parts of the lectures.  According to Anatoliy Tamm, a faculty member at the previously mentioned educational institution, students were bored and yawning because they were not attending voluntarily but were forced or received directives to be present at this conference. 

Such a light attitude towards the Ukrainian genocide only goes to show that many people in Ukraine still take the Holodomor lightly and have ambiguous or indifferent feelings about it.  Furthermore, various facts that are accepted all over the world are not accepted by a significant number of Ukrainians. 

The second part of the conference was conducted in smaller groups, where the Master-level students presented their research papers and lectures on the Holodomor pertaining to a specific Ukrainian region: for example, Luhansk region, Sumy region, Kharkiv region, and so on.  As students were presenting their material, none was courageous enough to call this man-made famine of the 1930s a genocide.  Personally, as an observer, I was stunned when not a single presenter dared to state that this famine was in fact a genocide against the Ukrainian people.  By failing to use the term genocide, in accordance with its meaning, students lightened and reduced the impact of the whole conference.  It seems that they did not believe their own research and, therefore, were not convinced that there is a need for all this talk or that there is a need to seek justice. 

Clearly, these students are either indifferent or disagree with the assertion aptly made by one pundit that “once the victims are known and crimes are identified and recognized, the only next logical step is to prosecute perpetrators.”  Unfortunately, this will not be happening anytime soon as most of the audience was merely satisfied with remembering those who perished.  This is not to say, however, that all Kharkiv residents are totally against the idea of remembering the Holodomor and bringing justice to people that have committed atrocious crimes against humanity.

As the adjectives “scientific” and “practical,” which were used to describe the conference, suggest, the gathering should have had practical results, not only in terms of providing a rationale for observing November 25, the Holodomor Day of Remembrance, but also in affecting attitudes of ordinary citizens.  As the Chinese proverb says: “The one who defines the term, wins the arguments.” However, the presenters and organizers at Kharkiv’s National Academy of Public Administration failed to define the terms as they did not convey to the audience that the Holodomor was in fact a genocide. Consequently, is it is clear that the Holodomor issue is not yet over and has not been put to rest by all Ukrainians.  Officially it is recognized, but unofficially it is not.

Taras Paslavskyi, M.Div., is a founder and president of the Providence Education Center in Kharkiv, Ukraine. For more information about the center, visit: http://www.prov.in.ua/