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How Many Perished in the Famine and Why Does It Matter?

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  • How Many Perished in the Famine and Why Does It Matter?

    BRAMA (press release), NY
    Feb 2 2008


    Op-ed

    How Many Perished in the Famine and Why Does It Matter?
    - John-Paul Himka


    Even after I had earned a PhD in history from the University of
    Michigan and had been working as a researcher at the Canadian
    Institute of Ukrainian Studies for several years, I was extremely
    naive about how scholars arrived at estimates for major catastrophes
    on the order of the Holocaust of the Jews or the Holodomor in
    Ukraine. When I was a young man, most of what I read suggested that
    each of these events took about six million lives. I thought that
    either the murderers kept a tally of their victims or else it was a
    fairly simple matter of subtracting the results of one census from
    those of another.

    I began to realize the complexity of the issue rather late, in 1980.
    I was working closely at that time with a scholar from Poland who was
    a visiting professor at CIUS, Janusz Radziejowski. He was mainly in
    Edmonton to help prepare the uncensored English version of his book
    on the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, which the Institute
    published in 1983. But one day he said to me that he also had an
    interest in collectivization in Ukraine and in the great famine of
    1932-33 and would like to present a paper based on his research. He
    wrote it all up, presented it at seminars in Edmonton and Toronto,
    and then published it in the Fall 1980 issue of the Journal of
    Ukrainian Studies.

    Janusz had demographic training and was used to working with census
    materials. Therefore, at the end of his paper, he offered a brief
    estimate of the population losses from collectivization and famine.
    The conclusion he came to was that there was a "demographic loss of
    9,263,000" Ukrainians in the USSR between 1926 and 1939. I was
    astounded at this high number. I never realized, I said, that the
    famine killed over 9 million people. He patiently explained to me
    that a demographic loss is not the same as the number of persons
    killed. In addition to the latter, this number includes children not
    born to those killed, other children not born for other reasons
    connected to collectivization and famine, and Ukrainians who
    assimilated to Russian nationality. Given the data available at that
    time, he doubted that we could sort out how much of this loss was
    attributable to each category.

    My next close encounter with these issues came in 1983-84. I was a
    Neporany Fellow at CIUS, and my only obligation was to work on my
    book about Galician villagers and the Ukrainian national movement in
    the nineteenth century. I would spend every day in an office in the
    basement of Athabasca Hall poring over my sources and writing my
    monograph. In the room next to me was another researcher, also
    working on a book on the Ukrainian peasantry. This was Alex
    Babyonyshev, better known under his pseudonym Maksudov. He was a
    former human-rights activist in the USSR and interested in
    demographic questions, history, and politics. His book was about
    collectivization and the famine.

    Needless to say, two researchers with a basement to themselves and
    working on related topics entered into intense discussions of their
    projects. Alex tested every one of his ideas on me and had me read
    and discuss everything he wrote. For me, it was like a year-long
    seminar on how collectivization was implemented and on how to arrive
    at a more accurate estimate of the population losses. I learned that
    these estimates were much more complex than even Janusz had taught
    me. Alex was busy drawing up graphs of the age structure of
    populations (they look like Christmas trees), examining economic
    indicators that might help estimate the extent of out-migration from
    Ukraine in the 1930s, and attacking the problem from numerous other
    angles. His book was never published in English, but the results of
    his research appeared in a Russian-language book, Poteri naseleniia
    SSSR (1989). He estimated that the total demographic loss in Ukraine
    came to 4.5 million.

    Later, in the mid-1990s, I began to work as a side theme on the
    Holocaust. My readings in this field only reinforced the lessons I
    had learned earlier on the difficulty of estimating the number of
    victims when mass murder was involved. It was often helpful to
    scholars when a particular German unit would report to Berlin that
    they had dispatched a certain number of Jews in such and such a
    locality, but generally the picture was extremely fuzzy.

    I bring all this up to help explain why I am disturbed by blithe
    claims I see being made about seven or ten million Ukrainians killed
    in the famine. I know that President Viktor Yushchenko and his
    administration are also using the ten million figure. That does not
    make it correct, however.

    It used to be that President Yushchenko relied for advice on
    historical issues on a professional historian, Stanislav Kulchytsky,
    but in the past six months or so he seems to have decided to use
    history as a political tool and, as the saying goes, does not want to
    be confused by the facts. In Ukraine politicians frequently appeal to
    identity politics, since symbols are easier to deliver than better
    health care, education, or civil service.

    Dr. Kulchytsky was one of the ideological architects of Yushchenko's
    campaign to have the Ukrainian famine recognized internationally as a
    genocide. He devoted a number of publications in 2005 precisely to
    explaining why the famine fit the definition. These publications
    appeared in Ukrainian, Russian, and English. The latter were
    circulated electronically by The Day in Kyiv as well as by E. Morgan
    Williams' Action Ukraine Report and Dominque Arel's Ukraine List. (I
    have reviewed the key text in the Summer 2007 issue of Kritika:
    Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History.) In the texts of 2005,
    Kulchytsky stuck to the results of his earlier research on the
    demographic effects of the famine in Ukraine: that there were
    3,238,000 deaths directly attributable to the Holodomor.

    Kulchytsky had conducted careful research on the subject and
    published several works devoted to the demography of the famine,
    notably Demohrafichni naslidky holodmoru 1933 r. v Ukraini, which
    came out in 2003. What distinguishes Kulchytsky's research from that
    of the earlier researchers who gave me my first lessons in famine
    demographics is that it draws on statistical information that was not
    available before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of
    the archives.

    Kulchytsky also drew heavily on recent studies by the Australian
    historian and demographer Stephen Wheatcroft. Wheatcroft had once
    produced estimates that were much too low for the losses connected
    with famine and collectivization, but in the past several years he
    has corrected his methodological errors and supplemented his sources
    with formerly inaccessible Soviet documentation. Wheatcroft now
    estimates that there were 3-3.5 million excess deaths in Ukraine (and
    about 6-7 million in the USSR as a whole).

    Another serious attempt to estimate the losses in Ukraine was
    conducted by a team of French and Ukrainian demographers (Jacques
    Vallin, France Mesle, Serguei Adamets, and Serhii Pirozhkov). The
    results of their research were published in Population Studies, which
    is a top journal in the field of demography (November 2002). Here is
    their conclusion: "The disasters of the decade culminated in the
    horrific famine of 1933. These events resulted in a dramatic fall in
    fertility and a rise in mortality. Our estimates suggest that total
    losses can be put at 4.6 million, 0.9 million of which was due to
    forced migration, 1 million to a deficit in births, and 2.6 million
    to exceptional mortality."

    So how many people were actually killed by the famine? From 2.5 to
    3.5 million. Those who died disproportionately were the rural
    population (predominantly Ukrainians) and little children. May their
    memory be eternal.

    And let me add: may it be unsullied by falsehood.

    I find it disrespectful to the dead that people use their deaths in a
    ploy to gain the moral capital of victimhood. To this end, they
    inflate the numbers. Let me just take one symptomatic case. Marta
    Tomkiw and Bobby Leigh are working on a film about the famine (google
    holodomorthemovie to see the trailer). The trailer opens with a
    definition of Holodomor. There follow the texts cited below:

    "The Darfur, Sudan Genocide claimed the lives of 180,000 people in 4
    years.
    "The Armenian Genocide claimed the lives of 1-1/2 million people from
    1915 to 1918.
    "The Holocaust claimed the lives of 6-1/2 million people in 9 years.
    "They are not forgotten.
    "Unfortunately, Holodomor has exceeded these tragedies by claiming
    the lives of 10 million Ukrainians in only 17 months.
    "History knows no other crime of such nature and magnitude."

    Here I do not want to single out this particular movie project for
    criticism. These are views one can easily find in many other
    Ukrainian representations of the famine, particularly in the North
    American diaspora. But the trailer formulates them clearly.

    The point of these ideas is that the Holodomor is bigger than the
    others, particularly bigger than the Holocaust. I do not understand
    why others are not offended by this competition for victimhood, even
    if the numbers were true, which they are not. I think the discussion
    of tragedies like these demands a certain moral probity. Disasters
    like these should not be taken lightly, manipulated,
    instrumentalized, or falsified. Moreover, these are not simply
    deaths, but crimes, murders, violations of the moral order. How much
    more careful we should be about them, how much more respectful of the
    truth.

    Even if the Holodomor did account for 10 million victims, and even if
    this competition for the greatest number of victims were perfectly
    decent, the final claim, about this being the biggest crime in
    history, would still be incorrect. There was also a famine in China
    directly attributable to the campaign for the Great Leap Forward.
    Again, it is difficult to estimate the number of losses, but Western
    and Chinese scholars estimate that from 15 to 43 million peasants
    starved to death in China in 1959-61. (In a forthcoming number of
    Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History, the Viennese
    scholar Felix Wemheuer will be comparing the famines in Ukraine and
    China.)

    Somehow a gap has opened up between scholarship in Ukrainian studies
    and popular diaspora notions of history. Here I have attempted to
    bridge that gap with information about the number of deaths actually
    attributable to the Holodomor. But I am also raising a moral question
    about how we should remember our dead. Many thinkers across the world
    are increasingly disturbed about what happens to the memorialization
    of the dead in the context of the nation and the state. I will leave
    those debates aside. But I think it should be clear to all that the
    respect and honesty we owe the departed means that we should refrain
    from using their deaths to gain political popularity in Ukraine or to
    score points in interethnic rivalry in North America. Above all, we
    must be careful not to embed their deaths in a falsehood.

    Dr. John-Paul Himka is a professor at the University of Alberta
    Department of History and Classics. His areas of expertise are
    Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Iconography of the Eastern Church, Memory of
    World War II, and the Holocaust.

    http://www.brama.com/news/press/2008/02/080202hi mka_famine.html
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