TORONTO — This week, Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yushchenko,
will travel to Israel — a nation for whom the term “genocide” has
become an indelible part of its collective memory — where he is
expected to ask Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to endorse a UN
resolution put forth by Ukraine recognizing the Soviet-era forced
famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine as an act of genocide. For Prime
Minister Olmert 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.
Complicating the matter is the new political reality in the
Middle East. Israelis have hesitated to endorse the Ukrainian
position, for fear of straining Israel’s delicate relations with
Russia.
Olmert is hoping to convince Russia to use its geopolitical
influence in the Caspian basin to stave off a military
confrontation with Tehran 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 Prime Minister Olmert 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. Historic synagogues in
Ukraine have been returned to Jewish communities and President
Yushchenko has ordered Ukraine’s Security Service to establish a
special department to combat hate crimes. Yushchenko has also
proposed legislation to criminalize the denial of the
Holocaust.
So why is the Kremlin irritated over Ukraine’s pursuit of the
genocide issue? Because the current government in Moscow is still
unwilling to deal with the ugly side of its Stalinist past.
THIS YEAR THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY will begin commemorating the
75th anniversary of the 1932-33 state-sponsored famine in Ukraine,
masterminded by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The premeditated
policy of forced grain seizures targeted Ukraine’s anti-Soviet
rural population and resulted in mass murder by starvation. The
artificially induced famine, known as the Holodomor, claimed the
lives of millions of victims. The genocide was the precursor to the
bloody Red Terror that later swept the entire USSR.
Having resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization, Ukraine’s
independent-minded rural population faced sweeping food
confiscations enforced by the notorious OGPU-NKVD secret police.
Starving Ukrainian peasants initially tried surviving on hay,
weeds, and leaves, even stripping trees of their bark. As
conditions worsened, some, on the verge of insanity, resorted to
cannibalism, feeding on the remains of the recently deceased.
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 1930s, 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. Ukraine’s aspirations for
independence were to be squashed at all costs. 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.
In 2006, after decades of denials and cover-ups, the Parliament
of Ukraine shed its Soviet legacy and passed legislation
recognizing the 1932-33 Ukrainian Forced Famine as an act of
genocide. In recent years, an ever-growing number of countries,
including the USA, Australia, Italy, Poland, Spain, Brazil,
Argentina, to name just a few, have officially acknowledged this
heinous crime to be genocide. This year, Canada’s Parliament is
expected to adopt a similar resolution in the House of Commons,
mirroring a unanimous motion passed in the Senate in 2003.
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, while others
were arrested, in a deliberate attempt to cover-up the shocking
human losses.
Recently, Ukraine declassified over 100 documents pertaining to
the 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine and repressions of the 1930s 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 crack down 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.
