Denying the terror famine: was the 1933 Ukrainian famine the result of a failed policy - or was it the policy itself?

IT IS a tribute to the efficiency of Soviet totalitarianism that the 1933 Ukrainian famine escaped serious scholarly inquiry for over fifty years, for the famine was one of the century's great political crimes. Millions died; how many, we can't be sure, but some Soviet sources endorse the estimate of seven million advanced by Robert Conquest in his brilliant study, The Harvest of Sorrow. And the famine did not derive from bad weather, plant blight, or some other natural cause, but was engineered by Stalin for fundamentally political reasons.

Two credible theories concerning those reasons have been advanced. The first, and more charitable toward Stalin, sees the famine as an unanticipated consequence of the regime's campaign for near-total collectivization--although it admits that Stalin persisted in the campaign even after learning of its toll on the peasantry. Which leaves him responsible for millions of deaths, but not for genocide.

The second theory accuses Stalin of deliberately using the famine to crush the Ukrainian people, to suppress its culture, annihilate its independent-minded peasantry, and destroy its will to resist Soviet domination--mass killing in the service of an anti-human and ultimately irrational idea. This is the theory Conquest endorses; he sees the famine as similar in nature to Hitlefts Holocaust against the Jews.

While it is certainly the case that peasants in Russia and Kazakhstan suffered terribly during the collectivization drive, Ukrainian deaths seem proportionately higher. Furthermore, the idea that Stalin used collectivization as a weapon against Ukrainian national aspirations can hardly be dismissed as far-fetched, given what we know about Stalin's obsessive concern with national restiveness.

Yet while most critics greeted Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow with praise, a segment of the Sovietology fraternity reacted with fury, and for several years carried on something resembling an orchestrated campaign to discredit both Conquest's study and a documentary film about the famine that was shown on public television in Canada and the United States.

There was, to begin with, the official Soviet position, summed up in 1986-- as the age of glasnost was dawning-- by Yuri Bogayevsky, first secretary of the Soviet Union's embassy in Canada. According to Bogayevsky, the principal culprits were not Stalin and his acolytes but rather the "kulaks," or wealthy peasants, who resisted collectivization and in the process "murdered about ten thousand Communist Party activists, farm leaders, and reform sympathizers--the most able and skillful farmers."

Now this bit of absurdity contains inaccuracies in practically every phrase, from the use of the term "kulaks"---a fraudulent concept concocted by Lenin to justify class warfare in the countryside--to the notion that those favoring collectivization were "the most able and skillful farmers." Nevertheless, the official Soviet version found an echo on the American Left. Jeff Coplon, a journalist who undertook something of a crusade against Conquest's book, wrote in The Village Voice that collectivization was an "epochal change in the mode of production," and seemed to equate the deaths of a few thousand agents of Communist expropriation with the murder of millions of peasants whose only crime was an unwillingness to surrender their small plot of land.

Others attacked Conquest with what in boxing terminology would be called crowding tactics, smothering his theories with numbers, numbers, and more numbers. The controversial Sovietologist Jerry Hough, for example, placed the number killed during the purges in the thousands, a rather considerable difference from the twenty million or so estimated by such diverse figures as Conquest, Stephen F. Cohen, and Marxist dissident Roy Medvedev. The difference between these estimates goes straight to the heart of Soviet legitimacy. After all, a regime which killed in the thousands, while guilty of substantial evil, can point to many historical precedents; on the other hand, one which destroyed millions of its own citizens clearly ranks with Hitler or Pol Pot.

The Shadow of the Swastika

THE MAJOR charge against the idea of the terror-famine, however, has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with a view of Ukrainian nationalists as infected by the fascist impulse. Sometimes murmured sotto voce and sometimes declared outright is the notion that Ukrainian (or Estonian, Latvian, Byelorussian, etc.) claims of injury at Communist hands are fraudulent, that the idea of a terror famine was concocted by shadowy forces bent on deflecting attention from a dark past. Thus Jeff Coplon calls the terror-famine theory a "fraud" and speaks of a "Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration." Similarly, J. Arch Getty sniffs that Conquest's ideas are "not generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circle of exiled nationalists" and asserts that Conquest's book smacked of the "longstanding political agendas of emigre groups."

Nor is the trashing of anti-Communist emigres limited to predictable leftist vehicles like The Village Voice or The Nation; the image of the Eastern European emigre with a cloudy background has become a staple of popular culture, with Byelorussians, Rumanians, and Hungarians having been depicted in recent films as concealing participation in the most horrible anti-Jewish atrocities.

Some go so far as to credit collaborationist emigres with exerting a decisive sway over American foreign policy during the early cold-war period. This, at any rate, is the thesis of Christopher Simpson, the author of Blowback, which contends that the liberation doctrine pursued, rhetorically at least, by the Eisenhower Administration was adopted because of the machinations of emigres with clear records of Nazi involvement. In this view, former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, stage-managed by the CIA and operating in an atmosphere of anti-Communist hysteria, were the "catalyst" for a policy that had the ultimate effect of prolonging the cold war.

That Ukrainian nationalism has historically been tarnished by anti-Semitism cannot be denied. The same, unfortunately, goes for practically every other people of that part of the world. Indeed, the level of anti-Semitism in the pre-war period generally rose or fell with the proportion of Jews in the general population. Thus there was a great deal of anti-Semitism in Poland, where there were many Jews, and relatively little in Bulgaria, where Jews accounted for less than 1 per cent of the population.

The question, then, is whether a people's past history of anti-Semitism renders current ambitions for sovereignty illegitimate. Here, it seems, one worthwhile measurement is whether the current leadership is willing to own up to the mistakes of the past and to adopt policies and a vocabulary of tolerance. By this standard, the current Ukrainian leadership scores rather impressively. The government, for example, has encouraged Jews to remain and help build the new nation, rather than emigrate to Israel. Interestingly, influential Ukrainian emigres rank among the strongest advocates of inter-ethnic cooperation.

By contrast, Soviet Communist regimes from Stalin onward were renowned for anti-Jewish prejudice; the Soviets functioned as the nerve center of world anti-Semitism during the latter Brezhnev years. No attempt was made to come to terms with the historic anti-Semitism of the Soviet peoples, and the Holocaust was taught not as a tragedy in which one group, the Jews, were singled out for annihilation, but rather as a scatter-shot affair in which many groups suffered in greater or lesser degrees.

Just as Stalin's anti-Jewish policies spread throughout Communist Europe, so, later, Brezhnev's anti-Zionist drive was taken up by the satellite regimes. Likewise, Stalin, described as "killer of peasants" by Osip Mandelstam, served as an inspiration for a later generation of Communists, the Pol Pots and Colonel Mengistus, who imposed terror famines on their own unfortunate people. Perhaps the most distressing lesson of Stalin's Ukrainian famine is that even great crimes against humanity can happen again if the world ignores or denies them.