Valeriy Vasylyev. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 30, Annual 2008.
On 24 April 1952, during a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CC CPU), Leonid Melnykov, first secretary of the CC, announced that on 14-15 April he and Dem’ian Korotchenko, the head of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, had had a four-hour-long conversation with Joseph Stalin. Responding to their report on the increase in wheat-sowing areas in the Ukrainian SSR, Stalin made what is probably his only known statement on famine as a phenomenon. Mel’nykov quoted the Soviet leader as saying: “… the history of mankind knows many tragic examples in which, as a result of a shortage of bread, entire nations die out, and nations are buried for all time in history.”
It should be pointed out that Stalin used the term “nation” (natsiia), not “people” (narod), “country” (strana), or “state” (gosudarstvo), and therefore it may be assumed that his choice of word was deliberate. After all, Stalin and the other party leaders were well aware of the catastrophic results of the 1932- 33 and 1946-47 famines in Ukraine, and familiar with the nuances of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on 9 December 1948. They, of all people, understood that famine can endanger the very existence of nations.
Intensive scholarly research during the past few years has allowed historians to reconstruct the picture of the horrific famine that took place in Soviet Ukraine in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Holodomor of 1932-33. However, a number of questions related to the famine require further study-for example, what did the leaders of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950s-1970s know about the 1932-33 Famine? How did they assess it, and what political course of action did they adopt as a consequence?
The first group of historical sources that can help provide answers to these questions are memoirs written by former party and state leaders of the Ukrainian SSR, such as those by Petro Shelest, first secretary of the CC CPU from 1963 to 1972. In 1932 Shelest began working at the Mariiupil Metallurgical Plant. Owing to the fact that his name figured in a list of privileged individuals receiving food through the ration card system established by the centralized state food supply system, he and his wife received one kilogram of bread a day, canned goods, powdered eggs, and herring: “At the time-1932-34-there was a terrible famine in Ukraine. Entire families, even entire villages were starving to death in the countryside. In many areas there was even cannibalism-this was a tragedy. Someday it will become known how many people actually starved to death in those years. This was simply a crime committed by our government, which is being shamefully concealed. Everything is written off as the successes and the difficulties of growth.”
In early 1933 Oleksandr Liashko, the head of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR from 1972 to 1987, was a seventeen-year-old student at the Luhansk Roadways Technical Secondary School. In the Pershotravnevyi Gardens in Luhansk he saw the bodies of people who had died of starvation and exposure being loaded onto wagons. In May 1933 he spent time in the village of Biloskelevate, in Novosvitlivka raion of Luhansk oblast, where he witnessed the horrible living conditions of the villagers. “I felt the first stirrings of doubt: could these horrible sacrifices and torments not have been avoided? What will our generation be like when it grows up, who will renew the human losses? But I chased away my doubts. We were taught strictly: do not doubt anything that concerns politics. Just believe and be ready to carry out any task assigned by the party and the Komsomol.”
The mother of Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, first secretary of the CC CPU from 1972 to 1989, recalled that her family avoided starvation by eating fish caught by her husband in the Dnipro River, as well as pumpkins and squash, which were their basic foods.
Thus, from an early age the future highest-ranking leaders of the Ukrainian SSR had lived through the 1932-33 Famine and witnessed people starving to death before their very eyes. Although their memoirs are subjective, and written for the most part (with the exception of Shelest’s) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is clear that the famine had left a profound impression on their memory.
Another useful group of historical sources is archival documents that offer various interesting details concerning the attitudes of Ukrainian citizens and their leaders to the famine as recorded in the 1950s-1970s. For example, data prepared by oblast party committees for the CC CPU reveal that the famine was first mentioned publicly during discussions by various party organizations of the findings of the Twentieth Party Congress, which took place in February 1956.
One of the first to speak candidly in public about the 1932-33 Famine was the Ukrainian poet Andrii Malyshko, in the spring of 1956. The background to this momentous event is as follows: on 26 March and 10 April 1956 the secretaries of the Kyiv oblast committee, Mykhailo Synytsia and Hryhorii Hryshko, sent Oleksii Kyrychenko, first secretary of the CC CPU (1953-57), a report on the nonparty declarations and actions of individual communists employed in various Kyiv-based higher educational institutions and artistic organizations who had attended meetings summarizing the Twentieth Party Congress. On 12 April 1956 Kyrychenko ordered thirteen copies of an announcement containing this information to be circulated among members and candidate members of the Ukrainian Politburo. According to this information, during a meeting of members of the Writers’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR and the Kyiv Film Studio, the writer Oleksandr Korniichuk gave a speech on the Twentieth Party Congress, in which he declared that some creative Ukrainian workers had been unjustly accused of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. For example, in the late 1940s the poet Volodymyr Sosiura was harshly criticized for his poem “Love Ukraine” and Korniichuk suggested that Sosiura should now receive an official apology. Other writers at the meeting demanded the rehabilitation of their colleagues, who had been unjustifiably subjected to political repressions.
In the opinion of the Kyiv oblast committee secretaries, Malyshko’s speech, which was evocative of a requiem service for the Ukrainian people, was particularly improper: “He painted the ‘terrible’ past of the Ukrainian people in ghastly colors, starting with the 1930s, declaring that ‘there was no bread or salt and people were thrown into jails and tortured.'” He chastised Stalin for his incorrect attitude to the opera Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, which was staged during the ten-day festival of Ukrainian literature and art held in Moscow in 1952, and criticized Lazar Kaganovich for his work when he was the secretary of the CC CPU. According to Malyshko, “The 1933 famine in Ukraine … was deliberately organized by Stalin. Why, then did the presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CC CPSU] not inform the delegates at the Twentieth Congress about this?” Malyshko’s candid words were proof that Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals were not only aware of the famine, but were also deeply disturbed by this horrific tragedy.
Other social groups in Ukrainian society were also troubled by the famine. Unfortunately, we know very little about social moods in the 1950s. Included in the information that was submitted by Ukrainian oblast party committees to the CC CPU about the discussions at party meetings of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech on Stalin’s “cult of personality” at the Twentieth Party Congress were questions posed about the 1932-33 Famine by rank-and-file communists as well as nonparty members. For example, on 24 March 1956 the secretary of the Sumy oblast committee, A. Naumenko, informed the CC CPU that a communist by the name of Buryns’kyi, from Znob-Novhorodske raion, asked: “Why were the causes of the 1932-33 famine not mentioned in Khrushchev’s speech?”
The memory of the famine in people’s consciousness is organically tied to the problem of the leadership’s responsibility for this tragedy. For example, on 26 April 1956 the secretary of the Cherkasy oblast committee sent a memorandum to the Department of Party Organs of the CC CPU, in which he noted that the following question was asked during a party meeting in Talniv raion: “Was the starvation in 1932-33 and in 1947 in Ukraine not the result of Beria’s hostile actions?”
Many people believed quite rightly that the blame for the famine should be placed squarely on the shoulders of Stalin. In a report submitted to the CC CPU on 20 July 1956 Mykola Rozhanchuk, secretary of the Poltava oblast committee of the CPU, quoted a fragment from a speech delivered by one Vasylakiia, a scholarly associate of the Battle of Poltava Museum, who was not a party member:
I don’t understand; after all, the CC CPU resolution states that the cult of personality arose only in recent times. It seems to me that this is not so…. I was under the impression that the members of the party’s Central Committee were afraid of Stalin, [that] none of them had the will to stand up to him. I believe that this was a major error made by members of the party’s Central Committee. Why do they not want to state openly that they made a mistake by not removing this [sic] in a timely fashion? Remember 1933, how many people starved to death. Did Stalin not know about this? And he was called a genius, our father, etc. I say that the people never loved him.
Consideration of guilt on the part of the top political leadership went beyond awareness of Stalin’s personal responsibility for the famine. The public linked his responsibility with the faulty political course that was adopted with regard to the collectivization of agriculture. A report drawn up by the Rivne oblast committee of the CPU, signed on 27 July 1956 by its secretary, Oleksandr Denysenko, notes the questions that were raised at a party meeting: “What mistakes did Stalin make in the collectivization of agriculture, and was it not a mistake to eradicate the kulaks as a social class?” Similar questions were raised by communists at a party meeting in Dnipropetrovsk oblast: “There was famine in 1933, and 1943, and in 1954, a bad harvest. Was this not connected with the cult of personality? What were the consequences of the cult of personality for agriculture?” Interestingly, the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast committee, Oleksii Vatchenko, sent a report about the meeting to the CC CPU as well as to the CC CPSU.
Thus, the members of the Politburo (or Presidium, as it was known between 1952 and 1966), the CC CPU, and members of the CC apparatus knew that the memory of the 1932-33 Famine was very much alive in Ukrainian society, affecting people’s political moods and sparking negative reactions and assessments of the historical past and the current domestic political course. This exacerbated social-psychological tensions and undermined the legitimacy of Khrushchev’s reforms. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to locate any directives issued by the Soviet Ukrainian leadership forbidding any mention of the famine. One thing is certain, however: starting in the second half of 1956, all references to the Holodomor disappeared from Soviet Ukrainian party documents.
Even so, from time to time this taboo topic surfaced in the occasional statements issued by Soviet Ukraine’s highest-ranking leaders owing to the fact that the Ukrainian diaspora was investing much energy in bringing international attention to the Holodomor. Archival documents reveal that various Soviet agencies operating in the international arena forwarded information about this campaign to the members of the Soviet Ukrainian Politburo. On 9 December 1956 Luka Palamarchuk, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, briefed the CC CPU about the work of the Soviet Ukrainian delegation to the 11th Session of the UN General Assembly, during which he announced that a two-volume book entitled The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book had been published in Detroit in 1953 and 1955 by the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror. The second volume, entitled The Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, was published by The Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime in the U.S.A. According to the foreign ministry of the Ukrainian SSR, the membership of both these organizations was comprised of “Ukrainian nationalists.” This two-volume publication and annotations to it were forwarded to the CC CPU. On 28 December 1956 Kyrychenko sent a report and the annotations on the two volumes to members and candidate members of the Presidium, as well as to all CC CPU secretaries. These are fascinating documents, all the more so as they were studied by the highest-ranking leaders of the Ukrainian SSR.
The second volume of the White Book (712 pages) is divided into two parts. The first part, entitled “Famine as Political Weapon,” was written by Petro Dolyna, who argued that the Famine was deliberately organized for political reasons. The second part, “The Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933,” comprises the bulk of the volume and is based on materials collected by Ivan Dubynets (Dubyna), a geological scientist who lived in the USSR until the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war he immigrated to the West, settling in the United States in 1949. He collaborated with various organizations on preparing this book for publication. Among the materials contained in volume 2 are extracts from numerous periodicals, including Ukrainian newspapers from the 1930s, books that were published for the most part by “nationalists,” and various types of information obtained from emigres, eyewitness testimonies, photographs, and other sources.
Kyrychenko’s report noted:
Seeking to create an impression of objectivity, the authors cite individual statements of the leaders of the CC CPU and the Ukrainian government; they quote Stalin’s Short Course of the History of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) and Concerning Questions of Leninism…. The entire book serves as proof of the nationalists’ propaganda theses: first of all, their main thesis that Ukraine is oppressed by “Russian communism” and second, their claim that allegedly in 1932-1933 a deliberately engineered famine took place in Ukraine, during which 4.8 million people died.
Analysts from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR asserted that the book’s authors claimed to have written a documented historical work. Its worth was acknowledged by US Representative (R) Charles Kersten, chairman of the Select Committee on Communist Aggression (Eighty-third Congress). In his introduction to the second volume Kersten writes that the book “is very important in showing the Russian communist enslavement of Ukraine.” It is clear, therefore, that Soviet Ukrainian leaders were able to examine the book firsthand because they were able to quote the exact number of the millions of Holodomor victims cited in this publication.
The following year, 1957, the leaders of the Ukrainian SSR once again heard about the Famine of 1932-33. Mykola Skachko, the head of the Radio Broadcasting Committee at the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, sent the CC CPU the texts of broadcasts transmitted by “hostile radio stations,” which analyzed the work of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the CC CPSU in advance of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, as well as the work of Ukrainian statisticians and the books of the American historian Clarence Manning. Among Professor Manning’s numerous publications were The Story of the Ukraine (1947) and Ukraine under the Soviets (1953). The latter was reviewed on Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty): “The author portrays the political, economic, and cultural conditions of the daily life of the Ukrainian people in the USSR. In particular, the 1930s, the destruction of peasant landownership, forcible collectivization, the liquidation of leading cadres of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and the Great Famine of 1932-1933 are accurately portrayed.”
On 10 October 1957, in keeping with a directive issued by Stepan Chervonenko, secretary of the CC CPU, the transcriptions of these radio programs were distributed to members and candidate members of the CC CPU. On 6 December Soviet Ukraine’s foreign ministry, obviously in response to a directive of the CC CPU, sent Chervonenko annotations on various books that the ministry had ordered through Mezhdunarodnaia kniga, the Soviet commercial entity that governed the importation of all books, recordings, and other materials into the USSR. Among them was Manning’s book Ukraine under the Soviets, of which a fragment from page 102 was quoted in the notes: “The difficult situation caused in Ukraine because of the bad harvest of 1932-1933 was created ‘according to a plan, with the goal of destroying the Ukrainian peasantry.'”
In the late 1950s the Soviet Ukrainian foreign ministry regularly informed the CPU leadership about the activities of the Ukrainian diaspora in various countries. Reflecting the mood of the cold war, much of the Soviet leadership’s attention was focused on the United States. On 27 February 1958 Palamarchuk sent the CC CPU a bulletin entitled A Survey of the Nationalist Ukrainian Press in the Emigration, which was prepared by the press bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was then circulated among all candidates and candidate members of the republican Politburo. The bulletin reported on the celebrations in the United States of the 40th anniversary of the declaration of Ukrainian statehood (22 January 1918). To commemorate this anniversary, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent greetings to the Ukrainian Congress Committee in the United States and the Philadelphia-based Independence Day Committee. Both houses of the US Congress-the Senate and the House of Representatives-marked the anniversary with “prayers for Ukraine” during sessions held on 21 and 23 January. The governors of nine US states and the mayors of many cities officially proclaimed 22 January as “Ukrainian Independence Day” and called on Americans to show their support for the Ukrainian people.
The main focus of the celebrations was the 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine. Senator William Langer (R) of North Dakota delivered a speech before the US Congress (with President Eisenhower in attendance), during which he declared: “The famine of 1932-1933, which was deliberately engineered by communist Russia with the goal of breaking the peasantry’s resistance to the idea of collectivization, together with attempts to destroy the Ukrainian way of life by imprisoning thousands of men and women in Soviet labor camps and forcibly deporting them to the outer reaches of Russia, are just some examples of the atrocities committed by Soviet Russia against the Ukrainian people in order to break their will.” His speech was later published by the official mouthpiece of the US Congress. The top officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR shared this information with the first secretary of the CC CPU, Mykola Pidhornyi (Nikolai Podgorny; 1957-63), who was also informed of the large-scale measures undertaken by the Ukrainian American diaspora to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine, including speeches delivered by congressmen and the mayors of many American cities to mark the occasion.
In 1959 Palamarchuk informed Chervonenko about the participation of several American politicians in the festivities marking Ukrainian Independence Day on 22 January 1959. That same year Ukraine’s foreign ministry forwarded Chervonenko information on the Captive Nations Week Resolution proposed in the US Congress by Kenneth Keating (R), a senator from New York. The resolution was drafted by a group including Dr. Lev Dobriansky, who was an advisor to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the Eisenhower Administration and who often met with the president to keep him abreast of Ukrainian issues. Keating’s resolution stated in part:
In 1932-1933 Ukraine was occupied by special units of the Russian army and gangs of communist officials. Some looted the property of the Ukrainian people and shipped it out of the country. Other special troops, having erected an iron cordon, prohibited people from emigrating from Ukraine, which was designated a “death zone of the USSR.” … While tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people were starving to death every day, when cases of insanity and cannibalism began spreading throughout the oppressed nation, Russian exports included an unusually large quantity of Ukrainian wheat. It was sold at incredibly low prices in order to demonstrate to the world the wealth of Soviet agriculture … Before the entire free world we accuse Russia of genocide against our nation … Since the facts prove the use of genocide by the Russians against the enslaved nations, we demand that at the next session of the UN the USSR be condemned as the party responsible for the mass genocide of the [Ukrainian] nation. And that the USSR, as a violator of the UN Charter and international law, be expelled from the UN. We propose that all free nations of the world sever their diplomatic ties with the USSR.
The idea that an act of genocide had been committed against the Ukrainian nation in 1932-33 began to gain currency among US politicians by the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is attested not only by Senator Keating’s resolution but also by the speech that Senator Frank J. Lausche (D-Ohio) delivered on 23 January 1961 before the US Congress, in which he urged, “Let’s move over to the famine that was organized by Moscow in 1932 and 1933. We are talking about genocide. The biggest specialist in genocide is Khrushchev. The death of five million patriotic Ukrainians was planned and implemented.” Podgorny was informed of this speech on 27 February 1961.
The Ukrainian diaspora continued its efforts to inform the international community about the 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine, while the Soviet Ukrainian leaders, who were regularly apprised of the diaspora’s activities, familiarized themselves with various documents pertaining to these endeavors. On 4 January 1964 Shelest issued an order to circulate “a survey of the bourgeoisnationalist press on agricultural problems in the Ukrainian SSR,” signed by I. Peresadenko, the head of a CC CPU department responsible for selecting personnel for service abroad. The survey included an excerpt from an article published on 29 September 1963 by the Ukrainian emigre newspaper Shliakh peremohy: “The Ukrainian political emigration-united as one-must take a decisive stand against Moscow’s latest biological destruction of the Ukrainian people, chiefly the peasants. It is necessary to submit interpellations to the UN and international judicial institutions in order to prevent a recurrence of the mass murder of the nation that occurred in ’30-33…. It would be a national and Christian sin on the part of all of us not to take advantage of every opportunity to help our brothers and sisters in Ukraine.”
As the dissident movement in Soviet Ukraine began to grow in strength, the truth about the famine began to circulate through the samizdat system. In 1966 the Committee of State Security (KGB) under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR informed the CC CPU about anti-Soviet documents that were being circulated in the republic. Soviet leaders thus had an opportunity to become acquainted with the ideas of those who were fighting against the Soviet communist regime: “How should one term the craftily premeditated destruction of a 40-million-strong nation-fraternal love or sophisticated genocide (murder of a nation)? … While one-fifth of the Ukrainian population was being destroyed by an artificially engineered famine in 1933, we were hearing about our ‘happy and prosperous life.'”
The dissemination of truthful information about the famine became a major element of the resistance of Ukrainian dissidents. A pamphlet written by the Ukrainian dissident Ievhen Sverstiuk entitled Z pryvodu protsesu nad Pohruzhal’s’kym (Apropos of the Pohruzhal’s’kyi Trial), a copy of which the KGB forwarded to the CC CPU, stated: “[The Soviet regime] starved millions of Ukrainians to death in 1933, tortured to death the finest representatives of our intelligentsia, crushing any attempt to think; we were turned into docile slaves. Devoting all our strength and the fruits of our labor to the state, we have no time to ask ourselves: who are we, what are we living for, where are they leading us?”
During the period of detente between the USSR and the United States, the 1932-33 Famine became an arena for the intense ideological rivalry between the two countries. The Ukrainian diaspora, angered by the political and judicial persecution of dissidence in the Ukrainian SSR, staunchly supported Ukrainian dissidents. Condemning Soviet political practice, various Ukrainian emigre organizations capitalized on the famine issue in order to shed light on the repressive totalitarian essence of the communist regime. On 21 March 1973 Congressman John Rarick (D) of Louisiana read out a petition drafted by the Women’s Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine in the US House of Representatives and which had already been submitted to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The petition was one of many measures undertaken to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Ukrainian famine. Signed by more than five thousand people, it declared: “Russia provoked the famine in response to the Ukrainian peasants’ protest against Russian oppression.” In 1932-33 “Russia confiscated grain from Ukrainian peasants, condemning seven million Ukrainians to death by starvation” On 26 April 1973 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR forwarded information about the petition to Shcherbyts’kyi.
A few months later the Permanent Mission of the Ukrainian SSR to the UN sent Shcherbyts’kyi a report entitled “On the Reaction of Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalists to L. Brezhnev’s visit to the USA” According to the report, on the eve of the Soviet leader’s visit “Ukrainian nationalists” organized a campaign to commemorate the “40th anniversary of the artificial famine in Ukraine” which culminated with an anti-Soviet demonstration that took place in front of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. In September of that year Shcherbyts ‘kyi received information about a demonstration in New York City that drew several thousands of people observing the “40th anniversary of the artificial famine in Ukraine.” Alarmed by the Ukrainian diaspora’s powerful campaign in the United States, the Soviet Ukrainian leadership resolved to deny the artificial nature of the famine by launching a number of counterpropaganda measures against the commemoration of its anniversary through the agency of the Ukraine Society (Tovarystvo Ukraina), an association whose goal was to develop cultural relations with Ukrainians living abroad. This work was supervised by the notorious secretary of the CC CPU, Valentyn Malanchuk.
In the late 1970s the Ukrainian famine became the focus of increasing public attention, with Ukrainians in the United States and Canada appealing to the international community to condemn the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainians. An anthology of famine-related materials entitled Pro dekolonizatsiiu SRSR (On the Decolonization of the USSR) was published during the Third World Congress of Free Ukrainians. This publication emphasized the fact that, as a result of political genocide and Soviet economic policies during the period of collectivization in Ukraine, an “artificially engineered famine” took place, which claimed the lives of “six million Ukrainians” in 1933. On 27 December 1978 the Permanent Mission of the Ukrainian SSR to the UN transmitted notes on this collection to the Soviet Ukrainian foreign ministry and the CC CPU. Three weeks later the Soviet Embassy in Canada sent the CC CPU a report entitled “On the Activities of Ukrainian Nationalist Centers in Canada in 1978,” which noted that during the events commemorating the forty-fifth anniversary of the famine, organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Committee in Winnipeg, Toronto, and other cities, Ukrainian Canadians paid their respects to their fallen countrymen.
The early 1980s were marked by an escalation of the cold war between the USSR and the United States, particularly over the issue of the 1932-33 Famine. Again, the leaders of Soviet Ukraine took an active part in these processes. On 4 April 1980 the Soviet Ukrainian writer Vitalii Korotych, who was visiting Canada as a correspondent of the Moscow-based Literaturnaia gazeta, wrote a letter to the CC CPU, with whose contents Oleksandr Kapto, a secretary of the CC CPU, became acquainted on 25 April. Korotych reported that Ukrainian organizations in Canada had launched preparations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the famine, including plans to publish books, release films, and so forth. In 1982 and 1983 the Ukrainian diaspora held numerous events marking the fiftieth anniversary of the famine. In response, the leadership of Soviet Ukraine issued a directive to the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR to prepare counterpropaganda materials. On 12 January 1984 Vasyl’ Iurchuk, director of the Institute of Party History at the CC CPU, sent the Central Committee a report entitled “On the Food Difficulties in the Early 1930s and the Fabrications of Bourgeois Propaganda” which was written by the institute staff in collaboration with the Institute of History and the Institute of Economic and Social Problems at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
The report noted that, as a result of the preparations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the famine, the anti-Soviet campaign in North America had reached unprecedented levels. One of its main organizers was described as “the war criminal Ia. [Iaroslav] Stets’ko,” who was welcomed at the White House by President Ronald Reagan on 19 July 1983.
During a debate in the US Congress on 27-29 September 1983, Congressman James J. Florio (D) of New Jersey introduced a bill to form a commission to study the causes of the “Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933.” He was supported by three US senators: Ernest F. Hollings (D-South Carolina), Pete V. Domenici (R-New Mexico), and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (D-Michigan), who urged the Senate to request President Reagan to designate 28 May 1984 as “the day on which the US Congress condemns the Great Famine in Ukraine.” The authors of the report prepared by Soviet Ukrainian academic institutions viewed these events as “an attempt at [engaging in] demagogic speculations around the real food difficulties that took place in our country, especially in Ukraine, during the early 1930s.”
On 17 January 1984 Kapto passed this report to the International Section of the CC CPSU. In January 1985 the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, 1932-33, was established to investigate the causes and consequences of the Ukrainian Holodomor. As part of its counterpropaganda measures, the CC CPU created its own commission, whose members included Professor Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi, who thus began studying the Holodomor during the Soviet era and has continued his research long into the post-Soviet period.
Soviet archival documents undeniably prove that during their youth the postwar leaders of the Ukrainian SSR had experienced the Holodomor, a colossal tragedy that they had never forgotten. By the time of the Khrushchev Thaw it had become clear that the horrific events of 1932-33 had become firmly embedded in the collective memory of Ukrainian society. This is attested by the questions that were posed during discussions of the proceedings of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and Khrushchev’s speech on Stalin’s “cult of personality.” It goes without saying that the Soviet leaders did not want the famine to become publicly known. Thus, by the end of 1956 all references to the famine disappeared from official party and government documents. Only Ukrainian dissidents continued to remind the public about the events of 1932-33 through the samizdat network.
From the 1950s through the early 1980s the Soviet Ukrainian leadership regularly received reports on the activities of the Ukrainian diaspora as the latter disseminated information about the famine throughout the world. Representatives of the diaspora insisted that the famine was planned and organized by the leaders of the Communist Party. The members of the Politburo and Soviet Ukrainian leaders were fully aware of the diaspora’s position that the 1932-33 famine was deliberately engineered as an act of political repression and implemented in order to crush the Ukrainian peasantry’s resistance to the policy of collectivization-an act of genocide that claimed the lives of approximately six or seven million people. It has not yet been established how knowledge about this horrific tragedy influenced the consciousness of Soviet leaders. But one thing is certain: they tried their utmost to counter the spread of information about the famine within Ukrainian society and in the international arena.