st the Ukrainian people. Opponents accused the president, who initiated the draft law, of “politicizing” a human tragedy.
These opponents are only half-right. The facts of mass deaths – for instance, how many people died, whether food was available and what authorities knew – can be attained and are being objectively investigated by Western and Ukrainian historians. But it is in categorizing what we see, or imagine – such as choosing who were the victims and what caused their deaths — that we necessarily enter the realm of the subjective, and therefore, of the political.
Genocide is the ultimate crime, the deliberate intent to exterminate a group and prevent its reproduction. The ultimate crime calls for the ultimate discredit of the perpetrator. The Nazi regime, the perpetrator of the Holocaust, has few defenders in the West outside of the loony fringe. Yet the legacy of Communism as a regime is far more ambiguous in the West and among the populations that lived through it, certainly in the former Soviet Union. In proposing to replace “genocide” with “a crime against humanity perpetrated by the Stalinist totalitarian regime,” thereby emphasizing Stalinism over Communism, the Party of Regions revealed the continued ambivalence of its constituency vis-a-vis what are perceived as the social achievements of the Soviet era; further, its reluctance to associate Communism as such with absolute evil. One thing should be clear: both formulations, whether “genocide” or “Stalinist crime against humanity,” are equally “politicized.” It couldn’t be otherwise.
The backdrop to the “genocide” debate in Ukraine is whether the famine was indeed a famine. The statement may sound blasphemous, but the position of the Soviet state for 60 years was, in fact, that there was no famine, which meant that one could be arrested for claiming the opposite. Fringe Communist elements, including those in Ukraine, continue to claim the indefensible, but the mainstream debate has shifted to whether the famine was “manmade” or caused by “natural” forces. That issue remains controversial. A conference on the Ukrainian famine in the U.S. several years ago had to change location at the last minute because a respectable university apparently objected to the term “manmade” in the conference title, arguing that it prejudged an open question. The problem with this assumption is that, as Noble Prize Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen argued in “Poverty and Famines”, there is no such thing as a “natural” famine in the modern era. Famines are not caused by a breakdown in food production per se, but by a breakdown in food distribution. And distribution, one may add, is an inherently political matter.
In Ukraine itself, the key political forces agree that the famine was man-made and the debate revolves around the politics of naming this politically-induced human catastrophe. Parliament, a political body, did name it a genocide by a narrow vote, but what is the evidence adduced by historians and students of mass violence on the matter? The core criteria of genocide, as laid out in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, is “intent to destroy.” Original intent, however, is extremely difficult to demonstrate, not only because written documents may be lacking, but also, as the French social scientist Jacques Semelin argued, because mass killing should be seen as a process in which the aims of actors can change along the way.
Did the Soviet leaders in the late 1920s consciously plan to starve the Ukrainian peasantry when they unleashed their collectivization drive? The evidence is that they did not. They did not expect that the disruption of collectivization, exacerbated by peasant resistance, would have a severely detrimental impact on the harvest. Yet, faced with an extremely serious humanitarian crisis in 1932, the Soviet government chose policies that could only exacerbate it, leaving millions to starve. The first policy was to deny that there was a famine in the first place, which obviously precluded any kind of international aid. If we can demonstrate that the logic of a political action will plausibly, if not inexorably, lead to a catastrophe — essentially what Ukrainian Communist officials told Moscow in 1932 — but political authorities remain in denial for ideological reasons, why should the political responsibility of these elites be less than if they had originally intended to victimize the peasantry?
Who was targeted by the famine? The “Ukrainians” as a nation, or the “peasants” as a class? The standard claim made by reasonable people objecting to the use of “genocide” to characterize the famine is that the famine targeted not the Ukrainians, but the peasants allegedly hoarding the grain and that the famine touched other areas outside of Ukraine, such as the Volga. There are two ways of answering this argument. The first is empirical. Newly discovered archival evidence indicates that Stalin interpreted the resistance within the Communist Party of Ukraine to the unattainable quotas of grain production in 1932 as a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism. The absolute Soviet ruler thus began, himself, to frame the issue in national terms, and to think in terms of punishment.
The second is conceptual. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines the victims of genocide as “national, ethnical (sic), racial, or religious,” excluding “social” groups such as the peasantry. Yet we have to understand that the Convention is a politically-induced document, reflecting the interests of the UN member-states, and the Soviet Union at that time specifically lobbied to have “social” categories excluded from the list.
The Party of Regions, and Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians more generally, are uncomfortable with the label of genocide because of fear that it could drive a wedge between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine. In an attempt to assuage these anxieties, the sponsors of the law used the category of “people” (narod), rather than “nation” (natsii) in defining the victims of the famine.
There are thus two important debates going on. The first is among the international community of scholars on how to best frame the famine in the comparative study of mass killing. The second is among Ukrainians themselves in Ukraine, who remain divided on how to interpret their past, and thereby their common destiny, vis-a-vis Russia. The Nov. 27 vote reiterated that the “Orange” perspective on these identity issues retains a small and geographically polarized majority, but a majority nonetheless, despite the vicissitudes of coalition politics.Dominique Arel holds the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa.
