Dear friends and colleagues,

I am deeply honored and humbled by your invitation to take part in this year's commemoration of the Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932-33.

Two years ago in June I was invited to be interviewed on the Kyiv television station 1+1 to discuss the famine and my involvement in the Walter Duranty case. Why, the interviewer asked me, after a second time in ten years, did the Pulitzer Prize Committee refuse to revoke Walter Duranty's prize? Why did the NYT refuse to recommend that revocation? Could it be that Ukraine for the educated public in the US (and more broadly) still is a relative unknown? And might this in turn reflect the underdeveloped state of Ukrainian studies itself and its international authority and prestige? The short answer to these questions is yes, and I'd like to devote these remarks to exploringing these connections. In brief, most North American and European scholars and politically engaged commentators and leaders still view Ukraine merely or primarily as a province or region of the Russian Empire or Soviet Union and therefore fail to see how the famine could be understood as ethnocide, genocide, or even as a crime against a nation or people. And this fact has to be taken as a clarion call to the Ukrainian studies community, that our job to raise awareness of Ukrainian history, politics and culture is far from done. The unwillingness or refusal to acknowledge the famine as a crime against humanity and genocide is inextricably linked to the persistent denial of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence today and Ukrainian distinctiveness in the past.

Soviet taboos
Clearly, one of the most important factors explaining the persistent ignorance about the famine, as well as its specifically Ukrainian aspects, has been the long-lived Soviet taboos on discussing or researching the subject. We now know that explicit instructions were issued from the centers banning the use of the word famine, and not only in party and military documents, but in medical records and statistical accounts. Even those instructions were top secret and recipients were ordered to return them after having absorbed the instructions so that there would be no trace of the order at the local level.

A census of the Soviet population in 1937 was ordered "suppressed" and conducted anew two years later because of the "truths" it revealed about the party's devastating rural policies, among other matters. And this was a census conducted by a Central Statistical Administration that already had been thoroughly purged and politicized in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

And so it is clear that one of the other fatal consequences of the famine-beyond the sheer human and demographic losses for generations to come--was that it was a major contributing factor, if not the largest such factor, to the culture of the Big Lie in the Soviet Union made infamous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. That so many people were forced to deny such a large tragedy that they had witnessed left an indelible stamp of bad faith and falsification not only in the popular memory, but even in the state and party's own archival records.

We know now of more and more cases of protests from peasants, party leaders, writers (including the Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov), and even an occasional breaching of the taboo, such as a novel by Mikhail Alekseev, Drachuny, printed in a literary journal, Sibir', during the post-Stalin years But the fact remains that not just historians, but ordinary citizens, were prohibited from discussing the famine in public settings, and were intimidated into silence on the topic in more private surroundings. And, by now, most of those eyewitnesses who might have told their stories about the famine after the Soviet-era bans had been lifted have died, many prematurely because of the epidemics and debilitating disabilities that accompanied the severe malnutrition.

The ban on mention of the famine for nearly 60 years of Soviet history meant that Ukrainians and Russians, both the broader publics and their historians' communities, remained largely ignorant of the details of this tragedy and particularly its man-made character. A telling example was the late Viktor Danilov, a close personal friend and clearly the preeminent Russian (and Soviet-era) specialist on the peasantry in the interwar period, resisted almost to the end of his life any suggestion that the famine in Ukraine had any anti-national aspects, whether in the intentions of the Moscow leadership or in the ultimate demographic and cultural consequences for the population of Ukraine. Part of this proclivity to denial was based on severely limited access (virtually none) to the relevant Soviet-era archival fonds, where the political dynamics of the murderous years 1932-33 would be reflected.

This situation, incidentally, has begun to be remedied with the publication of several new works in Russia and Ukraine, most notably The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, co-edited by Viktor Danilov and a team of western and post-Soviet historians; Yale University Press will bring out a three-volume English-language selection of the full Russian-language five-volume series. Many other volumes of documents on the collectivization and famine in Ukraine have appeared, including a new set of microfilms, 130 reels, from Primary Source Microfilm and the former Ukrainian Party archive in Kyiv selected by TsDAGO director Volodymyr Loyztskyi. It is now possible to trace what was known by whom and when for the years of unfolding famine; and it is harder than ever to deny that Moscow's orders and general level of callousness were the primary cause of the loss of millions of lives. Archive Director Lozytskyi relates his own story of confronting the taboo as late as 1990, when the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party prepared a set of galleys for a first book of archival documents. That initial draft was squashed by the Moscow party ideologues, especially Ivashko who has just transferred to Moscow from Kyiv, but the book did appear after independence and serves as a very useful guide to the decision-making processes between Moscow and Kharkiv in the 1930s, as well as between Moscow and Kyiv in the 1990s.

Still, more than a dozen years after the end of the Soviet Union, the famine has not been successfully integrated into the latest textbooks on Soviet history, and most authors avoid any "overly sensitive" interpretations, especially in Russia.

The inability to make sense of the famine is part of a larger set of problems. One is the reluctance to confront the broader history of collectivization itself; the other is the still broader problems of accountability for the crimes of the Stalin era. As far as collectivization is concerned, key issues are brushed over such as the ruthlessness and brutality with which it was imposed on the peasantry, the demoralizing impact it had on many of the once idealistic party members who took part in it, and the cost in long-term low productivity of agricultural labor. The persistent fight over the wisdom of collectivization is reflected in the stalled legislative efforts to privatize the collective farms through the CIS or the unwillingness of collective farm chairmen to implement the privatization and breakup laws where they exist.

The famine as part of the crimes of the Stalin era has been similarly brushed over, even as commissions have worked assiduously to posthumously "rehabilitate" innocent victims and clear their records of trumped-up criminal charges. But not one official in a CIS country, to my knowledge, has ever been brought to justice for the crimes committed. Stalin escaped justice in death; NKVD Chief Lavrentii Beria was executed by his fellow Politburo members after Stalin's death, but for crimes that nearly all of them were guilty of. The post-Stalin "rehabilitation" process turned out to be a convenient way to offer the innocent victims a cleaning of their records, albeit posthumously, but allowed the guilty to escape, it would seem, forever. With a former KGB officer in the Kremlin, and one who has himself promoted the rehabilitation of Stalin in the renaming of Volgograd back to Stalingrad and of the reputation of his predecessor and apparent model, Yuri Andropov, it is not likely that we will see any such justice for the foreseeable future. The same is true for Belarus, where the national dictator heralds from the collective farm sector and has not even allowed the name of the KGB to be changed nor the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky to be dismantled in the center of the capital, Minsk. Ukraine might have the best chance to come to terms with some of these issues, since Ukrainian historians have often cast the Stalin-era tragedies as imposed by an alien Moscow government on an unwilling Ukrainian population. But even in Ukraine, there have been few calls for, and no movement toward, bringing to justice the murderers and camp guards of the Stalin years. And the recent appointment of a former Communist deputy to the Rada, Olha Ginzburg, as head of the National Archives of Ukraine, has put all of us who care about Ukrainian history on guard lest the Ukrainian Communist Party seek to turn back the remarkably open access that has been achieved under the last two National Archivists, Ruslan Pyrih and Hennady Boriak.

Russian reluctance to confront this tragic part of its history was reflected in the efforts last year by the Russian representative to the United Nations to block the resolution introduced by the Ukrainian delegation to have the famine recognized as a crime against humanity. Russian national pride, reinforced by ignorance of large swaths of Russian history and acceptance of national myths of Russian benevolence, will continue to shape the non-reception of Ukrainian historians' claims about the national aspects of the famine in Ukraine. Moreover, in their efforts to bolster Russian-Ukrainian relations, the leaderships of both countries have sought to paper over inconvenient or unfortunate episodes in their overlapping and intertwined pasts. For example, the Pereiaslav Rada was the occasion for a presidential decree in Ukraine, which suggested celebration and commemoration rather than genuine scholarly scrutiny of new evidence or approaches.

The emphasis, not surprisingly, has been on marking events that celebrate Russia's and Ukraine's common destinies and to downplay periods of conflict, opposition, or, especially, separate destinies.

It is still too easy for most Russian historians and other scholars of culture to dismiss any place for Ukraine in their narratives other than as a colony or region of empire, with Kyivan Rus unequivocally claimed as the origins of Russian culture. The persistence of the triune model of Slavic history introduced by nineteenth-century Russian historians has been remarkable in the face of thirteen years of independence. In this sense, the acknowledgement of the famine in Ukraine and its meaning is part of a broader problem of the domination of the field by historians of Russia and by historical myths dating to the nineteenth century.

For historians of Russia in the West, the opinions of their nineteenth-century predecessors and contemporary colleagues have been formative, and only recently begun to be challenged with alternate narratives and archival-based research. For the time being, famine-denial is still an option, at least in the sense of the man-made aspect of the famine. I don't think there are historians who actively deny the famine took place; instead they deny any national aspect or its man-made features.

This situation, surprisingly, remains only moderately different in Ukraine itself, where historical consciousness is still shaped by Soviet-era myths, which means largely Russian national ones. Average Ukrainians, especially young ones today, know little about the famine or its broader meaning-this despite a barrage of pre-1990 diaspora and post-Soviet Ukrainian publications, documentaries, some fiction, and an annual commemoration across the country. Clearly, it will take several decades to integrate the dramatically broader range of interpretation and evidence that have emerged in Ukraine since independence; and the historical profession is not as assured of the prominent role, if also a tortured one, that it enjoyed or suffered in Soviet times. This, too, then is a problem of the state of Ukrainian studies, namely, the low level of historical consciousness among contemporary Ukrainians, as well as the continued underutilization and lack of knowledge about the now generally available archival and other sources.

Unfortunately, by now, there is little that can be recovered by oral history methods, due to the deaths of the few survivors of the famine; most of those who have been tapped lately were small children and barely aware of the tragedy unfolding around them, unlike the participants in the US project funded by Congress and led by the late James Mace.

The Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences has created a famine study center, but it consists of only a handful of scholars and has a miserly budget, even by contemporary academic standards. Even this as yet paltry effort is in large measure due to the involvement of Deputy Director Stanyslav Kulchytskyi, who has written extensively and edited several volumes on the famine as the most senior and authoritative specialist on the Soviet period. It will be years, if not decades, before this center begins to make its impact felt on the general level of awareness of the famine.

Before leaving the topic of Soviet taboos and myths, I'd like to consider one considerably more intangible matter that shaped and helped to silence the collective memory of the famine, namely, World War II, including the genuine collective memory and the officially promoted commemorative memory of the war. Both sets of memories have served to occlude the experience of famine in 1932-33. The horrors of Nazi Germany's occupation, including the Holocaust, but also the deportation of Ostarbeiter and the postwar experience of repatriation to Stalin's Soviet Union, reshaped the remembered experience of the famine itself for those who survived. This remembering was further compromised by the Soviet state's policy of resettling millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants from non-famine regions of the USSR to the worst affected provinces. For many of the resettler population, the memory of those whose graves they trod regularly in their everyday lives was largely absent. This perpetrated and reinforced the imposed silence that reigned in Ukraine and elsewhere for so many subsequent decades.

The myth of the war that was promoted by the Soviet state recast the central drama of modern Ukrainian history as one of heroic fighters for the defense of the socialist fatherland against the perfidious Nazi invaders, on the one hand, and villainous traitors who collaborated with Nazi occupiers or fought alongside the German army on Soviet territory, on the other. This was the central structuring myth of post-stalin collective memory and has tenaciously persisted among older generations until today. The genuine German atrocities of the Nazi occupation regime were often exaggerated or embellished by the ideological apparatus; whether intentional or not, it also had the consequence of "relativizing" the famine experience, defanging it to some degree and allowing Soviet ideologues to cast the famine problem as an artificial one created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists in the West.

Duranty syndrome more broadly

One of the most successful components of the Soviet big lie was, of course, Walter Duranty's infamous denial of the famine on the pages of the New York Times. We have known for some time that Duranty was fully aware of that very famine and reported to the British diplomatic authorities in Moscow that the number of victims could reach 10 million. Clearly, Soviet censorship and the threat of being barred from reporting on a show trial in Moscow whipped most of the capital's reporters into discipline and the demanded denial. Duranty went further in challenging the credibility of Gareth Jones, a promising, young reporter for The Manchester Guardian, and another British correspondent, Malcolm Muggeridge. But

Duranty was not alone in his denial, not then at the time or since. Most of the foreign correspondents in Moscow joined his authoritative voice as the New York Times bureau chief.

After conducting an investigation for the New York Times of Duranty's reporting for 1931, the year for which he won the prize, I came to see his denial of both the famine as well as the trumped-up nature of the charges brought in the great show trials of the late 1930s as part of the same syndrome. I have been frequently asked why I thought he wrote as he did about the Soviet Union, and I'm not sure I have been able to answer for myself that question with any satisfaction. On the one hand, he was a self-admitted cynic since, he claims, his experience in World War I had shattered any illusions about noble humanity (as it did for many others too). But more to the point, by the late 1920s, Duranty was in the thrall of Joseph Stalin and his world-historical project to make over the Russian (and Ukrainian) peasantry into modern citizens, whether they wanted to be made over or not. Clearly, Duranty was right that Stalin was a world-historical figure, but he excused most of the cruelty of Stalin's "modernization" in his characteristic translation of Stalin, "you have to break eggs to make an omelette." In other words, the magnitude of the transformation that Stalin had embarked upon was inevitably bound to have some collateral damage, as we hear often these days. As far as I can tell, Duranty was not an admirer of Stalin out of leftist sympathies, but for his sheer ruthlessness and determination. For Duranty Stalin was certainly no worse a national leader than Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Genghiz Khan in their times.

This was not the era of sympathy for the underdog in history, but of great men, and, most often, cruel and tyrannical great men. Duranty tried his best to convey the vantage point of the Moscow Politburo on the unfolding events. This vantage point was reconstructed by citing the Soviet leaders-Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, most prominently-and Soviet statistics, already fatally compromised by the politicization of the social sciences in the late 1920s.

With some qualifications, this uncritical view of Soviet modernization was one shared by left and right. Recall, for example, the influential biography of Stalin by the Trotskyist historian-journalist Isaac Deutscher, his empathy for Stalin all the more surprising because of Trotsky's titanic struggle with the Soviet dictator. This was part of the literature of totalitarianism as much as it was of the countervailing revisionist trends of the 1960s and 1970s. Trotsky himself, after all, was a critic of the Stalinist pace and method of collectivization and industrialization, as well as the consolidation of dictatorial powers in an ever more distant communist party leadership; Nikolai Bukharin warned against similar dangers, but both were political losers and their points of view were dismissed as irrelevant as they themselves became non-persons in the new Stalinist order and were air-brushed out of all Soviet publications.

Something similar is true for the fate of the oral histories of the famine collected by the late James Mace and his team of associates from among the diaspora survivors and their relatives. How so much testimony could be ignored for so long, and not just ignored but denied as the work of Ukrainian nationalist propagandists (both in the USSR and outside) has to do with the powerful workings of the reigning narratives: great men trumped the common people, modernization was impossible without barbarism. Those who dared get in the way were either destroyed or admitted their defeat in emigration and outright flight. Emigres' testimonies were generally viewed with considerable suspicion in the Sovietological field;

Ukrainian testimonies were doubly suspect because of the cases of collaboration in Nazi war crimes that came to light after World War II.

Of course, there are limits to oral histories of survivors as historical sources. While they poignantly convey the tragedy as suffered by individuals, such sources cannot answer questions about the motivations of the top leadership or the degrees of their culpability. Survivors knew only the horrible consequences of their policy decisions and mistakes. Still, this is an important component of historical memory that was too easily dismissed by generations of western historians, not to mention the ritualistic denunciation of these materials by Soviet historians and their allied propagandists.

Can we expect any improvement in this situation outside Ukraine and Russia?

I'm afraid that the evidence suggests that we are witnessing increasing parochialism in an era of growing globalization. The level of geographical and historical knowledge among especially American young people seems to be headed in a relentlessly downward direction. Those trends are reinforced by the decline in the number of foreign correspondents and quality of international coverage generally. It is still the practice that no major US broadcast or print media companies have permanent representatives in Kyiv. During the recent election in Ukraine, most of the correspondents parachuted in from Moscow for a day or so before the election to make their reports.
And there is another cause for pessimism, the special decline in interest in former Soviet space, and little change in the traditional Moscowcentric coverage.

An Optimistic Ending Note
Still, not all my experience has been negative, and I hope the positive moments partially reflect others' efforts and experiences as well. I'd like to end on an upbeat note that might warrant some measured hope in a longer-term change in attitudes and levels of knowledge about Ukraine and its history. When I first took the executives of Primary Source Microfilm to Kyiv, I offered them lectures in Ukrainian history morning, noon, and night, in order to place both the city's present in some context, but also to illustrate my point that Ukraine is a region full of history and its archives, accordingly, full of fascinating documents. It helped immensely that Ukrainian archival authorities were more forthcoming with exciting projects than many of their Moscow counterparts. For years we had tried unsuccessfully to get a collection in Moscow for the World War II period, a subject of considerable interest among Americans more generally and American historians more particularly. Moscow military archive directors are still obsessed with secrecy and with thwarting foreigners' access to the unvarnished history of the war, whereas the first collections that Ukrainian archivists offered dealt precisely with this difficult period, including the fates of Ostarbeiter from Ukraine in the Third Reich, collaboration by important Ukrainian intellectuals with German occupying authorities, and the NKVD's ruthless filtration of returning or returned Ukrainian citizens from forced labor or prison in the Reich. The accessibility of Ukrainian archives under the two most recent National Archivists, to repeat an earlier point, has been welcome and remarkable.

What lessons, then, can we learn from the place of the history of the terror-famine in Ukrainian studies? Above all, that we need to be persistent and patient in educating the public, not only in university settings, about the dramatic episodes and periods of Ukrainian history, to remind audiences of the specific Ukrainian experiences that distinguish it from Russian or Polish or Belarusan history and place it as a distinctive alternate path of development in Europe. Perhaps the 80th anniversary of the famine will bring a different outcome in the Duranty affair, but only if we who are actively involved in Ukrainian studies continue to do our work as scholars and to find effective ways of bringing our research to the broader thinking public.

Thank you for your attention.