Seventy-five years after the most brutal ethnic genocide in history, Russia’s goal to eradicate all things Ukrainian remains.
Article by Peter Borisow, New York, New York
Canadian American Slavic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 3, (Fall 2008). Pg. 251-265
Charles Schlacks, Publisher, Idyllwild, CA
As Ukrainians wind up the 75th Year to Commemorate the Holodomor, they can look back on the real progress that they have made in educating people around the world about the genocide in Ukraine in 1932-1933. Well over thirty-five countries as well as the European Union have recognized the inhuman sufferings during the Holodomor and many, [1] including the United States House of Representatives, have agreed it was deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people.
A massive Holodomor Memorial Complex is being built in Kyiv. Ukrainians broke ground recently in Washington D.C. for a Holodomor Monument just a few minutes’ walk from the U.S. Capitol.
Despite all this progress, one glaring exception remains – an unrepentant Russia. Today, Russia has changed only its tactics, not its ultimate goal of solving its “Ukrainian problem.” Russia continues its work to eliminate all that defines Ukrainians as a people and as a nation in order to return Ukraine once and for all to regional status within Russia.
In order to accomplish this, Russia must not only reassert its political control over Ukraine, but also fully subsume Ukrainian culture, society, business and industry into the Russian milieu. For Russia, this is a work in progress. However, Russia must also establish some degree of international acceptance of the elimination of Ukrainian national identity as well as of Ukraine as a nation.
Nothing stands in Russia’s way more than the Holodomor. How can Russia pretend to be a respected world leader, a caring and responsible steward of its people with all that blood on its hands? This is a case of Lady Macbeth in reverse – the world sees the blood, while Russia actually believes that after seventy-five years of denial, rewriting history, repression and destruction of evidence, it has washed away the blood and is now magically pure as a newborn baby’s soul.
But all of a sudden, here come those Ukrainian witnesses again. The survivors may be old, but they are unanimous about how and why it happened: “The Russians did it.” And, to make matters worse, the Ukrainian government has opened up the archives – with all those documents clearly stating that the purpose of the Holodomor was to destroy the Ukrainians.
The archives even contain documents proving that in the 1950s, in order to divert attention from Russia’s crimes in the Holodomor, Russia convinced the East German secret police, the Stasi, to forge documents alleging that Ukrainian nationalists had collaborated with the Nazis against Jews during World War II. [2] In fact, the opposite is true – Ukrainians and their military, political and religious leaders proactively opposed German persecution of Jews and worked to protect and rescue Jews from Nazis. [3]
While Russia continues to use its considerable international influence as a major world power, victor in World War II, and now flush with petrodollars, to promote Holodomor dilution and denial, it cannot change the fact that Russia is responsible for the genocide in Ukraine.
Russia engineered, managed and implemented the Holodomor. Russia murdered 10 million Ukrainians in 500 days. The politically convenient argument that it was “communists” or “Soviets” who carried out the Holodomor is specious at best. Even those who sell this claim know it’s just spin. [4]
Russia did not just run the USSR; it was the USSR. When the USSR fell apart, Russia became its successor state. Russia took over all the assets – military, diplomatic and financial. Russia took it all, claiming it was all rightfully hers. Sometimes even the most accomplished liars tell the truth. The fact is that the USSR was just another incarnation of the old Russian Empire. The USSR effectively enforced Russian interests both at home and abroad.
When the USSR became unmarketable, Russia reinvented itself yet again, this time as the Russian Federation. But the Empire aches because it is incomplete – Ukraine is missing. Without Ukraine there is no Empire. Without the Empire, Russia reverts to its perennial status as semi-nomadic tundra, a sort of frozen Middle Eastern potentate with gas.
DIFFERENT ORIGINS, DIFFERENT PEOPLES
It is impossible to understand the Holodomor without examining the historical and cultural roots of the Ukrainian and Russian nationalities as well as the historical relationships between the two nations.
Historically, Russia emerged as an empire of fairly rudimentary hunter-gatherers, which could survive at its levels of expectation only by conquering and draining the wealth and resources of its neighbors – ranging from the wheat and sea ports of Ukraine and the Caucasus to the oil and gas of Siberia.
To this day, Russia has a remarkably unsophisticated manufacturing industry and supplies much of its technical needs by buying them (including, unfortunately, entire manufacturers in Ukraine).
Contrast this with Ukraine, a nation with some of the earliest known agricultural settlements (dating to the Trypillian and Scythian days) and a fundamental difference in national temperament emerges. Stable agricultural settlements lead to the need to be civilized. You cannot live with neighbors without learning how to get along – thus the emergence of rules of behavior, respect and other aspects of civilized society.
Hunter-gatherers, by definition, take by force – be it berries from trees or meat from beasts. When one area is depleted, they move on to another. If competitors emerge, fights ensue and the winner takes all. Beads, gold, and so on, are accrued to trade for that which they cannot hunt or gather. This is still very much the nature of Russia to this day. Russia remains a predator state.
Early Russia’s nomadic form of survival also led to an evolutionary acceptance of harsh leadership. Russians literally lived in constant fear of people or wild beasts for whom they were either enemy or suitable prey. Leaders of such nomadic communities were chosen first and foremost for their physical prowess in defending the village from beasts and nomadic attackers. By definition they were large and strong men able to use their physical power to get what they wanted.
Being scattered and isolated, they had little understanding that there was any other way and even if they did, there was nothing they could do about it without becoming victims themselves. Challenges came only from even stronger strongmen. So, if you stayed low and didn’t get the strongman mad at you, you and your children could live and perhaps even prosper. The trade-off was protection against the external threat in exchange for just about whatever the strongmen wanted.
In time, this became encoded as not just acceptable behavior but the desirable standard for leadership in Russia. It is no aberration, therefore, that most Russians still rate Stalin as their greatest leader and accept Putin’s destruction of democracy at home in exchange for successful conquests abroad. It is their norm.
The very name “Russia” reflects its nomadic nature. From earliest times their northern tundra was known as Muscovy. It was not until Muscovy started building its wannabe “European” empire that Muscovite propagandists adopted the name “Russia” as part of their efforts to hijack neighboring Ukraine’s history (Kyivan Rus’) as their own. In fact, the name “Russia” has nothing whatsoever to do with the “Rus’” of Kyivan Rus’.
“Russia,” pronounced “Rass-I-ia” in Russian (NOT “Roo-ssI-ia”), derives from the Ukrainian verb “rozsiyaty,” meaning to scatter, as with the sweeping movement of the arm when seeding a field with grain. The early Ukrainians described their northern neighbors as “Rossiiane” – “the scattered ones” – which in fact, with their small nomadic settlements scattered all over the cold and forbidding northern tundra, they were.
KYIVAN RUS’ FIGHTS THE MONGOLS, MUSCOVY GOES ALONG
While Western Europe was suffering through the collapse of civilization during the Dark Ages, Ukraine thrived as a center of culture and learning. European rulers sent their children to Kyiv to study, as Ukraine prospered from rich trade and stable agricultural communities. All this changed when the Mongols invaded.
Not willing to bow to any conqueror, Ukraine fought to the last, and lost. Muscovy went along with Mongol rule. When the Mongols suddenly packed up and went home one morning, Muscovy was in a position to begin asserting its influence, and with the urge to dominate ever more territory came dreams of empire.
RUSSIA BUILDS AN EMPIRE
Russia’s burning desire to become a European empire, just like the Dutch, French, English and other “real” Europeans, set the stage for centuries of conflict with Ukraine. The newly self-proclaimed “Russia” lacked warm water ports, fertile agricultural lands and numerous other resources. It had no navy to cross seas or dazzle its neighbors.
It didn’t even have a very impressive footprint on the European continent, as most of its so-called territory was, in fact, in Asia. “Russia” had no deep European history. “Russia” had no Church to bestow the blessings of Divine Providence on its strongmen.
Russia did not even have a real language. What passed for spoken “Russian” was a garbled offspring of Ukrainian mixed with various local tongues. “Russians” spoke and wrote in French in the court of Peter I and German in Catherine’s. It was not until the nineteenth century, when Pushkin started writing in “Russian,” that Russia acquired a real literary language.
The irony that Russia had to wait for the grandson of an Abyssinian slave to give Russia a language is not lost on anyone, especially since it was his grandfather (gifted to Peter I by the ruler of the Netherlands) who built Russia’s navy. All in all, it was a pretty dismal foundation for an empire.
THANK GOODNESS FOR A GREAT NEIGHBOR
Just next door to Russia was Ukraine, which had much of what Russia lacked. Ukraine had a long European history. So, Russia declared itself the heir to Kyivan Rus’. Ukraine had an old and wonderfully lyrical language, one that could even be written! So, Russia declared itself the mother lode of Slavic languages. Ukraine had a long established Church.
So, the Metropolitan of Kyiv was marched off to Russia, where he was declared the “Metropolitan of Vladimir” (Moscow was not worthy of a metropolitan, even by Russian standards, until later) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church suddenly became a subunit of the Russian Orthodox Church. Ukraine’s ports became home to Russia’s warm water fleet (a problem to this day.) Ukraine’s rich agricultural land (where rich, black topsoil is measured in meters, not inches) together with the people who lived on it, was given away to the Russian “royal” family.
UKRAINIANS WON’T GO ALONG
But, Russia still had a big problem. The Ukrainians continued to want their own land, their own Church, their own language, their own laws, their own traditions, their own food, their own farms, their own wealth, their own borders – and especially their own freedom and independence.
As much as Russia tried to paint itself as Ukraine’s “big brother,” Ukrainians viewed it as a rogue young neighbor yet to be civilized. So, what would any self-respecting conqueror do with such insolence? The answer is obvious. Win what hearts and minds you can and kill the rest. And, that’s exactly what Russia has been trying to do for the last 400 years.
Although Russia’s methods have changed over the years, they have always been consistent with what was available and feasible at the time. There are limits to how many people you can kill with a sword. No matter how good you are, you still have to kill them one at a time. While you’re killing one, many others can escape. The countryside is open, transportation is slow, and communication depends on how fast a man can travel.
The process of Russification was not willfully less intense in the early stages. It was just slow and inefficient due to the lack of more efficient means. The emergence of more effective means to control, communicate and transport was paralleled by the emergence of ever more efficient means of segregating and killing those who insisted on being Ukrainian.
LAZAR KAGANOVICH FATHERS MODERN GENOCIDE
By the early 1930s, Russia had sufficient technology to move the destruction of Ukrainians to a level of slaughter not seen before or since in human history. Supported by the political will of Stalin, Lazar Kaganovich became the father of modern genocide. Joined by Pavel Postyshev and Viacheslav Molotov, these three Stalinist henchmen were the “Commanders of the Holodomor.” [5]
Kaganovich effectively closed Ukraine’s borders, controlled the flow of information, confined the target population, physically removed or destroyed all available food and then sat back and watched millions and millions of Ukrainians starve to death. He topped off his masterwork by killing millions more by traditional means, like shooting or freezing them to death in Siberia. Kaganovich’s kill rate remains unchallenged to this day – 10 million dead in 500 days.
Such massive slaughter is hard to fathom, hard to manage and hard to cover up. Kaganovich brought a whole new meaning to the word “diabolical” as he took to all three challenges like a duck to water. The disposal of bodies was a problem – not just the sheer numbers, but also the need to dispose of them in a way that left the least evidence.
So, they dug huge pits near railroad sidings, dumped in the bodies interspersed with logs to aerate the fires and burn as hot as crematorium ovens. The smell of burning human flesh permeated the countryside. Those who smelled it never forgot it – they took it to their graves in their nightmares.
Foreign reporters were taken on escorted tours of Potemkin villages, greeted by children neatly dressed for the occasion and holding large loaves of bread – which was soaked in kerosene to make sure the starving children didn’t eat it. Survivors report traveling for days in eastern Ukraine without seeing any living thing – not just no people, but also no dogs, no squirrels or other animals, rarely even a bird – the bone-chilling silence broken only by the wind.
Into this wasteland of death Kaganovich brought native Russians, many from the military, to repopulate those regions of Ukraine that were devastated by the genocide. Many fled and had to be brought back numerous times. The abandoned houses reeked of death, the plows turned up human skeletons. But in time they stayed put, and gradually those regions became largely Russian-speaking.
Unlike other masters of genocide, Kaganovich died in comfortable retirement in Moscow in 1991, at the ripe old age of 98, attended by two faithful servants. When asked if there was anything he regretted about what he had done, he replied, “I only regret that I didn’t finish them off.” [6]
PREOCCUPIED BY THE DEPRESSION, THE WEST
TAKES LITTLE NOTICE AND CARES EVEN LESS
In 1933, the USA and Europe were struggling to get out of a depression, and there was little interest in trying to come to grips with such massive slaughter, especially as it was so far away and the Russian propaganda machine was working overtime to deflect and deny.
Even the New York Times denied there was anything amiss in Ukraine. Their reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, a voracious pervert whom Stalin rewarded with drugs and sex, even won a Pulitzer Prize. To this day, the New York Times infamously refuses to return Duranty’s “blood-soaked” Pulitzer.
1933 was also the year President Roosevelt formally recognized the USSR. Persuaded by the likes of Armand Hammer (capitalist friend of Lenin, his Odessa-born father, Julius, founded the American Communist Party in 1919) and Averell Harriman (whose banking and shipping interests wanted open trade with Russia), Roosevelt knowingly turned a blind eye to the Holodomor.
Once again, the profit motive prevailed as businessmen from the United States, Britain and other European countries eagerly, greedily and without conscience traded the food seized from the starving Ukrainians as well as the gold, icons and anything else Russia plundered from Ukraine.
Then World War II broke out, and suddenly there was not just a new enemy – Germany – but the old enemy – Russia – just as suddenly became an ally. Much of the food that had been seized from starving Ukrainians during the Genocide of 1932-1933 had been sold to the West, and that hard currency was used to build and arm Russia’s huge military.
With its immense and well-armed forces Stalin became a “partner” of the US and Europe in the war against Hitler. Since Stalin won the war, he could write history as he wished. No one was going to suggest that he and Kaganovich be hanged together with others who were guilty of “genocide” (by then a new word had been coined to describe this kind of slaughter.)
It was not until after the war, in 1946, when Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko published I Chose Freedom, in which he writes about the Holodomor and Stalin’s many other atrocities, that anyone besides Ukrainian émigrés spoke up about it.
When the French Communist Party denounced the book as nothing but lies, Kravchenko sued them for slander in what was billed in the world press as “The Trial of the Century.” Kravchenko faced down Russian propagandists and high officials, and even his ex-wife, as he marched in his thirty survivor witnesses. He won, thereby forever changing how the world looks at Stalin and Russia.
METAGENOCIDE: RUSSIA’S CENTURIES OF CONQUEST
OF UKRAINIANS GO BEYOND GENOCIDE [7]
While the Holodomor marked the height of Russian genocide against Ukrainians, it was by no means an isolated event. Under Russian rule, Ukrainians were subjected to tyranny that went beyond traditional interpretations of genocide, to what this author terms “metagenocide” – long term ongoing genocide systematically targeting for destruction not just a group of people but also all that defines them as that group. The goal is not just to deny the group’s right to exist, but to deny that it ever existed as a nation in the first place, to wipe it from humanity’s collective memory.
Russia’s metagenocide in Ukraine was pervasive, calculated, insidious and covert. It was at times incremental, at times opportunistic, but never losing sight of its ultimate goal – to eliminate once and for all, all things Ukrainian and leave unchallenged Russia’s claim that all those things were and are really Russian.
It combined the worst aspects of classic genocide with long term intentional ethnocide. Russia’s metagenocide in Ukraine targeted not only Ukrainian persons, but also the Ukrainian language, culture, history, churches, traditions and all else that contributes to defining Ukrainians as Ukrainians and not as just another subset of Russians.
Russian destruction of Ukrainian people systematically targeted first one segment of the Ukrainian population and then another, the ultimate goal to eliminate them all. The killing of Ukrainians who insisted on being Ukrainians lasted throughout the twentieth century and for some, into the twenty-first.
Before World War II, several waves of killing destroyed the bulk of the Ukrainian nation’s leadership class. Ukrainian civil authority was eliminated during and after the revolution (1918-1921). The Ukrainian clergy and churches were eliminated in the early 1930s, leaving only a handful of Moscow Patriarchate affiliated churches controlled by the Russian secret police.
The destruction of the intelligentsia, begun in earnest in 1929 with the destruction of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, peaked in the late 1930s as the remaining survivors were executed or exiled, Ukraine’s premier historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky being among the last to fall. The Holodomor was designed to destroy the Ukrainian peasant class, the roots of Ukrainian national identity. Ukrainian nationalist leaders abroad were also assassinated, including Symon Petliura (Paris, 1926) and Yevhen Konovalets (Rotterdam, 1938).
Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent obliteration of Ukraine’s western border created the opportunity for Russia to extend its rule and anti-Ukrainian state terrorism into Western Ukraine (until then under Polish rule). Ironically, Ukrainians were perhaps the only major nationality that got it right in World War II.
To Ukrainians, the Nazis and the Communists were equally evil – two sides of the same fascist coin. Wanting only their own freedom, Ukrainians fought both the Germans and the Russians, and paid the ultimate price when Germany was defeated but Russia was not. As a victor and partner of the Allies, Russia was allowed to take control of all of Ukraine.
Instead of peace, the end of World War II brought continued death and destruction to Ukraine and Ukrainians. In 1946, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, predominant in Western Ukraine, was closed, its property was seized, its churches demolished and its clergy killed or exiled to Siberia. In 1947, Russia inflicted another massive slaughter by starvation on Ukrainians, as more than a million died when their food was once again seized and shipped out to feed Russians and their newly acquired satellite states in Eastern Europe.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which had fought both Hitler and Stalin during WW II, continued to fight Russian forces in Ukraine into the 1950s, when its leader, General Roman Shukhevych, was killed in a shoot-out with Russian forces near Lviv. The struggle against Ukrainian nationalists abroad also continued with the assassinations of Ukrainian leaders, notably Lev Rebet (1957) and Stefan Bandera (1959), both of whom were killed in Munich by the same self-confessed KGB assassin. [8]
Having lost perhaps half their population to genocide, terror, slaughter and war, for a while Ukrainians were too weak to resist. Russia used this period to consolidate control over all details of everyday life in Ukraine while implementing a broadly based program of ethnocide to de-Ukrainianize Ukraine and try yet again to make it just another part of Russia.
In the 1960s and 70s numerous Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists and cultural figures were arrested and exiled to Siberia. Songwriter Volodymyr Ivasiuk was murdered in 1979 in an effort to stop a nationalist resurgence in popular music. At the same time, the archives were purged of much damning evidence and crucial historical and cultural materials were transferred as Russia sought to rewrite history to suit its propaganda purposes. Once again, it all proved to be only a temporary solution.
MACE’S REPORT ON HOLODOMOR STIRS UKRAINE’S
MEMORY AND ENDS UP HELPING TOPPLE THE USSR
In anticipation of the 50th Year to Commemorate the Holodomor by the Ukrainian Diaspora, publications began appearing about the Holodomor, including testimonies by surviving eyewitnesses. In 1984, the American historian James Mace began compiling oral histories of the Holodomor in the United States and Canada.
This led to the creation of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine by the United States Congress, with Mace as Staff Director. The commission’s landmark Report to Congress in 1988 [9] concluded, “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-33.” [10]
In 1984, spurred by such allegations, Leonid Kravchuk, who was then senior ideologue of the Communist Party of Ukraine, began reviewing secret archival material on the Holodomor, at first seeking to dispel what he and other party leaders believed to be anti-communist propaganda. After examining 1,500 photographs and other documents, the evidence was so overwhelming that he concluded it was all true.
He wrote, “The faces of the children killed by starvation appeared constantly before my eyes. My conscience began to bother me as I came to understand that I was a member of an organization that could rightfully be called criminal.” [11]
The truth about the Holodomor had been suppressed so effectively and for so long that few people, not even the leaders of the CPU, which ran Ukraine, knew much about it. For over half a century, no one had spoken of it. Survivors had been terrorized into silence, and those who did dare to speak out were either executed or exiled to Siberia. Those born after World War II knew virtually nothing. The greatest crime of the twentieth century had become its greatest secret.
Despite strong opposition from other senior party members, in 1990 Volodymyr Ivashko, the new head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, ordered the first publication in Ukraine on the Holodomor, [12] that contained 350 photographs (with the “most terrifying” excluded.) [13] That same year Oles Yanchuk, a young Ukrainian film maker, received government funds to make Famine 33, a feature-length movie about the Holodomor. [14]
The 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Power Station had already highlighted Russia’s arrogance and wanton disdain for Ukrainian life. Revelations about the Holodomor made it much worse. Long-simmering resentment of Russian rule came to a head in 1990 as Ukraine, taking advantage of the decrepit state of the USSR and an impotent Gorbachev, exited the USSR and declared its sovereignty.
A year later, Ukraine declared its full independence. Leonid Kravchuk became its first president. The night before the referendum on independence for Ukraine, Yanchuk’s film, Famine 33, played nationwide on television. The referendum passed by over 90 percent.
UKRAINE STRUGGLES TO STAY FREE AS RUSSIA
STRUGGLES TO RESTORE THE EMPIRE
In a flash, Ukrainian independence proved all the old predictions about the Russian Empire. Without Ukraine, the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. Without Ukraine there was (and is) no Russian Empire, just a “Federation” unable to gain the respect it still craves from the international community. Returning Ukraine to the fold is among the highest priorities of the Russian leadership today.
Since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has re-launched intense efforts to suppress Ukrainian identity and language – “the voice of Ukraine’s soul” – by directly and indirectly buying up newspapers, magazines, book publishers and bookstores, as well as radio and television stations, and even movie studios.
[15]
Investments in Ukrainian industries and the business infrastructure (banks, insurance companies, and so on) have tied Ukrainian companies to their Russian counterparts. Politicians are routinely bought to legislate against anything that supports Ukrainian identity and for anything that brings Ukraine closer to dependence on Russia. Incredibly, until April 2008, the head of the State Committee on Archives in Ukraine was a leading member of the Communist Party, which has always denied the Holodomor.
Russia still casts a long shadow on Ukraine far beyond the media and archives. Those who cannot be persuaded to be “reasonable” still often end up dead. Some are killed in car “accidents” (Yaroslav Lesiv, 1991; Viacheslav Chornovil, 1999; Oleksandr Yemets, 2001), some are shot (Vadym Hetman, 1998); some are killed with the old-fashioned hammer in the head (Hryhorii Vaskovych, 2002; Ivan Havdyda 2002). [16] Others simply disappear (Mykhailo Boichyshyn, 1998) or end up imprisoned (Yulia Tymoshenko, 2001) or poisoned (Mykhailo Ratushny, 1998; Viktor Yushchenko, 2004).
Holodomor scholar James Mace died in Kyiv in 2004. Long aware that his work had earned him enemies in Russia, a week before his death he e-mailed fellow Holodomor researchers in the United States, telling them he feared for his life and warning them to be careful. [17]
The Moscow Patriarchate Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is heavily funded by Russia, regularly organizes pro-Russian demonstrations. Russians living in the Crimea (including many virulently anti-Ukrainian retired military types) are a persistent fifth column performing on command as suits Russia’s needs at any given time. Other well financed propaganda efforts are aimed at urging Ukrainians to stay away from the European Union and to fear NATO.
Every New Year, Russia precipitates a new “gas crisis” with Ukraine. It is basic political terrorism designed to create the impression, especially among Ukrainians, that ordinary life and business in Ukraine exists only at Russia’s pleasure and Russia can bring it all to a halt with a flick of a switch at any time and for any reason or without reason. This year, Ukrainians quietly squirreled away enough reserves to get them through the winter.
When Russia turned off the tap, Ukraine had enough gas to last it into March, but there was no longer enough gas in the system to get it to Southern Europe, leaving former German Chancellor and close Putin friend Gerhard Schroeder (curiously, now the highly paid Chairman of Russia’s Gazprom’s Baltic Sea pipeline project) rather “Red” faced.
The mysterious midnight fire at the chalet in Switzerland where Ukrainian President Yushchenko was reported staying on the night of December 29 (the flames seemed to erupt everywhere at the same time and the chalet burned to the ground despite rapid response by well equipped and expert local fire fighters) reminded everyone of previous assassination attempts. [18]
RUSSIA’S METAGENOCIDE AGAINST UKRAINE IS
LIMITED ONLY BY WHAT RUSSIA CAN GET AWAY WITH
Few Ukrainians doubt Russia will continue to use the strongest tactics against Ukrainians it can get away with at any given time. Russia’s metagenocide against Ukrainians continues and will continue, using ethnocide, economic, financial and cyber terrorism, pseudo-civilian terrorist violence and ethnic cleansing. Military force and further genocide should not be ruled out if Russia should ever again think it can get away with it.
There is an old KGB saying, “If it is necessary, it can be done.” [19] Russia is still run by the same KGB elite and is still quite comfortable with the taste of blood. Bosnia, Chechnya and Georgia stand as strong reminders that Russia’s methods and goals have not changed. Russia will continue to be as ruthless as the world allows.
Despite centuries of effort and tens of millions of victims, Russia’s metagenocide of Ukrainians has failed. Ukrainians have proven to be far more resilient and adept at survival than the Moscovites had anticipated way back when they decided to become an empire at Ukraine’s expense. Ukrainians have adapted to the art of survival. Even their national anthem is titled, “Ukraine has not yet died.” Nor will it – Ukrainians will not allow it.
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE HOLODOMOR
World wide recognition of the Holodomor phase of Russia’s metagenocide against Ukrainians will not go away. No matter how hard the Russians try, their enormously skilled and petrodollar-rich propaganda machine gets only limited results from its work to dilute and suppress efforts by Diaspora Ukrainians and the Ukrainian government to educate the world about the Holodomor. Despite limited funds, incessant infighting and weak organizations, Ukrainians have done remarkably well in counteracting Russian disinformation and getting the truth about the Holodomor out to the world.
Ukrainians say, “You cannot drown the truth.” No matter how you weigh it down, the ropes will rot and the chains will rust, and the truth will float to the surface and stare you in the face. You cannot escape it. The truth of the Holodomor will not be denied.
“The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood.” [20]
The faces of the children will not go away.
Close your eyes, Russia, and you will see them forever.
Close your eyes, Ukraine, and you will see them again.
— Peter Borisow
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ABOUT PETER BORISOW:
Peter Borisow is the son of Ukrainians whose entire families were killed between 1921 and 1933 and who emigrated to the United States after World War II. He is a graduate of New York University (history), and his career has spanned the arts as well as trade and finance. He lived in Europe for twenty years and speaks English, Ukrainian and Italian. He is the President of a privately held firm specializing in analysis and management of risk in film finance.
He is also the President of the Hollywood Trident Foundation, which promotes Ukraine and Ukrainians in the film industry and supports films about Ukrainian subjects. The actor Jack Palance was the foundation’s Chairman from its inception until his death. His widow, Elaine Palance, is now Vice-president.
Mr. Borisow is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for U.S. Ukrainian Relations in New York. He travels frequently to Ukraine and is an advisor to the Head of the Film Department at the Ministry of Culture. He is active in Holodomor recognition and education.
Footnotes:
[1] Australia, Canada, Columbia, Ecuador, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, United States and the Vatican,; statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Kostenko, reported by Ukinform -- Ukrainian News, Kyiv, Ukraine., Nov. 18, 2008.
[2] SSU (SBU) site English version: http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/index and
http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=74497&cat_
id=80545&mustWords=шtazi&searchPublishing=1
[3] See Herbert Romerstein, "Divide and Conquer: The KGB Disinformation Campaign against Ukrainians and Jews," Ukrainian Quarterly, LX, no. 3 (Fall 2004).
[4] Peter Borisow, "ABC's of Holodomor Denial," Ukrainian Weekly, LXXVI, no. 33, Aug. 17, 2008, pp. 7, 21.
[5] Not to be Forgotten -- A Chronicle of the Communist Inquisition, Roman Krutsyk, Memorial, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2001, panels 16-17.
[6] This quotation was reported to me by a person who spoke with Kaganovich by telephone (in his Moscow apartment) around 1989 or 1990. I know this person well and deem him to be credible. However, he is afraid to declare this publicly for fear of retribution. As he lives in Ukraine and is now elderly, threats against his life and safety are equally credible, and I have promised not to reveal his identity.
[7] Oxford English Dictionary (online) definition: Meta-, prefix: A1. Denoting change, transformation, permutation or substitution; A2. "with sense 'beyond, above, at a higher level'"
[8] Bohdan Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 23.
[9] Report to Congress, Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1988).
[10] Ibid., p. xxiii.
[11] Leonid Kravchuk, We Have What We Have: Memories and Thoughts (Kyiv: Stolittia, 2002), pp. 44-46. Kravchuk stated that in the 1980s he viewed some 1,500 photographs of the Holodomor and that the most horrific ones were not published in Pyrih's Holod 1932-33. In 2008, when the former president of Ukraine was asked by a reporter (Stefan Bandera, Kyiv, Ukraine) what happened to those photographs, he replied they were in the archives. Neither the author nor anyone known to him has been able to establish which photographs Kravchuk saw or if they still exist today and, if so, where they are stored.
[12] Holod 1932-1933 na Ukraini: ochyma istorykiv, movoiu dokumentiv [The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Through the Eyes of Historians, the Language and Documents], ed. and comp. Yaroslav Pyrih (Kyiv: Politvydav Ukrainy, 1990).
[13] Ibid. This is a fairly rare publication, as many printed copies were destroyed prior to distribution. Known surviving copies of the book contain numerous documents, but no photographs. See also footnote 11.
[14] Famine 33 [Genocide 33], Studio Fest Zemlia, Kyiv, Ukraine, 1990; producer and director: Oles Yanchuk, 35 mm feature, 90 min., b/w with some color.
[15] Peter Borisow, "The Ukrainian Film and Media Sector," Center for U.S. Ukrainian Relations, New York, March 31, 2005.
[16] Havdyda was attacked by unknown assailants in 2002 and died in 2008 without regaining consciousness.
[17] Mace said this to the author at a meeting in New York in 2003. The e-mail was sent to Cheryl Madden, author of several publications on the Holodomor.
[18] Brian Brady, Matthew Bell and Tony Paterson, "A Swiss chalet, a fire and a President who crossed Putin," Independent (U.K.), Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009.
[19] Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 39.
[20] Ibid., p. 118.
Source: http://www.lucorg.com/archive_view.php?id=3666
