Soviet and Nazi Crimes are no Different
July 1, 2009 – 12:14 amYou can’t be half pregnant or half drunk. If you want to remove the stain of totalitarianism you need to remove Nazi and Soviet idols to totalitarianism. Yushchenko’s only fault is that he did not go all the way in stating that Ukraine suffered terribly from the worlds two evil ideologies: Nazism and Communism (see Tim Snyder’s excellent article).
New York Review of Books 56, number 12 (July 16, 2009)
Holocaust: The Ignored Reality
by Timothy Snyder (Yale University)
Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with
death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and
1940s are the reference of today’s confused discussions of memory, and
the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share…
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875
BBC, Kyiv:
Ukraine wary of KGB terror files
Ukraine is opening up part of its old KGB archive, declassifying hundreds of thousands of documents spanning the entire Soviet period.
But the move to expose Soviet-era abuses is dividing Ukrainians, the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse reports from Kiev.
Deep in the bowels of Ukraine’s former KGB headquarters there is a deathly silence. Thousands of boxes, piled floor to ceiling, line the walls. Each box is carefully numbered and each one contains hundreds of documents: case notes on enemies of the former Soviet state.
Behind each number, there is a story of personal tragedy.
Volodymyr Viatrovych, the chief archivist, pulled out a brown cardboard folder stuffed full of documents: case number 4076. At the centre of the case is a letter, dated 1940 and addressed to “Comrade Stalin, the Kremlin, Moscow”.
“Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,” the letter starts. Nikolai Reva wanted Stalin to know the facts about the great famine of 1932-33, when millions died as a result of the Soviet policy of forced collectivisation.
Like many at the time, Mr Reva believed that Stalin was being kept in the dark, and that if only he knew what was happening, he would surely put a stop to it.
But his letter landed him in the Gulag. He was eventually rehabilitated – 25 years later.
Many met a harsher fate.
Leafing through one of many macabre photo albums, Mr Viatrovych pointed to a picture of Ivan Severin, shot in the head by the Soviet security services. Under the picture, in very neat handwriting, is written: “Liquidated, 3 April 1947“.
Criminal prosecution
Mr Viatrovych and his team are helping people to find out what happened to relatives and loved ones, often decades after they disappeared.
But the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), now in charge of the files, is declassifying them selectively.
They are concentrating on older cases, like that of the “liquidated” Mr Severin, who was part of a guerrilla campaign against Soviet rule in western Ukraine after World War II.
The authorities are preparing to mount a criminal prosecution in relation to the famine, or Holodomor , as it is known in Ukraine, though it is doubtful whether there is anyone still alive to stand in the dock.
But SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko hopes this is just the beginning.
“As soon as Russia starts to open and uncover its archives, there will be more and more truth about the real history,” he said. At the moment, he added, Russia is not being especially co-operative.
But there is another obstacle to complete disclosure, and that is the Ukrainian Security Service itself. They are the ones deciding which files to declassify.
I put it to Mr Nalyvaichenko that the SBU is, after all, a successor to the KGB. He came out on the defensive.
“First and most important for me – we are not a successor to the KGB. That’s according to the law,” he said.
Could he state categorically that no-one working for the SBU today had formerly worked for the KGB?
He could not, admitting that 20% of his employees were former KGB officers. Some analysts in Ukraine believe that is a conservative figure.
It seems unlikely that SBU officers who worked for the Soviet KGB in the 1970s and 80s will be enthusiastic about declassifying documents that could incriminate them. Even if, as Mr Nalyvaichenko pointed out, the SBU is trying to recruit younger staff.
‘Not worth it’
But not all young Ukrainians have an exclusively negative view of their 20th-Century history.
“ To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war ”
Dmytro Tabachnyk Historian and opposition MP
In Kiev, there is a vast monument to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany: a sprawling bronze relief of soldiers bearing guns and bayonets.
“We love our history,” said Svitlana, a young schoolteacher from the southern city of Odessa, on an outing with her class.
She was not keen for the children in her charge to be forced to examine the darker chapters of Soviet history.
“The past is the past,” she said. “The history of the famine, the killings, all the things Stalin did. I don’t think we should bring them up. There’s enough violence today as it is. If we start blaming each other… It’s just not worth it.”
‘Witch hunt’
The idea of airing the past as part of a healing process, and excluding members of the former regime from positions of authority – a process known as “lustration” – is being actively promoted by some in the Ukrainian administration.
But it is highly controversial. Dmytro Tabachnyk, a historian and opposition lawmaker, thinks the notion is absurd.
“It’s a witch hunt,” he said. “To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war.”
In a forest just outside Kiev, the tree trunks are tied with thousands of white scarves.
The scarves are embroidered in the traditional Ukrainian way, with red-and-black geometric patterns, and each one symbolically represents a life lost to Soviet oppression.
Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police would bury executed political prisoners at Bykivnia. No-one knows exactly how many bodies lie buried in this wood, but some estimates put the figure at more than 200,000.
But, says Nico Lange, the German director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Kiev, Ukrainians must stop blaming the Russians for their past, and start looking inward.
“Ukrainians have a tendency to perceive themselves as only victims of those historical processes,” he says.
“But coming to terms with the past really starts when you start uncovering also your own involvement: the oppressions by your own state, the offenders who are from your own people. If you do this work, this very painful work, the truth will finally set you free. And you will not invite new dictators to oppress you again.”
The Germans have experience of confronting their own past, both following World War II, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But it will take a lot of united political will for such a process to get under way in Ukraine.
And it may be that, for the moment, there are still too many people alive and in positions of power, who were involved with the Soviet regime in one way or another.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8119320.stm
Published: 2009/06/29 00:51:16 GMT
© BBC MMIX
13 Responses to “Soviet and Nazi Crimes are no Different”
http://www.rferl.org/content/GoodBye_Lenin_/1766997.html
By Taras Kuzio on Jul 1, 2009
This BBC Radio 4 clip is also worth listening to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7969010.stm
By LEvko on Jul 1, 2009
Everyone wants to live in a Skalinska dom. Or that’s what you are told when looking to buy an apartment and its true Stalinska apartments are the best value of you can find one to buy.
Stalin like Hitler was a tyrant and I wonder if the allies would have won if it had not been for Stalin. We would probably be speaking german and the world would be a much different place.
Its not so much as exposing and denouncing Stalin for what he was. Its the russian bashing that is attached to Stalin’s rule that concerns me. Stalin was Georgian after all.
Of equal if not greater concern is the attempts to declare Stepan Bandara a hero’s of the state. When in reality he was a Nazi sympathiser and killed Russians. Ukrainians and Jews alike. He was not a hero nor was Stalin.
By Bandarits in time on Jul 16, 2009
Catherine was German, Hitler was an Austrian, Brezhnev and Khrushchev were from Ukraine. So what? This is irrelevant.
Bandera could not have been a Nazi sympathiser if he was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 and spent the war in Nazi camps. His 2 brothers died in Nazi camps. The level of Soviet indoctrination is incredible.
By Taras Kuzio on Jul 16, 2009
The level of sovok indoctrination is incredible, indeed!
There it is, again – “don’t bash roosha, Stalin was Georgian.”
As if Stalin walked into rasha all by his lonesome self, and took over teh entire territory and millions of people all by his lonesome self, and carried out all of his death orders personally without any henchmen at all.
By elmer on Jul 16, 2009
Maybe we should also argue that it was not the fault of the Germans as Hitler was an Austrian and that the Germans were wrong to de-Nazify as this hurt the feelings of millions of Germans whose standard of living rose under Hitler. This is the same argument used by the Sovok mentality here – don’t touch Stalin or communism as there is an uneven attitude to Soviet rule in Ukraine and not everybody sees it negatively. If this approach was used in Germany post 1945 there would still be statues to Hitler and other Nazi henchmen across Germany today. Don’t you think you could have found ordinary Germans who also would have said well Hitler wasn’t so bad, he made the trains run on time, he gave us the Peoples Car (Volkswagen), he gave us full employment, etc.
You can’t have one rule for Germany and another for post-Soviet republics. That is Putin’s logic of wanting the recognition of Russia as the Soviet successor state but not recognising the crimes committed by that state.
I vote to ban all Nazi and Communist parties in Ukraine equally, as both Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism brought evils to Ukraine.
By Taras Kuzio on Jul 17, 2009
Well, the disturbing things is that I HAVE found praise of Hitler – on blogs and forums dealing with Russia.
With exactly that message – “Hitler wasn’t to bad because he ‘gave’ people the Autobahn”, etc., etc.
Which, of course, fits right into the “don’t blame us for Stalin” and “Stalin wasn’t so bad because he industrialized Russia and the sovok union.”
Or, put differently, “Nazi brand of evil – bad; Sovok brand of evil – good.” “Hitler tyrant – bad; Stalin tyrant – good.”
The “don’t blame us, Stalin was Georgian” has been posted for YEARS.
I’m a bit surprised to see it here – but then again, maybe not.
The sovoks learned nothing.
By elmer on Jul 17, 2009
Dr. Kuzio, or anyone. Can someone explain to me why in Snyder’s article in the New York Review he asserts that only 3 million perished in the Famine. I know Conquest started off at 7 million, but the numbers keep on going down. I’ve read S. Kulchytsky’s work and can actually remember meeting him as a student at U of T during glasnost and him asserting like a true believer: “the famine was not man-made but caused only by nature.” I was with him and the head of Memorial Maniak at that time. He has since seen the light but can anyone point me to an exhaustive study that shows only 3 million Ukrainian dieing? Thanks.
By Mike on Jul 31, 2009
Mike, the difficulty is that the stalinists were not as meticulous as the nazis in keeping records, and the sovoks won’t open their records.
So estimating deaths is a difficult process.
The rooshans want to minimize the number and blame it all on “natural causes” and an unfortunate “mistake” – “after all, stalin was Georgian.”
3 million is a very, very low number, given the enormous impact of the Holodomor.
But getting accurate figures, as stated above, is a difficult and laborious process, for several reasons, not the least of which is the refusal of roosha to open up its archives.
By elmer on Jul 31, 2009
I have read Kulchytsky saying it was around 4.5 m. The figure varies between 3-4.5. Motyls op ed is quite good. The Yushchenko figure of 10 m. is exaggerated and an attempt to show Ukraine suffered more than Jews in World War II. I would go with around 4-5 m. for Ukraine.
http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op_ed/45795
By Taras Kuzio on Aug 1, 2009
Thank you Dr. Kuzio! Now what about all those professors who refuse to even describe the Holodomor a genocide: Dominique Arel, Terry Martin, Magocsi who taught me didn’t touch the word genocide in a class I had with him, and I do not know if even Subtelny has ever argued for it. This was all too honestly obvious at a Holodomor conference at U of T last year, where none dared defend the use of the word genocide.
The entire conference ended with a former professor of mine, Peter Solomon, (who in my times learning under him laughed at the idea of “captive nations” and asserted that the Soviet Union was legitimate and was not on the verge of collapse (he said this in 1990). He apparently now runs quite a bit of Ukrainian programs at U of T on Ukrainian studies: a guy who on Soviet history did not include one class on the repressive organs of the K.G.B. as this did not fit with his “revisionist” view of the Soviet Union.
Lynne Viola, a revisionist queen, after throwing Conquest theses to the dogs was a panelist and had just written a book on the hidden gulag. Remarkably, she did not do any research in Ukraine on collectivization; she did it all from Moscow.
And that holodomor conference, partially funded by Toronto’s Ukrainian community, ended on one last note by Solomon: “It was after all the Ukrainians during the famine who did the most killing.” I’ve just noted somewhere Anne Applebaum is to write a book on the Holodmor. Will have to check. Mike
By Mike on Aug 2, 2009
Arel and Martin probably yes. They would never do so. Magocsi and Subtelny I suspect would be more inclined to use the word. Remember though that the word (genocide) is a rather complicated and loaded term. I am neither a historian or a lawyer and would be cautious in using it (but certainly would not ignore the term). Did Stalin opt to murder ALL Ukrainians? I have not seen proof to this affect. Did Hitler decide to murder ALL Jews. Yes, there is documentary proof. With Gypsies and Slavs coming a close second and third.
As to Solomon he represents that russophilia in academia that I found in my studies in the UK. I have said this to him in seminars where he has apologised about Putin’s regime. My London Professors tried to convince me in 1985-87 that the nationality problem was “resolved” in the USSR! Just as it was exploding. Some of my Birmingham Professors were CP members and they edit a Macmillan series in the Soviet Industrialisation Programme which is very apologetic.
Solomon now runs the Jacyk Program on Ukraine at the Munk Centre of International Relations.
In conclusion I have found that Canadian and British academics can be quite russophile-sovietophile. Americans far less so.
The main group who did the famine were Bolsheviks. I would stay away from using ethnic categories like Solomon and others do. The NKVD and Communist Party had a large number of Jews proportionately but that does not mean that Jews did Soviet repression and the famine. They – like the Ukrainians in the NKVD and CP – acted as Bolsheviks not as members of ethnic groups. Solomon’s comment was spurious and opens up counter arguments from Ukrainian anti-semites.
By Taras Kuzio on Aug 2, 2009
Dear Dr. Kuzio. A lengthy external articles aside, I would comment on your own preface to it:
“If you want to remove the stain of totalitarianism totalitarianism you need to remove Nazi and Soviet idols to totalitarianism. Yushchenko’s only fault is that he did not go all the way in stating that Ukraine suffered terribly from the worlds two evil ideologies: Nazism and Communism”
If I understand you correctly, you return to the topic of Soviet monuments in Ukraine despite its being discussed recently in another thread of your blog. I am surprised by your continued fixation on this relatively marginal issue while Ukraine is plagued by much more important problems such as practically non-existing judicial system, pervasive corruption, legal nihilism, leadership’s incompetence and their preoccupation with internal fights. But, perhaps, everyone prioritizes the problems we face in the country by his/her own order of importance. Personally, I disagree with your order of priorities and think that, say, purging the judiciary and security forces from the corrupt officials is by far a more pressing problem in Ukraine but even if this is your view that the “Soviet idols to totalitarianism” is the most urgent thing that Ukraine needs to deal with (I wonder why you also mentioned the Nazi idols, AFAIK there are none in Ukraine) the way to deal with it that you propose (you say they should be “dealt” by Yushchenko) is unrealistic in a democratic country.
Monuments in Ukraine just as in the US is a local issue. Central government lacks any authority to regulate such local issues which in Ukraine, just like in most of the free world, is left to the local communities whose representatives are voted into their positions in a democratically held elections. Are you saying that Yushchenko should skirt the legally prescribed separation of powers and usurp the authority he simply lacks? Or you are still seriously proposing that SBU should covertly engage with nationalist extremists and encourage them to commit mass acts of vandalism? I find any of this suggestions totally unacceptable. In fact, the worldwide experience with governmental security agencies resorting to covert relationship with extremists of any kind, be it militant Islamists in Afghanistan or Marxist or right-wing guerrilla rebels in Latin America, showed that such engagement is usually highly counterproductive in the long run for the very countries whose security forces engaged into such relationship. Eventually, those extremists tend to bite the hand that used to feed them to the hand’s own peril. I Hope your suggestion was a joke.
I would also like to comment on several posts above related to the number of Holodomor victims. There are two issues being discussed here, the number of victims, which is a matter of historic research (mostly the archival research) and whether the events that resulted into the mass starvation in Ukraine fall under the legal definition of Genocide.
While the number of Holodomor’s victims is a matter of factual determination, the applicability of the term Genocide is a much more complex matter of historic interpretation. The crime of Genocide requires proof of a genocidal intent of the Soviet leadership (including the leadership of Soviet Ukraine which supervised the grain collections such as Kosior and Chubar, both ethnic Ukrainians) to starve the Ukrainians based on their ethnicity. Thus it is necessary to derive the intent from the events which is much more difficult than to establish what actually happened. Since no document was ever found that directs starvation on the ethnic basis (unlike the well documented Nazi orders on the Final Solution) the researchers are forced to derive what was actually the leadership’s intent backwards from the events that took place. Not only this is difficult in itself. It is even more difficult when the debate gets politicized by different sides who are interested in a certain outcome of this debate for their own political gain. Dr. Kuzio’s example of Yushchenko consistently using the exaggerated numbers that we cannot find in any work signed by a scholar who studied the subject is just one such example. BTW, on one ocasion Yushchenko even said the number of victims is about 20 million. Those who intentionally understates the number of victims or deny the famine as a whole commit the exact same sin.
As for the estimate of the number of victims of the famine, I must correct Dr. Kuzio stating that Kulchitsky estimates the number of victims at around 4.5 million. Kulchitsky’s estimate is between 3 and 3.5 million. His calculation is based on the declassified archival data and can be found in the book ???????????? ???????? ?????????? 1933 ?. ? ???????. ?????????? ??????? 1937 ?. ? ???????: ????????? ?? ????????? published by the Institute of History of NANU in Kiev. For those who don’t go to libraries and do not read academic publications I can recommend the available online article “??????? ??? ???????? ??? ?????????? 1933 ?????” by the same author published Dzerkalo Tyzhnya where the calculation is reproduced for the general public in lesser detail: http://www.dt.ua/3000/3150/36833/ . Also, Kulchitsky holds the view that Holodomor was indeed Genocide but not based on ethnicity (for example the larger faction of ethnic Moldavians than Ukrainians perished from starvation within the borders of UkrSSR because the famine affected the rural areas and the Moldavians were even less urbanized than Ukrainians). Noting that the mass murder based purely on the ethnicity seems to not have been the case, Kulchitsky introduces a strange anachronism a “citizen of the Ukrainian SSR” and states that the famine was a genocide against Ukrainian citizens (see his series of articles in “????” in October – November 2005 as well as his article in the same paper “????????? 1932 — 1933 ??. ?? ???????: ????????? ? ????????? ????” http://www.day.kiev.ua/290619?idsource=177052&mainlang=ukr . This, however, even if proven, makes the adopted by UN in 1948 definition of Genocide difficult to apply. Unfortunately, most of those who argue for or against the view that the famine was Genocide do not read much serious research of the subject and the tragedy is hijacked by politicians who use it their political quarrels.
But turning back to the calculations of the number of victims, an Australian historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft who also spent much time in the archives and, together with R.W. Davies, authored the most yet comprehensive book on the subject in English “The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931 – 1933″ http://www.amazon.com/Years-Hunger-Agriculture-1931-1933-Industrialization/dp/0333311078 stated elsewhere that the number of the famine victims in Ukraine was between 3 and 3.5 million of the total 6-7 million Soviet-wide. See ?. ???????? “? ??????????????? ?????????????? ???????? ????????? ??????? ? 1931—1933 ??.” in “???????? ????????? ???????: ??????????????? ? ?????????????? 1927-1939 ??.: ????????? ? ?????????. ??? 3. ????? 1930-1933 ??.” Another authoritative study of the subject was published by Jacques Vallin at al. in the world’s leading magazine in Demography “Population Studies” , November, 2002. Their estimate of the number of victims is around 2.6 million, also a horrible number high “enough” to not need any exaggeration.
Part of the people who frequently cite these exaggerated numbers are ignorant, just like Conquest was when he wrote his book, now completely obsolete, because the archives that were closed at the time Conquest was writing his book are now open to the researchers. But by far worse is when the numbers made out of thin air by the people who not just “don’t know” but don’t want to know as millions of victims who indeed died in this national catastrophe is somehow “not enough” to advance their political agendas. Yushchenko is obviously able to obtain the information on the current state of research from the Ukrainian leading scholars but he chooses not to and it is clear why he is not interested.
And finally, please allow me to correct a factual error in your stating that Khrushchev was from Ukraine. This is a very widespread misconception. He was neither an ethnic Ukrainian nor was he born in Ukraine or what later became Ukraine. Khrushchev was a Russian born in a village in what is now Kursk Oblast, Russia. He did not speak Ukrainian. That he worked in Ukraine makes him no more Ukrainian than, say, Kaganovich, who is by the way responsible not only for the grain collections in 1933 but also for the enforcing the party policy of wide-range Ukrainization that took place in Ukrainie in the 1920s. That does not make him a Ukrainian, does it?
By Burachek on Aug 10, 2009