“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?

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

http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op_ed/45795

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.