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Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Holds Symposium on Great Famine

The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932-33. Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project was the title of a symposium held on October 20, 2003 by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Scholars from the United States, Italy, France, and the Netherlands presented their latest research into the causes, extent, and lasting impact of what the special commission on the Ukraine Famine, in its 1988 report to the U.S. Congress, called an "act of genocide and terror."

Organized by the HURI Associate Director Dr. Lubomyr Hajda, the symposium pursued a twofold purpose announced by its subtitle: to discuss some of the new findings in Famine studies effected over the last twenty years since HURI launched its Famine studies project in 1982, and to map the course of future research.

Alongside such recognized specialists in East European history as Terry Martin, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University, and Andrea Graziosi, Professor of History, University of Naples "Federico II", the symposium also included representatives of a younger generation of scholars, among them, Dr. Gijs Kessler, research fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Niccolo Pianciola, Ph.D. candidate, Scuola Europea di Studi Avanzati, Istituto Universitario Suor Orsola, Benincasa, Naples, and Dr. Juliette Cadiot, HURI Research Fellow, Harvard University.

In his opening remarks, Dr. Hajda gave an overview of the pioneering HURI Famine Project undertaken in 1982-1986 with the financial support of the Ukrainian community channeled through the Ukrainian Studies Fund and the Ukrainian National Association. The project included among other things a memorial exhibition of photographic and other documents held at Harvard's Widener Library and accompanied by the catalogue Famine in the Soviet Ukraine 1932-1933 (1986), prepared by O.Procyk, L. Heretz, J. E. Mace; the publication of the book Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation. National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (1983), written by James E. Mace, Post-Doctoral Fellow at HURI at the time, who was also instrumental in the work of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine. It was also within the HURI Famine Project that Robert Conquest's seminal book The Harvest of Sorrow was published (1986).

Session one of the symposium "The 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine: Its Specificities, Its Context" focused on the discussion of two papers: Terry Martin's entitled "The Great Famine in Ukraine and the Nationalities Question", and Andrea Graziosi's "The Great Famine of 1932-33: Consequences and Implications". Martin spoke of new documents from the personal archives of Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich that revealed their direct complicity in the Ukrainian Famine. Stalin connected the stubborn resistance of Ukrainian peasants to his collectivization policies with his longstanding dislike of Ukrainians and fears of Ukrainian nationalism. He also suspected the Ukrainian Communist leadership of disloyalty towards Moscow and of harboring nationalist sympathies. Stalin's grain requisition policies initially targeting peasants as a class eventually acquired a clear ethnic, anti-Ukrainian, bias and came to target Ukrainians as an ethnic group hostile towards Stalin's goals.

In his presentation, Andrea Graziosi raised a multitude of questions that are still unsolved or inadequately treated. They bespeak the enormity of the famine and its far-reaching consequences for Ukrainian, Soviet, and European past, but, what is no less important, for the present as well, the consequences which historians and other social scientists are only beginning to comprehend. He articulated, in fact, a whole program of research that can feed many dissertation and book projects.

What, asked Graziosi, was the legacy of those seven-eight months, in which millions died, on the population? How was collective psychology affected by the often dreadful death of so many sons, wives, husbands, relatives, and friends? What impact did the famine have on religious practices and feelings? What were the effects the famine had on how the urban population conceived its relations with the countryside? "Is it possible to surmise that the wall built of ethnic differences-let's recall that Ukrainian cities were still largely Russian and Jewish cities," Prof. Graziosi said, "and civil war memories … then became higher and thicker as a consequence of the treatment inflicted by the regime on the villages?" Prof. Graziosi's questions often sound like compelling hypotheses in search of their researchers. "Is it possible, went on Prof. Graziosi, that what took place in the countryside also impelled many of the new arrivals of Ukrainian origin to desperately try and integrate themselves as fast as possible in the urban environment, in order to escape a fate that must have looked, and indeed was, terrible? And what did the non-Ukrainian citizens think?"

In conclusion of his paper Prof. Graziosi voiced a kind of moral imperative, "Without a full awareness of the Great Famine it is simply impossible to understand the European 20th century. This is for me an intellectually and morally obvious fact, endowed with extraordinary strength, which will one day prevail, even though much time will probably have to pass before European historians will fully grasp the famine and its significance."

The second session of the symposium "A Prologue and an Epilogue to the 1932-33 Famine" could, with good reasons, be viewed as an early indication of the fact that other scholars are already pursuing some of the avenues of historical inquiry so compellingly outlined by Prof. Graziosi.

Both contributors to the session - Niccolo Pianciola and Gijs Kessler - are, not incidentally, Prof. Graziosi's students. They presented two specific case studies of other famine-stricken areas of the Soviet Union - Kazakhstan and the Urals. In his paper entitled "The Other Great Collectivization Famine: Kazakhstan 1931-33", Pianciola discussed an even lesser known famine that Soviet policies induced in Kazakhstan causing more than 1.5 million deaths and wiping off one third of the Kazakh population.

Dr. Kessler's presentation, "The Post-Famine Countryside in the Mid and Late 1930s", though focusing on the Urals region, could help set the agenda for the study of life in the Ukrainian village after the famine, about which also all too little is known. Both papers were well in concert with the time-hallowed approach practiced by HURI to study Ukraine in a wider context of other related problems.

The third and final session of the symposium was a roundtable held under the rubric "Issues, Sources, Scholarly Agenda". Besides Prof. Martin and Prof. Graziosi, its participants included Prof. Roman Szporluk, Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University, Dr. Sergey Babionyshev, Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Dr. Cadiot. They elaborated, each from his or her respective area of expertise, on issues that had been raised at the previous sessions, they also raised new issues of particular problem areas, such for example, as methodological difficulties in estimating population losses.

The roundtable was followed by a general open discussion among the symposium's speakers with a lively participation of the audience. HURI plans to publish the proceedings of Famine Symposium in one of the forthcoming issues of the Harvard Ukrainian Studies Journal.

Compiled by Yuri Shevchuk