Genocide Debated, Yet Again

As Ukraine commemorate the 75th anniversary of the “Holodomor,” or the Soviet famine in Ukraine, Anatolyi Zhilin, a legislator from Crimea, has fiercely denied the idea that the Stalin-era famine in Ukraine actually occured and stated the event is in fact a modern invention. This is in sharp contrast to how Ukraine is treating the event nationally—Kiev recognized the event as a genocide in 2006 by law, and is currently debating criminalizing the denial of the genocide (or the Nazi Holocaust) with punishments of fines and imprisonment.

Zhilin’s argument basically goes like this: the idea that a specific, genocidal policy was aimed against the Ukrainian people alone was a fantasy developed in the U.S. as an anti-Russian propaganda tool years after the fact. He added that “Russophobe” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as an adviser to Kennedy and Johnson administration officials during the 1960s, and later National Security Advisor to President Carter, and the wife of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko (a former state department diplomat) were involved in creating the myth, with the purpose of uniting Ukraine with the West against Russia. That Zhilin hails from Crimea says a lot about his background. Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, and voted overwhelmingly against Yushchenko in the most recent presidential election. (This is somewhat ironic in that these were the regions that suffered most during the Holodomor; but perhaps the modern voters are descended from the people who moved in to replace them?)

As my past posts have doubted the veracity of the information regarding the Armenian Genocide, criticized the scope of the allegations against Japan’s wartime acts in East Asia, and otherwise belittled the modern politicization of genocide here and here, I feel obliged to give my own opinion on the topic. Does Curzon downplay the Holodomor genocide issue as well, or do things change when we’re talking about Stalin and the Soviet Union?

The Holodomor is an undeniable event that claimed the lives of millions of people and which was part of the fratricidal and genocidal regime that ruled the Soviet Union in the 1920s and beyond. The denial of the Holodomor has been a cause widely promoted by Soviet sympathizers at the time and thereafter, and by Russian nationalists today. The declassified Soviet archives show undeniable evidence that the Kremlin planned the mass murder for a number of evil motivations. So I would never take the moral side of Zhilin and the other Holodomor deniers.

But I must admit I share some intellectual sympathy in that I oppose how the Holodomor is being used in modern politics and how Kiev wants to use the Holodomor as a weapon of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism at the expense of Russia and relations with Moscow. Ukraine has taken up the torch of promoting the issue of the Holodomor worldwide in this context, first recognizing it domestically by law, debating the criminalization of its denial, and havings its ambassadors across the globe push for its recognition. (Not surprisingly, the Europeans have taken the issue and pushed it full speed ahead.) And while there are rightist Russian elements that flat-out deny that any starvation occurred, Russia’s position is more nuanced, noting that the millions of victims of the famines and gulags of the 1920s and 1930s were millions of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities, living across an enormous agricultural nation. Russia’s essential view is that the issue is one for historians, not politicians.

Perhaps it’s the American in me that agrees with this. The U.S. uses the phrase “that’s history” to mean something that is no longer relevant, a position completely different from many. I wish the politization of history, colonialism, and genocide would be more widely accepted as history, and not wielded as a weapon for political purposes.