28 November 2012 — Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University, delivered the Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture at the University of Toronto on 9 November. His address, titled “The Holodomor and History: Bringing Ukrainians Back In,” was particularly notable for its call to add a human dimension to the study of the Holodomor and of Ukrainian history overall.
Professor Motyl began by stating that he had gained a considerably broader appreciation of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 as a result of editing a sourcebook on the topic, The Holodomor Reader (CIUS Press, 2012), with Dr. Bohdan Klid of the University of Alberta. The two scholars, in fact, came upon the idea for such a publication separately in the wake of the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2007–8.
As a result of working on this tome, several things became evident to him. The first was that debate on the question of “whether the Holodomor was or was not genocide is over—at least in the West.” He noted the seismic shift in knowledge and opinion about the Famine since the 1950s, when any discussion of the matter was virtually the exclusive domain of survivors, refugees, and émigrés. Today, “no serious scholar or political figure…disputes that millions of Ukrainians starved to death in 1932–33.” And, as “the empirical evidence for regarding the Holodomor as genocide is overwhelming,” it is only a matter of time before rational people who are neutral on the issue are persuaded.
The second matter that became clear to the speaker was that the debate regarding the precise number of Famine victims is best left to “the experts.” He noted that a figure of at least 4 million seems to have been established with reasonable certainty. But that is not the main point once one understands that the Holodomor was genocide, with a “kill rate” of up to 25,000 people per day at its height. He also dealt briefly with some of the vagaries regarding Famine figures over the years, in particular a tendency by Sovietologists or revisionist historians to underestimate the number of victims.
Issue number three concerned the need to humanize the Holodomor. Professor Motyl noted that as he was working on The Holodomor Reader, “the materials that impressed me most were not the scholarly articles and diplomatic documents but the survivor testimonies and literary accounts.… They gave life to the dead. They enabled me to feel for them.…” He went on to note that it is such first-hand accounts, rather than “abstractions and numbers,” that can “give a voice” and presence to the victims of the Famine.
This provided a lead-in to the speaker’s fourth point, namely, a call to humanize Ukrainian history in general. He started with the “radical suggestion” that “Ukrainians are human beings and that their history should be treated as the history of human beings,” and then dealt with two particular issues.
The first related to the scholarship of contemporary “neo-Soviet historians.” The speaker strongly voiced his opinion that their work is unacceptable and offensive because it “reduce[s] Ukrainians from complex persons to one-dimensional stereotypes with no conscience, no feeling, no brains, and no voice.” Such a simplistic approach feeds in part off the treatment of Ukrainians as “the savage ‘other’” in mutually reinforcing Polish, Jewish, and Russian discourses. Ukrainian attempts to provide an alternative to this have only been recent and not strongly presented, which is understandable in light of the fact that Ukrainians historically have lacked a state and a political elite, not to mention a literate urban class.
The speaker then went on to show how Ukrainian history can be enriched by adding the human element, using his parents’ memoirs (which he had recently edited, annotated, and informally self-published) as a case study. Focusing in particular on some “remarkable individuals,” he noted that such memoirs “give life to them in ways that more dispassionate studies cannot.” He added that “we need thousands more such voices” and called upon the descendants of Holodomor survivors and those who had lived through the Second World War or totalitarianism to gather a record of their parents’ or grandparents’ experience.
Professor Motyl concluded that people can contribute to the humanization of Ukrainian history by recognizing that “the Holodomor was not an abstraction that affected some imagined category called a nation or a peasantry. Millions of human beings were exterminated.” To this he added that “we should…insist that they have a voice.” The Famine Lecture was sponsored by the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto, the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, and the Toronto Branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. The event has been held regularly since 1998.
