In the house of the hanged one should not mention the rope.
Miguel De Cervantes

Before the Allies of the Second World War would permit the defeated Germans to govern themselves, they had to make sure that a record of the crimes of the Nazi era was presented, not only to the Germans but to world opinion as well. At the center of this endeavour was the International Military Tribunal that convened in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946.^[1] Fundamentally, the Nuremberg trial served the purpose of not repeating the mistakes committed after the First World War. Robert H. Jacksson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States, explicated this point in his opening speech in late November: “Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the first World War, we learned the futility of the latter course.”^[2]
An effect of the trial was that it left an enduring mark on the memory of Nazism in both Germanys. It established beyond a doubt that war crimes and crimes against humanity had occurred, and that these crimes were the direct result of decisions taken by the Nazi leadership.^[3] Military victory and the trial put an end to Nazism, and sentencing the perpetrators was perceived as alleviating the evil effects of their ideology.^[4] Jacksson was well aware of this symbolic importance, recognizing its future influence: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow,” he stated in front of the court.^[5] The trials were thus organized from the very beginning in order to not only satisfy juridical requirements, but also to provide historical tutelage. One junior prosecutor at Nuremberg even called them “the greatest history seminar ever held in the history of the world.”^[6]
Latter-day scholars have taken note of this didactic purpose of the trials. Regardless of the Tribunal’s legal requirements, the pursuit of justice was intimately connected to the utilization of history. There was an intent to make the trial a history lesson writ large, in Donald Bloxham’s words.^[7] Some have commended this history lesson. Michael Marrus, one of the foremost historiographers of the Holocaust, has concluded that although the Holocaust was not at the center of at the trial, Nuremberg provided a “turning point,” because afterwards the systematic murder of European Jewry during the Second World War could be pointed to as an established fact.^[8] However, the overarching first count of the Tribunal’s indictment – participation in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit, or which involved the commission of, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity – largely defined not only the proceedings, but gave rise to a “Nuremberg paradigm.”^[9] In other words, “Nuremberg historiography” has informed much thinking about the Holocaust up until today and promoted a certain image of totalitarian Nazi Germany, effectively producing an intentionalist-conspiracy interpretation.^[10]
The concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, central to the Tribunal, contributed greatly to a historical and cultural understanding of, and a response to, a traumatic history.^[11] Consequently, it is hardly surprising to note examples in the post-war era where voices have called for an encore. One of the more candid examples include the 2003 call of Levko Lukyanenko, the chairman of the Asotsiatsii doslidnykiv holodomoriv v Ukrainy (the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine), who argued for an international tribunal that would judge the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in a process he called Nuremberg-2.^[12] Although no war crimes trial had indicted Soviet officials, by this time a Nuremberg historiography of the Holodomor had already existed for around two decades in independent Ukraine as well as internationally.^[13]
The object here is to outline this historiography, to trace some of its developments, and to asses its effects in present-day Ukrainian historical culture. Given this aim, it is necessary to point out that this is not a traditional historiographical study concerned with evaluating scholarly ideals. Instead, historical thinking is at the center. Essentially a metaphorical operation, historical thinking relies on a successful rendering of the past that relates and reduces its content to an already known historical narrative. Associations, comparisons, perceived resemblances, and the blurring of cognitive and emotional contents are not uncommon. Since historical “facts” rarely speak a great deal about the past in themselves, and no inherent meanings are to be found in the past, interpretation is needed to turn a series of historical facts into a history. History is the past furnished with meaning, by ordering it through our collective historical thinking. Past, present and future are connected into a narrative that makes a meaningful whole.^[14]

HOLODOMOR HISTORY IN THE SHADOW OF COLD WAR

Indignation over the scant attention paid to the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine prompted a number of scholars, many of Ukrainian descent living outside the Soviet Union, to convene a conference on the so-called “Great Famine” on its fiftieth anniversary in 1983. In the preface of the ensuing conference volume, the two organizers, Bohdan Krawchenko and Roman Serbyn, claimed that “one of the main reasons for the lack of public awareness about the events of the famine has been the absence of a critical body of scholarship.”^[15] An equally strong scholarly-scientific ideal was expressed by conference participant James Mace: “we now know, we may with some certainty state what happened, how it was done, and to some extent why it was done… we owe it most of all to that ideal called the Truth.”^[16]
Adherence to the ideal of truth, expressed in the above quote, is generally shared by history and justice, by historian and judge. But, while both are devoted to “the ascertainment of facts and, therefore, proof,” they differ significantly in their evaluation and use of evidence.^[17] The judge, unlike the historian, is constrained by legal principles and therefore guided by different norms of investigation. The historian, on the other hand, is concerned with constructing a narrative of how and why something happened. This is done by approaching a topic – which at first glance may seem strange and impossible to imagine bringing order to – and analyzing it in terms of what is already understood and known. The objectives for the two differ significantly.^[18] The “truth” established in the volume edited by Serbyn and Krawchenko should thus be seen as a historical truth, a rendering of the 1932-1933 famine that could provide meaning and existential stability, as well as satisfy a number of other contemporary needs.^[19]
The same year The Ukrainian Weekly, the Ukrainian Nationalist Association’s weekly newspaper, announced that Ukrainian organizations in North America had set up a joint committee to commemorate the memory of the victims of the famine. In trying to make sense of this tragedy it was furnished with characteristics familiar to wider audiences. James Mace offers an illuminating example in his artcile entitled “The Famine: Stalin Imposes a ‘Final Solution.’” He concluded that the state deliberately created a famine “by an act of policy,” that it was geographically focused for political reasons, coincided with changes in Soviet nationality policy, and that there were individuals who, broadly speaking, could be classified as perpetrators of the famine.^[20] Implied was, of course, that the crime committed by Stalin and his henchmen was equal to Hitler’s, or at least on the same magnitude.
Following the “example of the Jews” was already a familiar theme among Ukrainian diaspora authors in North America. Lev Shankovsky, for example, stated as early as 1960 that: “The Jews should be an example for us how to illuminate our recent tragic history.”^[21] At a Ukrainian-Jewish conference in 1983, Yaroslav Bilinsky argued that: “We must finally write a basic history of Ukrainian martyrology, which would at the very least match in quality [Raul] Hillberg’s work on the destruction of the Jews.”^[22] Interestingly, Hillberg’s work, The Destruction of the European Jews, was largely a product of the judicially generated evidence from the Nuremberg trial.^[23]
Emphasis on the similarities of the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1980s was hardly novel. Already in the interwar years several individuals on the political right, who labelled themselves “totalitarian,” acknowledged that the Soviet dictatorship grew out of the same soil as the dictatorships they themselves had supported in Italy or Germany. Many academics also came to regard the similarities between Nazism and Stalinism as more striking than their differences. Calvin Hoover, for example, argued that the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy shared a typological similarity, consisting of dictatorship, single party systems, fanatical hostility to liberalism and control of the economy to name a few.^[24]
During the decade following the Second World War the Soviet Union and Germany were often compared, or bracketed together, through the concept of totalitarianism. Karl Deutsch insisted that it best be used “as a means to emphasize certain similarities between Fascist and Communist one-party governments.” That is to say, the new genre of political system centered upon the artificial construct of a leadership cult.^[25] However, to George Kennan there were “at least no better examples than Germany and Russia.”^[26] Even if scholars quarrelled over the usability of the concept and about the superficiality of the supposed similarities between Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union, totalitarianism became synonymous with Nazism and Stalinism. By claiming sameness between Nazism and Stalinism, the evil deeds of Hitler could be used to condemn the Soviet system. Terror and the other darker sides of the two regimes became one of the most prominent aspects of research and disagreement.
Totalitarianism theory was used as a political-ideological tool against the Soviet Union. Nazism, it was thought, was neither a unique nor situated phenomenon, limited to the period 1933-1945. Rather, it continued behind the Iron Curtain in the totalitarian Soviet Union. “This was the great mobilizing theory and unifying concept of the Cold War.”^[27] Understood as a totalitarian empire, the Soviet Union could easily be attributed characteristics normally associated with Nazi Germany. This should not be understood as mere politics, but rather as an outcome of explaining and analyzing it in terms of what is already understood and known. Nazi Germany simply provided a cognitive blueprint.
In order to convey the full scale of the horror of the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, Robert Conquest compared the starving Ukrainian country side to “one vast Belsen” in the introduction to his book Harvest of Sorrow, first published in 1986 (and in so doing making the most powerful comparison with the Holocaust).^[28] A decade later Dan Diner, a historian of the Holocaust, seized on the deployment of this iconography as a flagrant example of abuse of the comparison between National Socialism and Stalinism. According to Diner, such comparisons, made possible through the concept of totalitarianism, were merely transhistorical, and that strict rejection as well as the urgent demand for historical comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism shared the assumption that the crimes of Stalin were worse than those of the Nazis.^[29]
Two years after the publication of Robert Conquest’s seminal work on the famine, the Commission on the Ukraine Famine presented its final report to the United States Congress. Its purpose, as defined by its enabling legislation, had been to study the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine, in order to expand the world’s knowledge of it and provide the American public with a better understanding of the Soviet system. Among the many findings of the commission, the most important ones were that the famine was not related to drought, that the victims numbered in the millions, that Soviet authorities knew about the food shortage, and that Josef Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians.^[30]
No matter where the Ukrainian famine was discussed, the perceived facts about it were firmly lodged within an intentionalist-conspiracy interpretation. The trope, or at least its conspiracy part, was in fact so powerful that even critics such as Douglas Tottle conjured up conspiratory arguments. He attributed the whole affair to a small number of “Ukrainian Nationalists,” understood as a right-wing and fascist minority among the Ukrainian community in North America, whose interests coincided with Cold War propaganda at the time. In Tottle’s words, historical truth was put aside in favor of propaganda. Consequently, Tottle charged that the whole campaign was overflowing with factual errors, omissions and falsifications. As a mere product of propaganda, the “famine-genocide campaign” was only a climax of the campaign launched by the Nazis in 1933, in which the famine was used to demonstrate the diabolical nature of the Soviet regime.^[31]
The trope also remained powerful over time. Peter Borisow, addressing a commemoration of famine in 2003, complained that:

“Many of us are pained by the realization that everyone on the planet knows about the Holocaust, but few have even heard Holodomor. There are two important reasons for this. First, Hitler lost the war. Russia won the war. If, God forbid Hitler had won the war, do you really think anyone would know about the Holocaust? Second, Russia – and let’s not kid ourselves, the Soviet Union was just a passing phase for the same old monster – has spent tons of money and decades of effort to slander and discredit anything and everything Ukrainian.”^[32]

As can be concluded from the quote, the 1932-1933 famine did not gain widespread acceptance as a de jure genocide according the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Even if it had, indictment of those identified as perpetrators would have been impossible. Many had passed away at the beginning of the 1980s and those still alive would hardly have been extradited from the Soviet Union. Still, an international commission concerned with the famine was constituted in February 1988. The International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine was an initiative of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians, and was tasked to formulate recommendations on the legal possibilities to classify the famine as a genocide and to investigate the possibility of pressing charges against the responsible persons. A majority of the commission’s members found it impossible to affirm the existence of a preconceived plan to organize the famine in Ukraine. Instead, they concluded that the authorities most likely took advantage of it once it occurred. The conclusion drawn was simply that the famine was not systematically organized to crush the Ukrainian nation. Even if it was not organized the Soviet authorities were still identified as the responsible part, with Josef Stalin bearing the key responsibility. Still, the Commission was deeply split over the question of possible prosecution, a split generated by different views on the Genocide Convention and its applicability.^[33]
The international commission thus failed to convey a single historical interpretation of Soviet terror in Ukraine in line with, or as powerful as, the one provided for Nazi crimes at the Nuremberg trial after the Second World War. However, taken together the various efforts during the 1980s and early 1990s still produced an important body of work that can be labelled as caught in a “Nuremberg historiography.” As in the trial against Nazi Germany, the accounts of the Ukrainian famine displayed an absence of, or rather a disinterest in, low-level functionaries as perpetrators or the actual process of the perceived crime. Instead a top-down approach was adhered to, most often concentrating on Stalin personally.
Emphasis on the top-down approach not only followed in the footsteps of the approach at Nuremberg, it can also be seen as a counter or an answer to the official Soviet interpretation of the events in the early 1930s. In March 1930, Pravda carried the now famous article by Stalin entitled “Dizzy with Success,” in which he outlined the great successes of the collective-farm movement. But he also admitted that the same successes had induced a spirit of vanity and conceit among some party workers.^[34] The emblematic History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Short Course) provides an illustration of Stalin’s account:

“…with all the phenomenal progress of collectivization, certain faults on the part of Party workers, soon revealed themselves. Although the Central Committee had warned Party workers not to be carried away by the success of collectivization, many of them began to force the pace of collectivization artificially…. Carried away by the initial success of collectivization, persons in authority in certain regions violated the Central Committee’s explicit instructions regarding the pace and time limits…. Taking advantage of these distortions of policy for their own provocative ends, the kulaks and their toadies would themselves propose that communes be formed instead of agricultural artels, and that dwellings, small livestock and poultry be collectivized forthwith.”^[35]

As follows from the quote, low-level officials were to blame for the food shortage, a condition the Central Committee warned against.
Whereas documents, admissible legal evidence, had been central and abundant at the Nuremberg trial, efforts to make the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine gain wider attention certainly suffered from a serious lack of evidence, at least on the same magnitude as the one presented in Nuremberg. None of the researchers who engaged in bringing the famine greater attention during the 1980s, nor the US Commission and the International Commission had access to any significant internal documents produced by the Soviet regime.^[36] Lack of documents was, of course, the combined result of the Cold War and a complete disinterest from the Soviet side in officially exposing what happened in Ukraine.
A consequence of focusing on Stalin personally and the Soviet top-level leadership was that no attention was directed towards actual perpetration. Metaphorically speaking it is possible to claim that there was no mention of the hangman’s rope, a silence about the actual perpetrators. In turn, this helped shape the image of a Soviet Russia attacking Ukrainian peasants, Ukrainian nationalism, and Ukraine itself. This history of the Holodomor fit neatly with the overall conception of Ukrainian martyrology. A simple black and white version of the past reaffirmed “Russians” as the perpetual enemy. This simple, yet reassuring history also became popular in Ukraine after independence, as it corresponded to a general understanding of national history.

HOLODOMOR IN THE SHADOW OF NATIONAL HISTORY

The North American scholar and chairman of the US commission, James Mace, visited Ukraine in 1990 and handed over famine testimonies gathered by the commission to the historian Stanislav Kulchytskyi. Years later, Kulchytskyi claimed that it was through analysis of these testimonies, in conjunction with the archival material made available to him that he came to the conclusion that “terror by famine was organized.”^[37] So great was their deemed importance that both Robert Conquest and James Mace were later employed on the organizational committee in charge of planning the sixtieth anniversary of the Holodomor in 1993, a committee largely dominated by former dissidents.^[38]
To study how the societal discussions of the famine trickled down, was pasted into, and cemented in the much broader Ukrainian history, a closer study of the history textbooks issued after Ukrainian independence should bring some light to the study at hand.The short-term solution to the lack of historical textbooks in 1991 was to use the work authored by Orest Subtelny in North America. Explanations of the famine, however, bear stark resemblance of the interpretations and discussions that took place in the diaspora in North America almost a decade earlier:

“The Famine that occurred in 1932-1933 was to be for the Ukrainians what the Holocaust was to the Jews and the Massacres of 1915 for the Armenians. A tragedy of unfathomable proportions, it traumatized the nation, leaving it with deep social, psychological, political, and demographic scars that it carries to this day. …As Conquest and Krawchenko have pointed out the harvest of 1932 was only 12% below the 1926-30 average. In other words, food was available. …Despite the pleas and warnings of Ukrainian Communists, Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas in 1932 by 44%. His decision, and the regime’s brutal fulfilment of his commands, condemned millions to death in what can only be called a man-made famine.”

The description of the famine is based mainly on literature that appeared in North America during the upsurge of famine-related research in the 1980s. Even though Subtelny is reluctant to draw any final conclusion regarding the causes of food shortage in Ukraine during the early 1930s, explaining it as either a perceived necessary aspect of industrialization, or a way of wiping out nationalist resistance in a troublesome region of the Soviet Union, the reader is left with the impression that this was a disaster of tremendous proportions.^[39]
From the onset of independence the Ukrainian state promoted a new official historical narrative. The adoption and publication of new history textbooks was part of an effort to create an all-encompassing Ukrainian national identity. However, many teachers disliked the use of history for ends they perceived as political, but nonetheless regarded the process as expected.^[40]
In the first new Ukrainian history textbook that dealt with the 1930s, published in 1994, the author F. G. Turchenko covered collectiviszation and industrialization in a chapter named “Soviet Modernisation of Ukraine.” Such a title not only echoed old Soviet textbooks, but should be interpreted as implying an arranged or ordered modernization of Ukraine by an outside force. The images used to complement the text were of an older character – an image of the Lenin hydroelectric dam in Dnipropetrovsk, and the hundred thousandth tractor produced in the Kirov plant were used as symbols of the immense leap in industrialization, urbanization and modernization that Ukraine took in the thirties. Even though the industrial advances are celebrated in this traditional manner, collectivization is equated with “a pillaging of the countryside” that served to speed up urbanization and industrialization. The Holdomor, one of the “most cruel crimes organized by Stalinism against the Ukrainian nation,” is explained as a result of forced collectivization, confiscation of private property and food. As additional information, aside from the purely descriptive account of the famine, the chapter is complemented with excerpts from Soviet documents relating to the famine, published in historical journals at the beginning of the 1990s. But unlike Subtelny’s account, Turchenko does not explicitly argue that the famine targeted Ukrainians, or was used as a weapon against Ukrainian nationalism. He also describes its spread in the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan, etc., but does not label the famine genocide.^[41]
The seemingly cautious treatment of the Holodomor and the use of old Soviet images to show progress was certainly an effect of the time-consuming task of writing history textbooks. Discussions of the 1932-1933 famine unfolded on a broader scale throughout the beginning of the 1990s, and it is likely that there was no time to include it all in the textbook. In the official curriculum from 1996, however, the Ministry of Education stipulated that lesson number thirty-one in the tenth grade history course was to cover causes and preconditions of the Holodomor, the forceful requisition of grain, the Molotov commission, the mass deaths and, most importantly, the collective farm as a way of tying the peasantry down.^[42]
In the following edition of the textbook authored by Turchenko in 1998, the Ukrainian famine had been allotted more space than compared to the previous edition. However, the Soviet-era imagery of victorious workers at the tractor plant still remained. Even so, the Stalinist regime in general, and the system of collective farms in particular were condemned in a much stronger tone. Its presence in independent Ukraine was also underlined: “The Holodomor of 1932-1933 belongs to the heritage of many tragedies that became evident in the last ten years. …The tragedy of 1932-1933 is a remainder of the turning point in the kolkhoz-feudal system, an essential lever of force to stand up for immemorial national rights.”^[43] Even though it is evident to anyone who reads the account that the famine was a tragedy of great scale initiated and perpetrated by Stalin and other high-ranking Soviet officials, nowhere is genocide mentioned.
In an introductory history textbook, however, the Holodomor was explicitly labelled a genocide:

“The famine in Ukraine eliminated millions of lives. But it does not end in the black pages of the history of the Ukrainian nation. The tragedy’s share also befell other peoples. …Peoples of the former tsarist Russia who entered into the [Soviet] Union believed in improved living conditions. Individual’s hopes turned out in vain. …The servants of Stalin did see many enemies of the people. Terrible dark days carried the Ukrainian people in the years of Stalin to genocide. Millions of people were killed as a result of famine in 1932-1933.”

Even though the famine is ascribed genocidal character, no real arguments are delivered in favor of such a label. Instead, genocide is defined as “the zealously planned destruction of a people, a crime affecting a people.”^[44] Such a definition communicates little and merely express that the treatment of different peoples of the Soviet Union often bordered on the criminal.
Characteristic for the Ukrainian history textbooks was the emphasis on the importance of the famine, not only as a historical event or process, but a significant lesson to pupils in the 1990s. Textbook authors, and indirectly the Ukrainian state, urged their young to remember the hardships that were the Holodomor. In so doing, the Ukrainian famine was incorporated into the national history made up of several tragedies. Summoned to underline the evilness of the Soviet Union and the legitimacy of a sovereign Ukrainian state, the famine illustrated the troubled past of the Ukrainian people.
The over-arching anti-Russian and anti-Soviet understanding proved strong. In a textbook entitled History without Myths, the collectivization campaign executed by the Soviet government in the 1930s constitutes the important context for the “trial of the Ukrainian people.” In store was a period of new hardships, beginning after the Bolshevik victory in Ukraine. Direct reference to Robert Conquest concludes that the Ukrainians did not become “citizens of terror” because of the decline in gross output of bread, but as a consequence of the attack against revived Ukrainian nationalism and national self-consciousness. Thus, the famine is interpreted as genocide committed against the Ukrainian peasant population by the Bolshevik regime, aimed at liquidating the Ukrainian nation. This argument is further strengthened since the liquidation is interpreted as a physical one, whereby Ukraine’s old intelligentsia, prominent scholars and writers were targeted for destruction. The author concludes that the decade was a repressive one with regard to the Ukrainian nation and intellectuals, of whom all were labelled as “class enemies.” This in turn led to the complete liquidation of the national intelligentsia and political elite. The author sees this organization of a “bloody drama” as in the “habit of J. Stalin.” The liquidation was not simply a physical one, but also psychological, whereby the nation was deprived of its memory of the event. This tragedy was not even partially remembered in a society dominated by animated marches, films, and books glorifying the new life and its construction, while a “Satan’s banquet” was going on in the countryside.^[45]
From the cursory examination of the Holodomor in history textbooks and Ukrainian historical culture it is possible to discern two important vectors. First is the importance attached to claiming it as a genocide. Ukrainian politicians, textbook authors, North American scholars, and Ukrainian alike all underline that it was not only an immoral crime, but that it was also a legal crime. However, a crime, be it genocide or not, always implies the existence of perpetrators, which is the second vector. Although very little attention is paid to the presumed perpetrators, this is an important detail, as will be explained below.
In a survey, many teachers in Eastern Ukraine voiced concern over the famine as a period of history that was especially difficult to teach because it was still a contested part of the Ukrainian past in the society at large. Many regarded the period of collectivization and starvation as the period in Ukraine’s history where state textbooks employed a very negative historical narrative, painted in a simplistic black-and-white fashion. Even though the famine was thought necessary to remember, teachers found it problematic, as they felt it was done at the expense of intolerance towards other national groups, especially Russians. One interviewee in Luhansk identified the problem as stemming from the persistence of textbooks to label the Moskali (Russians) as those who ruined the Ukrainian people by, amongst other things, instigating and carrying out the 1932-1933 famine. “I am also a Moskal, a Russian… should I be kicked every year because the famine took place,” asked the director of a school in Luhansk rhetorically.^[46]
A central part in the narrative of the 1932-1933 famine has been its genocidal character. Textbook authors, politicians, journalists and others seem to grab every opportunity to underline this detail. Conceptualized as a genocide, the Holodomor not only fits neatly into the overall tragic conception of Ukrainian history, but becomes its absolute low-point, a concentrate of the whole of Ukrainian history. All previous attempts at denying Ukrainians their language, culture and way of life throughout history are reiterated in a single historical event. The Holodomor surpasses all other tragedies, as it was a tragedy on a scale never before witnessed.
The continuous stress on the genocidal character of the famine should not be understood as a scholarly-scientific enterprise. Heorhyi Kasianov has concluded that the famine, as part of the historical victimology of Ukraine, has made it difficult to separate scholarly from “ideological and political” interpretations. In line with the division between the scholarly and the political, he also argues that the tendencies in political discourse to label the famine a genocide has merely encouraged speculation, as the term itself is problematic.^[47]
Even though genocide is notoriously difficult to define, proponents of the Holodomor being a genocide can rely on the results of an international commission. Already by 1990, the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine identified the forced collectivization, the dispossession of wealthy “kulak” peasants and the central government’s desire to curb “traditional Ukrainian nationalism” as important preconditions. The Commission concluded, although not unanimously, that the famine was deliberately orchestrated as an instrument of state policy, that the famine was an act of genocide, and that Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and others were responsible.^[48]
In practice, the genocidal character of the famine is underlined by arguing that the tragedy befell not just the Ukrainian people, but the Ukrainian nation. Unlike other genocides, however, the Ukrainian one was characterised by punishment through nature. Even though it is recognized that the instigated food shortage also affected other parts of the Soviet Union (e.g., the North Caucasus), these incidents are often presented as relatively minor in comparison to the war waged by Molotov and Kaganovich in Ukraine.^[49]
Official state recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide did not come until 2003. Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed a resolution on May 15, 2003 declaring the 1932-1933 famine “an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation” that was based on the “hellish plans of the Stalinist regime.” The resolution further stated that the “terrible truth of those years” had to be made public by the state and condemned by the Ukrainian nation as well as the international community “as one of the largest genocides in history in terms of victims,” so that the state could be internationally regarded as a “fully worthy, civilized nation.” Recognition of the famine as genocide, it was further argued, was needed to help stabilize the “social-political relations within the country,” correct the historical record, and bring historical justice and moral healing to generations of survivors and their heirs who were not allowed to relate or reveal what had occurred. Most importantly, recognition of the genocidal character would help the country to avoid future “attempts at new dictatorships and violation of the most sacred of human rights, the right to life.”^[50]
On the one hand, the resolution passed by the Ukrainian parliament stresses the need to remember the lessons of the famine so that it might be prevented in the future. Knowledge can avert future dictatorships and violation of human rights. Such arguments come close to the conclusions reached by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, albeit via a different genocide. On the other hand, the resolution clearly states that recognizing the genocidal character of the famine can indeed help stabilize the social-political situation in the country, which should be understood as a democracy. Knowledge of the Ukrainian genocide, it was argued, would strengthen the democratic state. This argument was voiced the same year in an address to the Commission of Human Rights in the United Nations. The Ukrainian representative argued that the world had failed to respond to the Ukrainian genocide and that his country, therefore, welcomed the establishing of the International Criminal Court, an institution designed to protect and strengthen the principle of the rule of law and to provide accountability for such serious criminal acts as genocide and crimes against humanity. Ukraine had learnt its lesson and did its utmost to ensure proper implementation of the principles of the rule of law, to create the conditions for economic growth and the efficient functioning of democratic institutions. Such a policy was part of Ukraine’s course towards European and Euro-Atlantic integration.^[51]Two years later, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister reminded the General Assembly of the United Nations that “the Ukrainian government will never tire of making the international community abandon hypocrisy and finally recognize this act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation.”^[52]
An affirmative response to emphasising the great contemporary importance of the Ukrainian genocide was gained from the United States House of Representatives in 2003. In a resolution it was resolved not only that the famine claimed at least five million victims in Ukraine, but that it “was designed and implemented by the Soviet regime as a deliberate act of terror and mass murder against the Ukrainian people.” More importantly, however, was the resolution that Ukrainian Parliament’s official recognition represented “a significant step in the reestablishment of Ukraine’s national identity, the elimination of the legacy of the Soviet dictatorship, and the advancement of efforts to establish a democratic and free Ukraine that is fully integrated into the Western community of nations.”^[53]
Even though Ukrainian history textbooks converge on the conclusion that the famine was a genocide, either by explicitly arguing for it, or by implicitly presenting it as one, none of the books surveyed here expresses the political-pedagogical and ideological use so clearly as in the political statements outlined above. A textbook co-authored by Stanislav Kulchytskyi provides a striking example. Here it is argued that the famine was instigated by a commission headed by Molotov, a commission that is portrayed as directly responsible for the five million dead. Action was taken by the Bolsheviks, “through a slow direct physical destruction of the peasant population.”^[54]
In conjunction with the commemoration of the 74th anniversary of the famine, the Verkhovna Rada in Ukraine passed a law condemning the 1932-1933 famine as a deliberate act of genocide committed against the Ukrainian people. “I would like to emphasize this: the vote is historic,” Ukrainian president, Victor Yuschenko explained. “It does not target anyone. It restores our national dignity. We will renew our memory of those ten million innocent victims killed in 1932-1933,” adding that the law also helped restore “historical justice.”^[55] In March 2007, Yushchenko called upon the Rada to pass a law prohibiting the denial of the Holodomor, as well as the Holocaust. He was convinced that its passage would not only unite the nation, but also promote intolerance to violence, respect for life, civil rights and freedoms, as well as ethnic and civil peace.^[56]

PERPETRATORS

A crime always implies the existence of perpetrators. Since the 1932-1933 famine has been labelled man-made it has to have had instigators. Legally, genocide is certainly the most serious crime that can be committed. According to the United Nations Genocide Convention fashioned on the proceedings at Nuremberg, however, it is required to prove the intent of the perpetrators to destroy a human community in order to classify a crime as genocide. Perpetrators must have acted with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”^[57] Intentionality is thus a clear criterion in an otherwise too broad and too narrow definition.
In Ukrainian history textbooks and in Ukrainian historical culture in general, the perpetrators of the Holodomor are a cleary nameable group. Stalin, Molotov, Postyshev and Kaganovich are routinely singled out as the individuals bearing the legal and moral responsibility. It was they who instigated the famine. Blaming them certainly further reinforces the evilness of the Soviet Union and highlights the famine as something instigated from afar – from Moscow. It was they who destroyed the old agrarian order and claimed the lives of millions. In Ukraine they enlisted the help of party officials such as Postyshev and Kosior. Kaganovich drew up black lists that that banned villagers from leaving their villages, that deliveries of all foodstuff to the listed villages were suspended, and that searches at the farms continued until all food was expropriated. However, all high-ranking Bolsheviks acted on directives from Stalin.^[58]
It should be noted that in the scholarly debate outside Ukraine, it has long been argued whether the victims of the famine in the early 1930s died as a result of a conscious policy or whether they were unintended victims of “unfavourable natural conditions and policies aimed at other goals.” Recently, Michael Ellman confronted the argument put forward by R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, in their The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, that the intention of the authorities was never to starve the population. Echoing scholarly discussions on the Holocaust and Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jews, Ellmann disagrees and advances the argument that despite no document having been found where Stalin explicitly orders starvation, this by itself is not conclusive.^[59] However, the ensuing debate between the scholars eventually ended up in the same question that has haunted the subject for decades:

“Whether or not [Stalin] was guilty of genocide in 1932-1933 depends on how “genocide” is defined. If a strict legal definition is adopted, based on the UN Genocide Convention… there is some evidence… but it seems to the present author that it does not meet the standard of specific intent required to prove genocide. …If a more relaxed definition favoured by some modern specialists in genocide studies is adopted, the Ukrainians were victims of genocide in 1932-1933.”^[60]

In Ukrainian history textbooks the question of the genocidal character of the famine is hardly debated and highly explicit. However, what is remarkable is not what is said in the textbooks, political speeches and newspaper articles, but what is not said. Stalin exterminated Ukrainians, but how this was done is rarely expressed. The Bolsheviks launched a war against Ukraine, or Stalin sent his trusted men to Ukraine to requisition grain. A silence surrounds how the famine was executed in practice. As attention is directed to the highest levels of the political establishment of the time, it is at the same time averted from the lowest levels, from those individuals who actually requisitioned grain and other foodstuff from the peasants. At best these are merely referred to as Bolsheviks, but most often this aspect is altogether ignored. The tendency to look only at the absolute top of the political establishment is evident in the different readers in history published throughout the 1990s. These readers include original documents pertaining to different historical periods. The sections on collectivization and the 1932-1933 famine concentrate exclusively on decrees, statements and other records emanating either from the Communist Party of Ukraine or from Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich. Taken together, the purpose of making these excerpts available to pupils seems to be to establish intent on the part of the political leadership, and thereby guilt. Assigning historical truth to archival materials, readers in history make use of the perpetrators’ own records to show the criminality and illegitimacy of the political leadership at the time.^[61] That the International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine named Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich as responsible is certainly an important circumstance, promoting their status as perpetrators in present-day Ukraine. But the commission also emphasized the role played by different activists who cooperated with local party officials in carrying out the decrees issued in Moscow. These activists were recruited by the authorities and given mandate as well as official status, placing responsibility on the Soviet authorities.^[62] On these activists, Ukrainian history textbooks remain silent. A possible reason might be that textbooks simply disregard these activists due to practical matters, such as the length of books. Another reason, perhaps more plausible, is that including the activists would divert attention from Stalin and his closest men; but, more importantly, including the lowest levels in official history would complicate its apparent black and white character. No longer would it be possible to portray the Holodomor as a genocide instigated and executed by the Soviet Union and directed against Ukrainians, as there were many Ukrainians involved in grain requisition in the countryside. The tragic, victimized and embattled sense of Ukrainian history is conveniently reaffirmed as Ukraine and Ukrainians are made to suffer from the timeless and evil outside force. That Ukrainians could be found not only among the victims, but also among the perpetrators of the totalitarian regime is conveniently forgotten.^[63]
Calls and arguments in favor of a tribunal along the lines of the Nuremberg Trials should be understood as an effect of clearly identifying a small number of Soviet officials as the responsible perpetrators. As an international crime against the Ukrainian nation, genocide requires the guilty to be charged. However, such calls have echoed in vain. Even if such a trial started investigations and prosecutions, it would soon discover, as is well known, that those individuals identified as perpetrators have all passed away. Establishing a “Nuremberg-II” would indict suspected criminals in absentia and turn into a simple show trial. However, recognizing the 1932-1933 famine as genocide strengthens the Ukrainian national identity in an important way. As genocides affect a national, ethnic or racial group, recognition of the genocidal character of the Holodomor would, in reverse logic, strengthen Ukrainian ethnicity by international affirmation.

FINISHING REMARKS

During the preparation for the Nuremberg trial, Chief of Counsel Jacksson insisted on relying on documents as the didactic paradigm of the prosecution. He was concerned that allegations of Nazi atrocity would be dismissed as mere propaganda. Eyewitnesses would be vulnerable to charges of exaggeration. Hence, much of the Nuremberg trial was consequently devoted to “a numbing protocol.”^[64] The prosecution at Nuremberg was mainly interested in the top-level officials of the Nazi regime, establishing an intentionalist-conspiracy charge, ignoring, for example, the actions of local police forces or the full role of the SS.^[65] The historical narrative produced as a result of the verdicts at Nuremberg provided many post-war societies (on both sides of the Iron Curtain) with a progressive image of the future. Evil was overcome.
As the Holocaust has been reinterpreted, enlarged and complicated, the image at Nuremberg has also been added to. Most importantly, interest has been directed away from the central Nazi leadership and to low-level functionaries. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is path breaking in this sense.^[66] In the metaphor of Miguel De Cervantes, it might be said that more and more interest has been directed towards the actual rope and less to the death sentence. Heeding the call of various scholars, politicians and journalists, and submitting the famine to genocide studies would probably result in both deepened and diversified studies of the Stalinist terror. In turn, this would also dissolve the neat division between perpetrator and victim present in most school history textbooks, which portray “Russians” or “Bolsheviks” as perpetrators and “Ukrainians” as victims. Following the trends from genocide studies would, for example, mean that interest in bystanders would increase. Most likely this would lead to a more “historically correct” image of Stalinist totalitarianism in practice, but it would be an image much more difficult to make sense out of in the house of the hanged.