15

The Holodomor in History and Memory

Dear God, calamity again! …

It was so peaceful, so serene;

We but began to break the chains

That bind our folk in slavery …

When halt! … Again the people’s blood

Is streaming!

Taras Shevchenko, ‘Calamity Again’, 18591

In the years that followed the famine, Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what had happened. They were afraid to mourn publicly. Even if they had dared to do so, there were no churches to pray in, no tombstones to decorate with flowers. When the state destroyed the institutions of the Ukrainian countryside, it struck a blow against public memory as well.

Privately, however, the survivors did remember. They made real or mental notes about what had happened. Some kept diaries, ‘locked up in wooden boxes’ as one recalled, and hid them beneath floorboards or buried them in the ground.² In their villages, within their families, people also told their children what had happened. Volodymyr Chepur was five years old when his mother explained to him that she and his father would give him everything that they had to eat. Even if they did not survive, they wanted him to live so that he could bear witness: ‘I must not die, and when I grow up I must tell people how we and our Ukraine died in torment.’³ Elida Zolotoverkha, the daughter of the diarist Oleksandra Radchenko, also told her children, her grandchildren and then her great-grandchildren to read it and to remember ‘the horror that Ukraine had passed through’.⁴

Those words, repeated by so many people in private, left their mark. The official silence gave them almost a secret power. From 1933 onwards such stories became an alternative narrative, an emotionally powerful ‘true history’ of the famine, an oral tradition that grew and developed alongside the official denials.

Although they lived in a propaganda state where the party controlled public discussion, millions of Ukrainians inside Ukraine knew this alternative narrative. The sense of disjunction, the gap between private and public memory, the gaping hole where the national mourning should have been – these things distressed Ukrainians for decades. After his parents died of starvation in Dnipropetrovsk province, Havrylo Prokopenko could not stop thinking about the famine. He wrote a story about it for school, with an illustration to match. His teacher praised his work but told him to destroy it, for fear it would get him, and her, into trouble. That left him with the feeling that something was wrong. Why could the famine not be mentioned? What was the Soviet state trying to hide? Three decades later, Prokopenko managed to read a poem on a local television station, including a line about ‘people black with hunger’. A threatening visit from local authorities followed, but that left him even more convinced that the USSR was responsible for the tragedy.5

The absence of commemoration also bothered Volodymyr Samoiliuk. Although he later survived Nazi occupation and fought in the Second World War, nothing ever seemed more tragic to him than the experience of the famine. The memory stayed with him for decades, and he kept waiting for the famine to appear in official history. In 1967 he watched a Soviet television programme about 1933. He stared at the screen, waiting to see a reflection of the horror he remembered. But although he saw clips of the enthusiastic heroes of the first Five Year Plan, the May Day parade, even football matches from that year, ‘there was not a word about the horrific famine’.⁶

From 1933 until the late 1980s the silence inside Ukraine was total – with one glaring, painful and complicated exception.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By November the Wehrmacht had occupied most of Soviet Ukraine. Not knowing what was to come next, many Ukrainians, even Jewish Ukrainians, at first welcomed the German troops. ‘Girls would offer the soldiers flowers and people would offer bread,’ one woman recalled. ‘We were all so happy to see them. They were going to save us from the Communists who had taken everything and starved us.’7

A similar welcome initially greeted the German army in the Baltic states, which had been occupied by the USSR from 1939 until 1941. The Caucasus and Crimea welcomed German troops with enthusiasm as well, though not because the inhabitants were Nazis. De-kulakization, collectivization, mass terror and the Bolshevik attacks on the Church encouraged a naively optimistic view of what the Wehrmacht might bring.⁸ In many parts of Ukraine the arrival of the Germans inspired spontaneous de-collectivization. Peasants not only took back land, they destroyed tractors and combine harvesters in a Luddite rage.⁹

The uproar ended quickly – and anyone who hoped for a better life under German occupation had their expectations swiftly dashed. A full account of what happened next is beyond the scope of this book, for the catastrophe inflicted by the Nazis on Ukraine was widespread, violent and brutal on an almost incomprehensible scale. By the time they reached the USSR, the Germans had a lot of experience in destroying other states, and in Ukraine they knew what they wanted to do. The Holocaust began immediately, unfolding not in distant camps but in public. Instead of deportation, the Wehrmacht staged mass executions of Jews as well as Roma in front of their neighbours, at the edge of villages and in forests. Two out of every three Ukrainian Jews died over the course of the war – between 800,000 and a million people – a substantial part of the millions more who died all across the continent.

Hitler’s Soviet victims also included more than 2 million Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom died of disease or starvation, many of them on Ukrainian territory. Cannibalism haunted Ukraine once again: at Stalag 306 in Kirovohrad guards reported prisoners eating dead comrades. A witness at Stalag 365 in Volodymyr Volynskyi reported the same.¹⁰ Nazi soldiers and police robbed, beat and arbitrarily murdered other Ukrainians, especially public officials. Slavs, in the Nazi hierarchy, were subhuman untermenschen, perhaps one level above the Jews but slated for eventual elimination. Many who had welcomed the Wehrmacht quickly realized that they had exchanged one dictatorship for another, especially when the Germans launched a new wave of deportations. During the course of the war Nazi troops sent more than 2 million Ukrainians to do forced labour in Germany.11

Like every occupying power in Ukraine, the Nazis ultimately had only one real interest: grain. Hitler had long claimed that ‘the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry’, and that Ukrainian territory would ensure ‘no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war’. Since the late 1930s his government had been planning to transform that aspiration into reality. Herbert Backe, the sinister Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture, conceived a ‘Hunger Plan’ whose goals were straightforward: ‘the war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war’. But he also concluded that the entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food. As Backe explained in his ‘Economic Policy Guidelines’ issued in May, as well as in a memorandum circulated to a thousand German officials in June 1941, ‘unbelievable hunger’ would soon grip Russia, Belarus and the industrial cities of the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad as well as Kyiv and Kharkiv. This famine would not be accidental: the goal was for some 30 million people to ‘die out’.¹² The guidelines for the Economics Staff East, which was to be responsible for exploiting conquered territory, put it starkly:

Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone can only be at the expense of supplying Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out in the war; they prevent Germany and Europe resisting the blockade. With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.¹³ [emphasis in original]

This was Stalin’s policy, multiplied many times: the elimination of whole nations through starvation.

The Nazis never had time to fully implement the ‘Hunger Plan’ in Ukraine. But its influence could be felt in their occupation policy. Spontaneous de-collectivization was quickly halted, on the grounds that it would be easier to requisition grain from collective farms. Backe reportedly explained that ‘the Germans would have had to introduce the collective farm if the Soviets had not already arranged it’.14 In 1941 the farms were meant to be turned into ‘co-operatives’, but that never happened.¹⁵

Hunger returned too. Stalin’s ‘scorched earth’ policy meant that many of Ukraine’s economic assets had already been destroyed by the retreating Red Army. The occupation made the situation worse for those who remained. Just before Kyiv was captured in September, Hermann Göring, the Reich Minister of the Economy, held a meeting with Backe. The two agreed that the city’s population should not be allowed to ‘devour’ food: ‘Even if one wanted to feed all the inhabitants of the newly conquered territory, one would be unable to do so.’ A few days later Heinrich Himmler of the SS told Hitler that the inhabitants of Kyiv were racially inferior and could be discarded: ‘One could easily do without eighty to ninety percent of them.’¹⁶

In the winter of 1941 the Germans cut off food supplies to the city. Contrary to stereotype, the German authorities were less efficient than their Soviet counterparts: peasant traders did get through the makeshift cordons – they had found it difficult to do so in 1933 – and thousands of people took to the roads and railroads again in search of food. Shortages nevertheless multiplied throughout the occupation zone. Once again, people began to swell, slow down, stare into the distance and die. Many thousands of people died from starvation in Kyiv that winter. In Kharkiv, which was cordoned off by a Nazi commander, 1,202 people died of hunger in the first two weeks of May 1942; the total deaths from starvation during the occupation amounted to about 20,000.¹⁷

It was in this context – in hardship and chaos, under brutal occupation, and with a new famine looming – that it became possible, for the first time, to speak openly about the 1933 famine in Ukraine. Circumstances shaped the way the story was told. During the occupation the purpose of the discussion was not to help survivors mourn, recover, create an honest record or learn lessons for the future. Those who hoped for some kind of reckoning with the past were disappointed: many of the peasants who had kept secret diaries of the famine unearthed them and brought them to the offices of provincial newspapers. But ‘unfortunately, most of the editors were by now uninterested in those past years, and these valuable chronicles received no publicity’.18 Instead, those editors – who now owed their jobs, and their lives, to the new dictatorship – mostly published articles in the service of Nazi propaganda. The purpose of the discussion was to justify the new regime.

The Nazis actually knew a good deal about the Soviet famine. German diplomats had described it in their reports to Berlin in great detail while it was taking place; Joseph Goebbels had referred to the famine in a speech at the Nazi Party congress in 1935, where he spoke of 5 million dead.¹⁹ From the moment they arrived, the German occupiers of Ukraine used the famine in their ‘ideological work’. They hoped to increase hatred towards Moscow, to remind people of the consequences of Bolshevik rule. They were especially keen to reach rural Ukrainians, whose efforts were required to produce the food needed for the Wehrmacht. Propaganda posters, wall newspapers and cartoons showed unhappy, half-starved peasants. In one an emaciated mother and child stand against a ruined city above the slogan ‘This is what Stalin gave Ukraine’. In another an impoverished family sit at a table with no food beneath another slogan: ‘Life has become better, comrades, Life has become merrier’ – a famous quote from Stalin.²⁰

To mark the tenth anniversary of the famine, in 1942–3 – coincidentally the high-water mark of Nazi power in Ukraine – many newspapers published material aimed at winning peasant support. In July 1942, Ukraïnskiy Khliborob, an agricultural weekly that reached 250,000 people, published a major article on a ‘year of work without the Jew-Bolsheviks’:

All peasants remember well the year of 1933 when hunger mowed people down like grass. In two decades the Soviets turned the land of plenty into the land of hunger where millions perished. The German soldier halted this assault, the peasants greeted the German army with bread and salt, the army that fought for the Ukrainian peasants to work freely.²¹

Other articles followed, and got some traction. A diarist at the time wrote that the Nazi propaganda had a strong impact because some of it was true:

… the very look of our people, our houses, our yards, our floors, our toilets, our village councils, the ruins of our churches, the flies, the dirt. In one word – everything that fills Europeans with horror but is ignored by our leaders and their sidekicks who have distanced themselves from ordinary people and the contemporary European standard of living.22

A refugee from Poltava told an interviewer immediately after the war that there had been a good deal of discussion of the famine under the occupation. He also remembered that at one point, when it looked as if the Red Army might return, people asked ‘And what will those “Reds” of ours bring? A new famine of 1933?’²³

Like everything else in the Nazi press, these wartime accounts were suffused with anti-semitism. The famine – as well as poverty and repression – was repeatedly blamed on the Jews, an idea that had of course had currency before, but was now enshrined in the occupiers’ ideology. One newspaper wrote that the Jews were the only part of the population that did not feel the famine because they bought everything they needed in the Torgsin shops: ‘Jews lacked neither gold nor dollars.’ Others spoke of Bolshevism itself as a ‘Jewish product’.²⁴ One memoirist recalled that he was shown an anti-semitic propaganda film about the famine in Kyiv during the war. It contained photographs of unearthed corpses, and ended with the murder of a Jewish secret policeman.²⁵

The wartime press did manage to publish a tiny number of articles on the famine that had not been specifically designed to fit into the framework of Nazi propaganda. In November 1942, S. Sosnovyi, an agricultural economist, published what may have been the very first quasi-scholarly study of the famine in a Kharkiv newspaper, Nova Ukraïna. Sosnovyi’s article was free of Nazi jargon, offering a straightforward account of what had happened. The famine, he wrote, had been designed to destroy the Ukrainian peasant opposition to Soviet power. It was not the result of ‘natural causes’: ‘In fact, weather conditions in 1932 were not extraordinary like those, for instance, in 1921.’ Sosnovyi also produced the first serious estimate of casualties. Referring to the 1926 and 1939 censuses and other Soviet statistical publications (not the suppressed 1937 census, though he probably knew about it), he concluded that 1.5 million people had died from starvation in Ukraine in 1932, and that 3.3 million died in 1933 – numbers slightly higher than those now widely accepted, but not far off.

Sosnovyi also described, accurately, how the famine had come about, proving that the true story, the ‘alternative narrative’, was still very much alive a decade after the fact:

First, they took everything from the collective farm storehouses – everything that farmers earned for their ‘work days’ (trudodni). Then they took forage, seeds, and then they went to the huts and took the last grain from the peasants that they received in advance … They knew that the area sown was smaller, the amount of grain harvested was lower in 1932 in Ukraine. However, the grain procurement plan was extremely high. Isn’t this the first step towards the organization of a famine? During the procurement, Bolsheviks saw there was extremely little grain remaining, yet they carried on and took everything away – this is indeed the way to organize a famine.26

Later, similar ideas would form the basis of the argument that the famine had been a genocide, an intentional plan to destroy the Ukrainians as a nation. But in 1942 that term was not yet in use, and even the concept was of no interest to anybody in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

Sosnovyi’s article was dry and analytic, but a poem that accompanied it is evidence that mourning, though suppressed in public, was still taking place. Composed by Oleksa Veretenchenko, ‘Somewhere in the Distant Wild North’ was part of the 1933 cycle, a series of poems that appeared in Nova Ukraïna throughout 1943. Each one struck a different note of pain or nostalgia:

What has happened to the laughter,

To the bonfires girls used to light on Midsummer’s Eve?

Where are the Ukrainian villages

And the cherry orchards by the houses?

Everything has vanished in a ravenous fire

Mothers are devouring their children,

Madmen are selling human flesh

At the markets.27

An echo of those emotions could also be heard in the privacy of people’s homes. Because the Soviet and German invasions had effectively united western Ukraine (Galicia, Bukovyna and western Volhynia) with the rest of the country, many western Ukrainians managed to travel east for the first time, recording what they saw and heard. Although the famine had been widely discussed in 1933, it was still a surprise to Bohdan Liubomyrenko, a visitor to central Ukraine during the war, to hear famine stories told over and over again: ‘Wherever we visited people, everyone in conversation could not fail to mention, as something very terrible, the days of famine they had lived through.’ Sometimes his hosts spoke ‘all night long about their horrific experiences’:

The terrifying years of the artificial famine which the government planned with evil gloating against Ukraine in 1932–33 had cut deep into the people’s memory. Ten long years had been unable to erase those murderous traces and to disperse the expiring sounds of the innocent children, women and men, of the dying of young people enfeebled by famine. The sad memories still hang like a black haze over the cities and villages, and produce a mortal fear among the witnesses who escaped the starvation.²⁸

Ukrainians also began to speak openly about collectivization, resistance and the armed militia that had arrived to repress them in 1930. Many were clear about the political causes of the famine, explaining ‘how the peasants were robbed; how everything was confiscated, leaving nothing behind for families, even those with small children. They confiscated everything and exported it to Russia.’²⁹ Ukrainians elsewhere in the USSR did the same. In the 1980s the writer Svetlana Aleksievich met a female Russian veteran who had served alongside a Ukrainian woman during the war. The woman, a famine survivor who had lost her entire family, told the Russian veteran that she had only survived by eating horse manure: ‘My dad was a history teacher and he told me: “one day Comrade Stalin will be punished for his crimes”.’³⁰

Just as they would later on – and just as today – not all the listeners believed these stories. The Russian veteran worried that her comrade was an ‘enemy’ or a ‘spy’. Even the Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia found it hard to grapple with the idea of a state-sponsored famine: ‘Frankly, we found it difficult to believe that a government could do such a thing.’31 The thought that Stalin had deliberately allowed people to starve to death was too horrible, too monstrous, even for those who hated him.

The end of the Second World War did not quite bring a return to the status quo. Inside Ukraine the war altered the language of the regime. Critics of the USSR were no longer mere enemies but ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’. Any talk of the famine was ‘Hitlerite propaganda’. Memoirs about the famine were buried even deeper in drawers and closets, and discussion of the subject became treasonous. In 1945 one of the most eloquent Holodomor diarists, Oleksandra Radchenko, was literally persecuted for her private writing. During a search of her apartment the secret police confiscated her diary. Following a six-month interrogation, she was charged with having written a ‘diary with counter-revolutionary contents’. During her trial she told the judges that ‘the main aim of my writings was to devote them to my children. I wrote because after 20 years the children won’t believe what violent methods were used to build socialism. The Ukrainian people suffered horrors during 1930–33 …’ Her appeal fell on deaf ears, and she was sent for a decade to the Gulag, returning to Ukraine only in 1955.³²

The memory of new horrors overlaid that of 1933 as well. The murder of Kyiv’s Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in 1941; the battles for Kursk, Stalingrad, Berlin, all fought with Ukrainian soldiers; the prisoner-of-war camps, the Gulag, the filtration camps for returning deportees, the massacres and the mass arrests, the burnt-out villages and destroyed fields – all of these were now part of Ukraine’s story too. In official Soviet historiography ‘the Great Fatherland War’, as the Second World War came to be called, became the central focus of research and commemoration, while the repression of the 1930s was never discussed. The year 1933 receded behind the years 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945.

Even 1946 turned sour, as post-war chaos, a return to harsh requisitioning, a major drought – and, once again, the need for exports, this time to feed Soviet-occupied central Europe – led to further disruptions in food supply. In 1946–7 some 2.5 million tons of Soviet grain were shipped to Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even France. Ukrainians once again went hungry, both in the countryside and the cities, as did others across the USSR. Death tolls related to food deprivation were very high, with many hundreds of thousands suffering from malnutrition.33

Outside Ukraine the situation also changed, and in a radically different direction. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians found themselves, like other Soviet citizens, outside the borders of the USSR. Many were forced labourers, sent to Germany to work in factories and farms. Some had retreated alongside the Wehrmacht, or rather fled to Germany in advance of the returning Red Army: having experienced the famine, they knew they had nothing to gain from the reimposition of Soviet power. Olexa Woropay, an agricultural specialist from Odessa who witnessed the famine, found himself in a ‘displaced persons camp’ near the German city of Munster, where he and his compatriots were living in ‘a huge barracks which was converted from a military garage’. In the winter of 1948, while they waited to be sent on to Canada or Britain, ‘there was nothing to do and the evenings were long and dull. To pass the time, people told stories of their experiences’. Woropay wrote them down.³⁴ A few years later they appeared in London in a small volume called The Ninth Circle.

Although it had little impact at the time, The Ninth Circle now makes fascinating reading. It reflects the views of people who had been adults during the famine, who still remembered it vividly, and who had had time to reflect on the causes and consequences. Woropay, like Sosnovyi a few years earlier, argued that the famine had been organized deliberately, that Stalin had planned it carefully, and that it was intended from the start to subdue and to ‘Sovietize’ Ukraine. He described the rebellions that had followed collectivization, and explained what they meant:

Moscow understood that all this marked the beginning of a further Ukrainian war, and she was afraid, remembering the liberation struggle of 1918–1921. She knew, too, how great a threat an economically independent Ukraine would be to communism – especially as there still remained in the Ukrainian villages a considerable element which was both nationally conscious and morally strong enough to cherish the idea of an independent, unified Ukraine … Red Moscow therefore adopted a most ignominious plan to break the power of resistance of the thirty-five million strong Ukrainian nation. The strength of Ukraine was to be undermined by famine.35

Other members of the diaspora concurred. Spontaneously, wherever they found themselves, they began to organize around the famine, to mark it and to commemorate it as a turning point in the history of Ukraine. In 1948, Ukrainians in Germany, many in displaced persons camps, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the famine; in Hanover they organized a demonstration as well as leaflets describing the famine as a ‘mass murder’.³⁶ In 1950 a Ukrainian newspaper in Bavaria reprinted the Sosnovyi article first published in occupied Kharkiv, and repeated its conclusion: the famine had been ‘organized’ by the Soviet regime.³⁷

In 1953 a Ukrainian émigré named Semen Pidhainy went one step further. Born to a Cossack family in Kuban, Pidhainy was a veteran of the Gulag. Arrested and imprisoned in the Solovetskii Island concentration camp, he was released before the Nazi invasion and spent the war working in the city administration of Kharkiv. He wound up in Toronto in 1949, where he dedicated himself to studying and propagating the history of Ukraine. Like the Ukrainians in Germany, his goals were political as well as moral: he wanted to remember, to mourn, but also to draw the West’s attention to the brutal and repressive nature of the Soviet regime. In these early years of the Cold War there was still a strong pro-Soviet sentiment in many parts of Europe and North America. Pidhainy and the Ukrainian diaspora dedicated themselves to fighting against it.

In Canada, Pidhainy initiated the founding of the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror. He also became a prominent émigré organizer and often spoke to émigré groups, encouraging them to write down their memories, not only of the famine but of life in the USSR. Other émigré institutions did, or had already done, the same. The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg, founded in 1944, held a memoir-writing competition in 1947. Although aimed at collecting material about the Second World War, many of the memoirs submitted concerned the famine, and the Centre eventually built up a substantial collection.38 The Ukrainian community around the world also responded to an appeal from a diaspora newspaper in Munich for memoirs that would ‘serve as a severe accusation of Bolshevik arbitrariness in Ukraine’.³⁹

One of the results of these efforts was The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a book edited by Pidhainy. Eventually comprising two volumes – the first was published in 1953, on the twentieth anniversary of the famine – the Black Deeds contained dozens of memoirs as well as analysis of the famine and other repressive aspects of the Soviet regime. Among the authors was Sosnovyi. This time his arguments were shortened and translated into English. Entitled ‘The Truth about the Famine’, his essay began bluntly: ‘The famine of 1932–33 was needed by the Soviet government to break the backbone of the Ukrainian opposition to complete Russian domination. Thus, it was a political move and not the result of natural causes.’⁴⁰

Others described their own experiences. Brief, poignant memoirs were mixed with longer and more literary reminiscences as well as drawings and photographs of the dead. G. Sova, who had been an economist in Poltava, remembered that ‘Upon many occasions, I saw the last ounce of grain, flour and even peas and beans taken away from the farmers.’⁴¹ I. Kh-ko described how his father ‘managed to conceal some grain in the leggings of his boots’ during the search of their home, but eventually died anyway: ‘nobody buried him, because the dead lay scattered everywhere’.⁴²

The editors sent The Black Deeds of the Kremlin to libraries across the country. But like The Ninth Circle, the newspaper articles in Canada and the leaflets in Germany, it was studiously ignored by most Soviet scholars and mainstream academic journals.⁴³ The mix of emotive peasant memoir with semi-scholarly essays did not appeal to professional American historians. Paradoxically, the Cold War did not help the Ukrainian émigré cause either. The language many of them were using – ‘black deeds’ or ‘famine as a political weapon’ – sounded too political to many scholars in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The authors were easily dismissed as ‘Cold Warriors’ telling tales.

The active suppression of the famine story by Soviet authorities also had, inevitably, a powerful impact on Western historians and writers. The total absence of any hard information about the famine made the Ukrainian claims seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible. Surely if there had been such a famine then the Soviet government would have reacted to it? Surely no government would stand by while its own people starved?

The Ukrainian diaspora was also undermined by the status of Ukraine itself. Even to serious scholars of Russian history, the notion of ‘Ukraine’ seemed, in the post-war era, more dubious than ever. Most outsiders knew little of Ukraine’s brief, post-revolutionary moment of independence, and even less of the peasant rebellions of 1919 and 1930. Of the arrests and repressions of 1933 they knew nothing at all. The Soviet government encouraged outsiders as well as its own citizens to think of the USSR as a single entity. The official representatives of Ukraine on the world stage were spokesmen for the Soviet Union, and in the post-war West, Ukraine was almost universally considered to be a province of Russia. People calling themselves ‘Ukrainian’ could seem somehow unserious, much in the way that campaigners for Scottish or Catalan independence once seemed unserious too.

By the 1970s the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe, Canada and the United States was large enough to produce its own historians and journals, and wealthy enough to establish both the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. But these efforts were not significant enough to shape the mainstream historical narratives. Frank Sysyn, a leading diaspora scholar, has written that the ‘ethnicization’ of the field may even have alienated the rest of the scholarly community, because it made Ukrainian history seem a secondary, unworthy pursuit.44 The memory of the Nazi occupation, and the collaboration of some Ukrainians with the Nazis, also meant that even decades later it was easy to call any advocate of independent Ukraine ‘fascist’. The diaspora Ukrainian insistence on their identity even seemed to many North Americans and Europeans to be ‘nationalist’ and therefore suspicious.

The émigrés could be dismissed as ‘notoriously biased’, their accounts scorned as ‘dubious atrocity tales’. The Black Deeds compilation would eventually be described by one prominent scholar of Soviet history as a Cold War ‘period piece’ with no academic value.45 But then events began to evolve in Ukraine itself.

In 1980, as the fiftieth anniversary of the famine approached, Ukrainian diaspora groups across North America once again planned to mark the occasion. In Toronto the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee began to film interviews with famine survivors and witnesses across Europe and North America.⁴⁶ In New York the Ukrainian Studies Fund commissioned James Mace, a young scholar who had written a doctoral thesis on Ukraine, to launch a major research project at the Harvard Ukrainian Institute.⁴⁷ As in the past, conferences were planned, demonstrations were organized, meetings were held in Ukrainian churches and assembly halls in Chicago and Winnipeg. But this time the impact would be different. Pierre Rigoulot, the French historian of communism, has written that ‘human knowledge doesn’t accumulate like bricks of a wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social, cultural and political framework.’⁴⁸ For Ukraine that framework began to shift in the 1980s, and it would go on changing throughout the decade.

In part, the change in Western perceptions came about thanks to events within Soviet Ukraine, though these were slow in coming. Stalin’s death in 1953 had not led to an official reassessment of the famine. In his momentous ‘secret speech’ in 1956, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the ‘cult of personality’ that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, including many party leaders, in 1937–8. But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization. His refusal to speak about it meant that the fate of the peasants remained hard to discern even for dissident intellectuals in the years that followed. In 1969, Roy Medvedev, a high-ranking party insider, mentioned collectivization in Let History Judge, the first ‘dissident’ history of Stalinism. Medvedev described ‘tens of thousands’ of peasants dying from starvation, but admitted he knew little.

Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ opened some cracks in the system. Although historians were unable to touch difficult subjects, sometimes writers could. In 1962 a Soviet literary magazine published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first honest depiction of the Soviet Gulag. In 1968 another magazine published a short novel by a much lesser known Russian author, Vladimir Tendriakov, in which he wrote of ‘Ukrainian kulaks, expropriated and exiled from their homeland’, dying in a provincial town square: ‘One got used to seeing the dead there in the morning, and the hospital groom, Abram, would come along with his cart and pile the corpses in. Not everyone died. Many of them wandered along the dusty, sordid alleyways, dragging dropsied legs, elephantine and bloodlessly blue, and plucked at every passer-by, begging with dog-like eyes.’49

In Ukraine itself the intellectual and literary rejection of Stalinism had a distinctly national flavour. In the less repressive atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ukrainian intellectuals – in Kyiv and Kharkiv and now in Lviv, the formerly Polish territory incorporated into Soviet Ukraine in 1939 – once again began to meet, to write, and to discuss the possibility of a national reawakening. Many had been educated in primary schools that still taught children in Ukrainian, and many had grown up hearing versions of the ‘alternative history’ of their country from their parents and grandparents. Some began to speak openly about the promotion of the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian literature and a Ukrainian history that differed from the history of Russia.

These muted attempts to resurrect the shadow of a national identity alarmed Moscow. In 1961 seven Ukrainian academics were arrested and tried in Lviv, among them Stepan Virun, who had helped write a pamphlet criticizing ‘unjustified repressions accompanied by accusations of nationalism and the annihilation of hundreds of Party and cultural personalities’.⁵⁰ Another two dozen went on trial in Kyiv in 1966. Among other ‘crimes’, one was accused of possessing a book containing an ‘anti-Soviet’ poem; because it had been printed without the author’s name, police had failed to identify the work of Taras Shevchenko (whose works were, at the time, perfectly legal).⁵¹ Shelest, the Ukrainian Communist Party leader, presided over these arrests, though after he lost his position as First Secretary, in 1973, he too came under attack on the grounds that O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land ‘devotes far too much space to Ukraine’s past, its pre-October history, while failing to adequately glorify such epochal events as the triumph of the Great October, the struggle to build socialism’. The book was banned, and Shelest remained in disgrace until 1991.52

But by the 1970s the USSR was no longer as cut off from the world as it had once been, and this time around the arrests found an echo. Ukrainian prisoners smuggled news of their cases back to Kyiv; dissidents in Kyiv learned how to contact Radio Liberty or the BBC. By 1971 so much material had leaked out of the USSR that it was possible to publish an edited collection of testimonies from Ukraine, including passionate statements from jailed Ukrainian national activists. In 1974 dissidents published an underground journal that contained several pages on collectivization and the 1932–3 famine. An English-language translation of the journal appeared too, under the title Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the U.S.S.R.⁵³ Soviet analysts and observers in the West slowly became aware that Ukrainian dissidents had a separate and distinct set of grievances. When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 brought an abrupt end to the era of détente, a much broader swath of the Western public also refocused on the history of Soviet repression, including repression inside Ukraine.

By the early 1980s the Ukrainian diaspora had also changed. Better established and now better funded – its members no longer poor refugees, but established members of the North American and European middle classes – diaspora organizations could afford to support more substantive projects, and to turn scattered material into books and films. The Canadian interview project evolved into a major documentary: Harvest of Despair won awards at film festivals and appeared on Canadian public television in the spring of 1985.

In the United States the public broadcaster’s initial reluctance to show the film – it was feared to be too ‘right wing’ – became controversial. PBS finally broadcast the film in September 1986 as a special episode of ‘Firing Line’, the programme produced by the conservative columnist and National Review editor William Buckley, and followed the broadcast with a debate between Buckley, the historian Robert Conquest, and the journalists Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times and Christopher Hitchens, then of The Nation. Much of the debate had nothing to do with the famine itself. Hitchens brought up the topic of Ukrainian anti-semitism. Salisbury focused most of his remarks on Duranty.54 But a cascade of reviews and articles followed.

An even greater wave of interest accompanied the publication of Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, the most visible fruit of the Harvard documentation project, a few months later. The book (like this one) was written in collaboration with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Conquest did not have the archives available today. But he worked with Mace to pull together the existing sources: official Soviet documents, memoirs, oral testimony of survivors in the diaspora. Harvest of Sorrow finally appeared in 1986 and was reviewed in all major British and American newspapers and in many academic journals – unprecedented, at the time, for a book about Ukraine. Many reviewers expressed astonishment that they knew so little about such a deadly tragedy. In The Times Literary Supplement the Soviet scholar Geoffrey Hosking was shocked to discover ‘just how much material has accumulated over the years, most of it perfectly accessible in British libraries’: ‘almost unbelievably, Dr. Conquest’s book is the first historical study of what must count as one of the greatest man-made horrors in a century full of them’. Frank Sysyn put it simply: ‘No book dealing with Ukraine had ever received such wide notice.’⁵⁵

Not all of the notice was positive: a wide range of professional journals did not review Conquest’s book at all, while some North American historians, who saw Conquest both as the representative of a more traditional school of Soviet history as well as a member of the political right, denounced the book in no uncertain terms. J. Arch Getty complained in the London Review of Books that Conquest’s views had been promoted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and dismissed his sources as ‘partisan’ because they were linked to ‘Ukrainian émigrés in the West’. Getty concluded that ‘in today’s conservative political climate, with its “evil empire” discourse, I am sure the book will be very popular’. Then, as now, the historical argument about Ukraine was shaped by domestic American politics. Although there is no objective reason why the study of the famine should have been considered either ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’ at all, the politics of Cold War academia meant that any scholars who wrote about Soviet atrocities were easily pigeonholed.56

Harvest of Sorrow would eventually find an echo inside Ukraine itself, although the authorities tried to block it. Just as the Harvard research project was launching in 1981, a delegation from the UN Mission of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic visited the university and asked the Ukrainian Research Institute to abandon the project. In exchange, the Institute was offered access to Soviet archives, a great rarity at the time. Harvard refused. After excerpts from Conquest’s book appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail, the first secretary to the Soviet Embassy wrote an angry letter to the editor: Yes, some had starved, he claimed, but they were the victims of drought and kulak sabotage.⁵⁷ Once the book was published, it proved impossible to keep it away from Ukrainians. In the autumn of 1986 it was read aloud on Radio Liberty, the American-backed, Munich-based radio station, to its listeners inside the USSR.

A more elaborate Soviet response arrived in 1987, with the publication of Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. The ostensible author, Douglas Tottle, was a Canadian labour activist. His book described the famine as a hoax invented and propagated by Ukrainian fascists and anti-Soviet groups in the West. Although Tottle acknowledged that poor weather and post-collectivization chaos caused food shortages in those years, he refused to concede that a malevolent state had played any role in spreading starvation. Not only did his book describe the Ukrainian famine as a ‘myth’, it argued that any accounts of it constituted, by definition, Nazi propaganda. Tottle’s book posited, among other things, that the Ukrainian diaspora were all ‘Nazis’; that the famine books and monographs constituted an anti-Soviet, Nazi propaganda drive that also had links to Western intelligence; that Harvard University had ‘long been a center of anti-communist research, studies and programs’ and was linked to the CIA; that Malcolm Muggeridge’s writing on the famine was tainted because the Nazis had made use of it; and that Muggeridge himself was a British agent.58

The Institute of Party History in both Moscow and Kyiv contributed to Tottle’s manuscript; unsigned versions were sent back and forth between their offices and those of the two party Central Committees for corrections and commentary. Soviet diplomats followed the book’s publication and progress, and they promoted it where they could.⁵⁹ The book eventually attracted a small following: in January 1988 the Village Voice published an article, ‘In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right’, which used Tottle’s work uncritically.⁶⁰

In retrospect, Tottle’s book is significant mostly as a harbinger of what was to come, nearly three decades later. Its central argument was built around the supposed link between Ukrainian ‘nationalism’ – defined as any discussion of Soviet repression in Ukraine, or any discussion of Ukrainian independence or sovereignty – and fascism, as well as American and British intelligence. Much later this same set of links – Ukraine, fascism, the CIA – would be used in the Russian information campaign against the Ukrainian independence and anti-corruption movement of 2014. In a very real sense the groundwork for that campaign was laid in 1987.

Fraud, Famine and Fascism, like other Soviet apologies at the time, conceded that there had been some hunger in Ukraine and Russia in 1932–3, but it attributed mass starvation to the demands of ‘modernization’, kulak sabotage and alleged bad weather. As with all of the most sophisticated smear campaigns, elements of truth were combined with falsehood and exaggeration. Tottle’s book correctly pointed out that some of the photographs which were at that time widely identified with 1933 were actually taken during the famine of 1921. The author correctly identified some bad or misleading reporting from the 1930s as well. Finally, Tottle wrote, correctly, that some Ukrainians had collaborated with the Nazis, and that Nazis had, during their occupation of Ukraine, written and spoken a great deal about the famine.

Although these facts neither diminished the tragedy of 1932–3 nor altered its causes, the ‘Nazi’ and ‘nationalist’ associations were intended, simply, to smear anyone who wrote about the famine at all. To some extent the strategy worked: this Soviet campaign against the Ukrainian memory of the famine, and against the historians of the famine, left a taint of uncertainty. Even Hitchens had felt obligated to mention Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in his discussion of Harvest of Despair, and part of the scholarly community would always approach Conquest’s book with caution.61 Without access to archives it was still impossible, in the 1980s, to describe the series of deliberate decisions that had led to the famine in the spring of 1933. It was also impossible to describe the aftermath, the cover-up, or the suppressed census of 1937 in detail.

The research projects that led to both Harvest of Despair and Harvest of Sorrow nevertheless had a further echo. In 1985 the United States Congress set up a bipartisan commission to investigate the Ukrainian famine, appointing Mace as chief investigator. Its purpose was ‘to conduct a study of the 1932–33 Ukrainian famine in order to expand the world’s knowledge of the famine and provide the American public with a better understanding of the Soviet system by revealing the Soviet role’ in it.⁶² The commission took three years to compile its report, a collection of oral and written testimony from survivors in the diaspora, which remains one of the largest ever published in English. When the commission presented its work in 1988, the conclusion was in direct contradiction to the Soviet line: ‘There is no doubt,’ the commission concluded, that ‘large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukraine SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932–33, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities’.

In addition, the commission found that ‘Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage”, upon which all difficulties were blamed during the Famine, are false’; that the ‘Famine was not, as alleged, related to drought’; and that ‘attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available’. The commission concluded that ‘the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was caused by the extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population’ and not, in other words, by ‘bad weather’ or ‘kulak sabotage’.⁶³

The findings echoed those of Conquest. They also confirmed the authority of Mace, and provided a mountain of new material for other scholars to use in the years that followed. But by the time the commission made its final statement in 1988, the most important debates about the Ukrainian famine were finally beginning to take place not in Europe or North America, but inside Ukraine itself.

On 26 April 1986 some odd, off-the-charts measurements began showing up on radiation-monitoring equipment in Scandinavia. Nuclear scientists across Europe, at first suspecting equipment malfunction, raised the alarm. But the numbers were not a fluke. Within a few days satellite photographs pinpointed the source of the radiation: a nuclear power plant in the city of Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine. Inquiries were made but the Soviet government offered no explanation or guidance. Five days after the explosion a May Day march went ahead in Kyiv, less than eighty miles away. Thousands of people walked through the streets of the Ukrainian capital, oblivious to the invisible radiation in the city’s air. The government was well aware of the danger. The Ukrainian Communist Party leader, Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, arrived late to the march, obviously distressed: the Soviet General Secretary had personally ordered him not to cancel the parade. ‘You will put your party card on the table,’ Mikhail Gorbachev had told Shcherbytskyi, ‘if you bungle the parade.’64

Eighteen days after the accident, Gorbachev abruptly reversed his policy. He appeared on Soviet television and announced that the public had a right to know what had happened. Soviet camera crews went to the site, filmed interviews with doctors and local people, and explained what had happened. A bad decision had been made; a turbine test had gone wrong; a nuclear reactor had melted down. Soldiers from all over the Soviet Union had poured concrete over the smouldering remains. Everyone who lived within twenty miles of Chernobyl had abandoned their homes and farms, indefinitely. The death toll, officially listed as thirty-one, actually soared into the thousands, as the men who had shovelled concrete and flown helicopters over the reactor began to die of radiation sickness in other parts of the USSR.

The psychological impact of the accident was no less profound. Chernobyl destroyed the myth of Soviet technical competence – one of the few that many still believed. If the USSR had promised its citizens that communism would guide them into the high-tech future, Chernobyl led them to question whether the USSR could be trusted at all. More importantly, Chernobyl reminded the USSR, and the world, of the stark consequences of Soviet secrecy, even causing Gorbachev himself to reconsider his party’s refusal to discuss its past as well as its present. Shaken by the accident, the Soviet leader launched the policy of glasnost. Literally translated as ‘openness’ or ‘transparency’, glasnost encouraged public officials and private individuals to reveal the truth about Soviet institutions and Soviet history, including the history of 1932–3. As a result of this decision, the web of lies woven to hide the famine – the manipulation of statistics, the destruction of death registries, the imprisonment of diarists – would finally unravel.65

Inside Ukraine the accident stirred memories of past betrayals and historic catastrophes, leading Ukrainians to challenge their secretive state. On 5 June, just six weeks after the Chernobyl explosion, the poet Ivan Drach rose to speak at a meeting of the official Writers’ Union of Ukraine. His words had an unusually emotional edge: Drach’s son was one of the young soldiers who had been sent to the accident without proper protective clothing, and he was now suffering from radiation poisoning. Drach himself had been an advocate of nuclear power, on the grounds that it would help modernize Ukraine.⁶⁶ Now he blamed the Soviet system both for the nuclear meltdown, the cloak of secrecy that had concealed the explosions, and the chaos that followed. Drach was the first person openly to compare Chernobyl to the famine. Speaking at length, he declared that a ‘nuclear lightning bolt had struck at the genotype of the nation’:

Why has the young generation turned away from us? Because we didn’t learn to talk openly, to speak the truth about how we lived, and about how we are living now. We have got so used to falsehood … When we see Reagan as the head of a commission on the famine of 1933, I wonder, where is the Institute of History when it comes to the truth about 1933?⁶⁷

Party authorities later dismissed Drach’s words as an ‘emotional outburst’, and censored even the internal transcript of the speech. The reference to a ‘nuclear lightning bolt’ striking at the ‘genotype of the nation’ – a phrase that was widely misremembered as a direct reference to genocide – was replaced with ‘it struck painfully’.⁶⁸

But there was no turning back: Drach’s comments had struck a chord among those who heard them at the time, and those who repeated them afterwards. Events gathered pace; very quickly, glasnost became real. Gorbachev had intended the policy to reveal the workings of flawed Soviet institutions, with the hope that this would make them function better. Others interpreted glasnost more broadly. True stories and factual history began to appear in the Soviet press. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other chroniclers of the Gulag appeared for the first time in print. Gorbachev became the second Soviet leader, after Khrushchev, to speak openly about ‘blank spots’ in Soviet history. And unlike his predecessor, Gorbachev made his remarks on television:

… the lack of proper democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness and repressions of the 1930s – to be blunt, crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth.69

Equally quickly, glasnost began to seem insufficient to Ukrainians. In August 1987, Vyacheslav Chornovil, a leading dissident intellectual, wrote a thirty-page open letter to Gorbachev, accusing him of having launched a ‘superficial’ glasnost, one that preserved the ‘fictitious sovereignty’ of Ukraine and the other non-Russian republics but suppressed their languages, their memories, their true history. Chornovil provided his own list of ‘blank spots’ in Ukrainian history, naming the people and incidents still left out of official accounts: Hrushevsky, Skrypnyk, Khvylovyi, the mass arrests of intellectuals, the destruction of national culture, the suppression of the Ukrainian language and, of course, the ‘genocidal’ great famine of 1932–3.⁷⁰

Others followed suit. The Ukrainian chapter of Memorial, the Soviet society for the commemoration of Stalin’s victims, began openly collecting testimony and memoirs for the first time. In June 1988 another poet, Borys Oliinyk, stood up at the infamous Nineteenth Party Congress in Moscow – the most open and argumentative ever to take place in history, and the first to be televised live. He raised three issues: the status of the Ukrainian language, the dangers of nuclear power and the famine: ‘The reasons for the famine of 1933, which extinguished the lives of millions of Ukrainians, need to be made public, and those responsible for this tragedy [should] be identified by name.’71

In that context the Ukrainian Communist Party prepared to respond to the U.S. Congressional Report. Finding itself in a quandary the party decided, as it had so often done in the final, stultifying years of the USSR, to create a committee. Shcherbytskyi tasked scholars at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Party History – the organizations behind the publication of Fraud, Famine and Fascism – with refuting the general accusations, and in particular with countering the conclusions drawn by the U.S. Congressional Report. Committee members were meant, once again, to produce an official denial. To ensure their success, the historians were given access to archival sources.⁷²

The result was unexpected. For many of the scholars the documents were a revelation. They contained precise accounts of the policy decisions, the grain confiscations, the protests of activists, the corpses on city streets, the tragedy of orphans, the terror and the cannibalism. There had been no fraud, the committee concluded. Nor was the ‘famine myth’ a fascist plot. The famine had been real, it had happened, and it could no longer be denied.

The sixtieth anniversary of the famine, in the autumn of 1993, was like no other that had preceded it. Two years earlier, Ukraine had elected its first president and voted overwhelmingly for independence; the government’s subsequent refusal to sign a new union treaty had precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Ukraine, in one of its last memorable acts before giving up power, had passed a resolution blaming the 1932–3 famine on the ‘criminal course pursued by Stalin and his closest entourage’.⁷³ Drach and Oliinyk had joined other intellectuals to found Rukh, an independent political party and the first legal manifestation of the national movement since the repressions of the early 1930s. For the first time in history, Ukraine was a sovereign state and acknowledged as such by most of the world.

As a sovereign state, Ukraine was free, by the autumn of 1993, to debate and commemorate its own history. From a mix of motives, former communists and former dissidents were all eager to have a say. In Kyiv the government organized a series of public events. On 9 September the deputy prime minister opened a scholarly conference, underlining the political significance of the famine commemorations. ‘Only an independent Ukraine can guarantee that such a tragedy will never be repeated,’ he told the audience. James Mace, by then a widely known and admired figure in Ukraine, was also there. He too drew political conclusions: ‘I would hope that this commemoration will help Ukrainians remember the danger of political chaos and political dependence on neighboring powers.’ President Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist apparatchik, also spoke: ‘A democratic form of government protects a people from such misfortunes,’ he said. ‘If we lose our independence we are destined to forever lag far behind economically, politically and culturally. If this happens, most importantly, we will always face the possibility of repeating those horrible pages in our history, including the famine, which were planned by a foreign power.’74

Ivan Drach, the leader of Rukh, called for a broader acknowledgement of the significance of the famine: he demanded that Russians ‘repent’, and that they follow the example of Germans in acknowledging their guilt. He referred directly to the Holocaust, noting that the Jews had ‘forced the whole world to admit its guilt before them’. Although he did not claim that all Ukrainians had been victims – ‘Bolshevik marauders in Ukraine mobilized Ukrainians as well’ – he did strike a nationalist tone: ‘The first lesson which is becoming an integral part of Ukrainian consciousness is that Russia has never had and never will have any other interest in Ukraine beyond the total destruction of the Ukrainian nation.’⁷⁵

The ceremonies continued throughout the weekend. Black streamers hung from government buildings; thousands of people gathered for a memorial service outside St Sofia’s Cathedral. But the most moving celebrations were spontaneous. Crowds flocked to Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s central boulevard, where people had put personal documents and photographs on billboards set up at three points along the street. An altar was set up halfway down; visitors left flowers and bread beside it. Civic leaders and politicians from all over Ukraine laid wreaths at the foot of a new monument. Some brought jars of earth – soil taken from the mass graves of famine victims.76

To those who were there, the moment would have seemed definitive. The famine had been publicly recognized and remembered. More than that: after centuries of Russian imperial colonization and decades of Soviet repression, it had been recognized and remembered in a sovereign Ukraine. For better or worse, the famine story had become part of Ukrainian politics and contemporary Ukrainian culture. Children would now study it at school; scholars would piece together the full narrative in archives. Monuments would be built and books would be written. The long process of understanding, interpreting, forgiving, arguing and mourning was about to begin.