EPILOGUE

The Ukrainian Question Reconsidered

The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism … Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin – one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia. It is indeed an indispensable step in the process of ‘union’ that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the ‘Soviet Man’, the ‘Soviet Nation’ and to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe.

Raphael Lemkin, ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’, 19531

Ще не вмерла України і Слава, і Воля

(The glory and the freedom of Ukraine has not yet died)

Ukrainian national anthem

Those who lived through the Ukrainian famine always described it, once they were allowed to describe it, as an act of state aggression. The peasants who experienced the searches and the blacklists remembered them as a collective assault on themselves and their culture. The Ukrainians who witnessed the arrests and murders of intellectuals, academics, writers and artists remembered them in the same way, as a deliberate attack on their national cultural elite.

The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.

As we have seen, Stalin did not seek to kill all Ukrainians, nor did all Ukrainians resist. On the contrary, some Ukrainians collaborated, both actively and passively, with the Soviet project. This book includes many accounts of assaults carried out by neighbours against neighbours, a phenomenon familiar from other mass murders in other places and at other times. But Stalin did seek to physically eliminate the most active and engaged Ukrainians, in both the countryside and the cities. He understood the consequences of both the famine and the simultaneous wave of mass arrests in Ukraine as they were happening. So did the people closest to him, including the leading Ukrainian communists.

At the time it took place, there was no word that could have been used to describe a state-sponsored assault on an ethnic group or nation, and no international law that defined it as a particular kind of crime. But once the word ‘genocide’ came into use in the late 1940s, many sought to apply it to the famine and the accompanying purges in Ukraine. Their efforts were complicated at the time, and are complicated still, by multiple interpretations of the word ‘genocide’ – a legal and moral category rather than a historical one – as well as by the convoluted and constantly shifting politics of Russia and Ukraine.

In a very literal sense the concept of ‘genocide’ has its origins in Ukraine, specifically in the Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian city of Lviv. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who invented the word – combining the Greek word ‘genos’, meaning race or nation, with the Latin ‘cide’, meaning killing – studied law at the University of Lviv, then called Lwów, in the 1920s.2 The city had previously been Polish until the eighteenth century, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It became Polish after the First World War; Soviet after the Red Army invasion of 1939; German between 1941 and 1944; part of Soviet Ukraine until 1991; and part of independent Ukraine after that. Each change was accompanied by upheaval and sometimes mass violence as new rulers imposed changes in language, culture and law.

Although he left Lviv for Warsaw in 1929, Lemkin wrote in his autobiography that he was inspired to think about genocide by the history of his region, as well as by the brutal emotions that washed over it during the First World War. ‘I began to read more history to study whether national, religious or racial groups, as such, were being destroyed,’ he wrote. The Turkish assault on the Armenians, ‘put to death for no reason other than that they were Christians’, moved him in particular to think more deeply about international law and to ask how it could be used to stop such tragedies.³ His work was made more urgent by the Nazi invasion of Warsaw in 1939, which he immediately understood would involve an assault on the Jews as a group, as well as others. He finally articulated his views in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress, a book he published in the United States in 1944, having fled occupied Poland. Lemkin defined ‘genocide’ in Axis Rule not as a single act but as a process:

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.⁴

In Axis Rule, Lemkin spoke of different kinds of genocide – political, social, cultural, economic, biological and physical. Separately, in an outline for a history of genocide that he never finished or published, he also listed the techniques which could be used to commit genocide, including among them the desecration of cultural symbols and the destruction of cultural centres such as churches and schools.5 As broadly defined in Lemkin’s published and unpublished work in the 1940s, in other words, ‘genocide’ certainly included the Sovietization of Ukraine and the Ukrainian famine. He later argued explicitly that this was so. In a 1953 essay entitled ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine’ Lemkin wrote that the USSR attacked Ukrainian elites precisely because they are ‘small and easily eliminated, and so it is upon these groups particularly that the full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labour, exile and starvation’.⁶

Had the concept of genocide remained simply an idea in the minds and writings of scholars, there would be no argument today: according to Lemkin’s definition, the Holodomor was a genocide – as it is by most intuitive understandings of the word. But the concept of genocide became part of international law in a completely different context: that of the Nuremberg trials and the legal debates which followed.

Lemkin served as adviser to the chief counsel at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, and, thanks to his advocacy, the term was used at the trial, though it was not mentioned in any of the verdicts. After the Nuremberg trials ended, many felt, for reasons of both morality and Realpolitik, that the term ought to be enshrined in the UN’s basic documents. But as Norman Naimark and others have argued, international politics, and more specifically Cold War politics, shaped the drafting of the UN convention on genocide far more than the legal scholarship of Lemkin or anyone else.⁷

Initially, a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1946 condemned genocide in language that echoed Lemkin’s broad understanding. Genocide was identified as ‘a crime under international law … whether it is committed on religious, racial, political or any other ground’. Early drafts of what would become the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide also included ‘political groups’ as potential victims of genocide. But the USSR, knowing that it could be considered guilty of carrying out genocide against ‘political groups’ – the kulaks, for example – resisted this broader definition. Instead, the Soviet delegation argued that political groups ‘were entirely out of place in a scientific definition of genocide, and their inclusion would weaken the convention and hinder the fight against genocide’. The Soviet delegation sought instead to ensure that the definition of ‘genocide’ was ‘organically bound up with fascism-nazism and other similar race theories’. Lemkin himself began to lobby for this narrower definition, as did others who badly wanted the measure to pass, and feared that the USSR might otherwise block it.8

The Convention finally passed in 1948, which was a personal triumph for Lemkin and for many others who had lobbied in its favour. But the legal definition was narrow, and it was interpreted even more narrowly in the years that followed. In practice, ‘genocide’, as defined by the UN documents, came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust.

The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation. Although Lemkin later argued for an expansion of the term, and even described the Sovietization of Ukraine as the ‘classic example of Soviet genocide’, it is now difficult to classify the Ukrainian famine, or any other Soviet crime, as genocide in international law.⁹ This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as ‘genocide’.

The difficulty of classifying the Holodomor as a genocide in international law has not stopped a series of Ukrainian governments from trying to do so. The first attempt followed the Orange Revolution of 2004 – a series of street protests in Kyiv against a stolen election, corruption and perceived Russian influence in Ukrainian politics. Those protests led to the election of Viktor Yushchenko, the first president of Ukraine without a Communist Party pedigree. Yushchenko had an unusually strong mandate from the Ukrainian national movement and he used it to promote the study of the famine. He made references to the Holodomor in his inaugural speech and created a National Memory Institute with Holodomor research at its heart. He also lobbied for the United Nations, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe and other international institutions to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. Under Yushchenko’s government, funding for research into the famine expanded dramatically. Dozens of local groups – teachers, students, librarians – joined a national effort to create a Book of Memory, for example, a complete list of famine victims.10 In January 2010 a Ukrainian court found Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior and others guilty of ‘perpetrating genocide’. The court terminated the case on the grounds that the accused were all deceased.¹¹

Yushchenko understood the power of the famine as a unifying national memory for Ukrainians, especially because it had been so long denied. He undoubtedly ‘politicized’ it, in the sense that he used political tools to draw more attention to the story. Some of his own statements about the famine, particularly his claims about the number of casualties, were exaggerated. But he stopped short of using the famine to antagonize Ukraine’s Russian neighbours, and he did not describe the famine as a ‘Russian’ crime against Ukrainians. Indeed, at the seventy-fifth anniversary Holodomor commemoration ceremony in 2008, as on other occasions, Yushchenko went out of his way to avoid blaming the Russian nation for the tragedy:

We appeal to everyone, above all the Russian Federation, to be true, honest and pure before their brothers in denouncing the crimes of Stalinism and the totalitarian Soviet Union … We were all together in the same hell. We reject the brazen lie that we are blaming any one people for our tragedy. This is untrue. There is one criminal: the imperial, communist Soviet regime.¹²

Yushchenko’s words were not always heeded by his compatriots. Of course, he was right to blame the famine on Soviet Communist Party policy, not Russian policy: there was no ‘Russia’, or at least no sovereign Russian state, in 1933. Yet because the Communist Party’s 1933 headquarters had been in Moscow, and because Moscow, the capital of post-Soviet Russia, assumed many of the assets of the USSR after 1991, some in Ukraine do now blame ‘Russia’ for the famine.

The Russian political establishment, which was by the mid-2000s recovering its own imperial ambitions in the region, confused the issue further by choosing to hear Yushchenko’s campaign as an attack on Russia, not an attack on the USSR. Pro-Russian groups inside Ukraine followed the Russian state’s lead: in 2006 a group of Russian nationalist thugs, led by a member of the local Communist Party, entered the office of Volodymyr Kalinichenko, a historian who wrote about the famine in the Kharkiv region, kicked at locked doors and shouted threats.13 In 2008 the Russian press denounced the Holodomor commemorations as ‘Russophobic’ and the Russian president, then Dmitry Medvedev, turned down an invitation to attend, dismissing talk of the ‘so-called Holodomor’ as ‘immoral’.¹⁴ Behind the scenes Medvedev threatened leaders in the region, advising them not to vote for a motion designating the Holodomor as a ‘genocide’ at the United Nations. According to Prince Andrew of Great Britain, Medvedev told the president of Azerbaijan that he could ‘forget about Nagorno-Karabakh,’ a region disputed by Azerbaijan and Armenia, unless he voted against a proposal to call the Holodomor a genocide.¹⁵

The campaign was not just diplomatic. It was accompanied by the emergence of a Russian historical narrative that did not deny the famine, but emphatically downplayed it. There is almost no commemoration of either the Ukrainian or the wider Soviet famine in Russia and very little public debate. To the extent that it is mentioned at all, it is usually part of an argument that clearly denies any particular Ukrainian suffering. In 2008 the Russian scholar Viktor Kondrashin published the most eloquent version of this counter-narrative. The Famine of 1932–33: The Tragedy of the Russian Village detailed the horrors of those years in the Russian province of Penza, in the Volga region. Kondrashin did not deny that there had been mass starvation in Ukraine. On the contrary, his work showed that Stalin had launched the brutal process of collectivization, and confirmed that he had ordered the ‘thoughtless’ confiscation of grain in 1932–3, knowing full well that millions of peasants would die. But Kondrashin also argued that the Ukrainian estimates of Ukrainian death rates were too high, that estimates of famine deaths in the Volga regions had generally been too low, and that Stalin’s policies had affected everyone alike. The ‘mechanism of the creation of famine was the same’, in Russia and Ukraine, he told an interviewer: ‘there were no national differences’.16

Kondrashin’s argument was partly correct. President Yushchenko is one of many prominent figures who sometimes cite casualty figures for the Holodomor that are too high. Although the Ukrainian scholarly community is now coalescing, with some exceptions, around a number just below 4 million deaths, it is still possible to hear numbers as high as 10 million deaths.¹⁷ Kondrashin may also have been right that Penza province – like Ukraine, a region famous for a civil war-era peasant rebellion that infuriated Lenin in 1918 – was a special target of the Soviet state.¹⁸

Clearly there is a case for a close examination of the ‘special’ famine in Penza. There is an even more urgent case for a closer examination of the famine in Kazakhstan, where the very high mortality rate also indicates something much more sinister than negligence. But that should not negate the need for a recognition of the special circumstances of the famine in Ukraine. As this book has shown, the historical record includes decrees directed solely at Ukraine, such as the one closing the Ukrainian border, blacklisting dozens of Ukrainian collective farms and villages, and implicitly linking the grain collection failure to Ukrainization. The demographic record also shows that Ukraine had a higher death toll in those years than any other part of the Soviet Union.

In a public debate with the Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky, Kondrashin himself wrote that Stalin saw the food crisis of 1932 as an ‘opportunity’:

the famine of 1932–33 and the general economic crisis in Ukraine gave the Stalinist regime an excuse to adopt preventive measures against the Ukrainian national movement and also, in the distant perspective, its possible social base (the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, the peasants).¹⁹

Since this, more or less, is the argument of most mainstream Ukrainian historians – and of this book – it seems that the gap between the ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ scholarly interpretations of the famine is not as great as has sometimes been presented.

Nevertheless, politicization of the famine debate has meant that the differences between the public Ukrainian and Russian understandings of the famine have become significant, both in the Russian-Ukrainian context and also within Ukraine itself. Yushchenko spoke often about the famine, and thought carefully about how to commemorate it. But his opponent and successor, Viktor Yanukovych – a ‘pro-Russian’ president, who had been elected with open Russian financial and political support – abruptly reversed that policy. Yanukovych removed references to the Holodomor from the presidential website, replaced the head of the National Memory Institute with an ex-communist historian, and stopped using the word ‘genocide’ to describe the famine.

Yanukovych continued to speak of the famine as a ‘tragedy’ and even as an ‘Armageddon’, and he frequently used the word ‘Holodomor’, which implies an artificially created famine. He also continued to hold annual commemoration ceremonies and he did not stop or harass archival researchers, as President Vladimir Putin did in Russia at about the same time, although many had feared that he would.20 Nevertheless, the president’s change of tone and emphasis enraged his political opponents. In particular, his refusal to use the word ‘genocide’ was widely dismissed as a gesture of deference to Russia (it is notable that President Medvedev did finally visit a Holodomor memorial in Kyiv in 2010, during the Yanukovych presidency, perhaps as a ‘reward’ for the toned-down language). One group of citizens even tried to take Yanukovych to court for ‘genocide denial’.²¹ His disastrous presidency further discredited all of his policies, including his downplaying of the famine. He systematically undermined Ukrainian political institutions and engaged in corruption on an extraordinary scale. He fled the country in February 2014 after his police shot more than one hundred protesters dead in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, during an extended protest against his rule.

Inevitably, Yanukovych’s disgrace left its mark on the public historical debate. Thanks to the politics that swirled around the word ‘genocide’, it became a kind of identity tag in Ukrainian politics, a term that could mark those who used it as partisans of one political party and those who did not as partisans of another. The problem worsened in the spring of 2014, when the Russian government produced a caricature ‘genocide’ argument to justify its own behaviour. During the Russian invasions of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists and Russian politicians both said that their illegal interventions were a ‘defence against genocide’ – meaning the ‘cultural genocide’ that ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ were supposedly carrying out against Russian speakers in Ukraine.

As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensified, attacks on the history and historiography also worsened. In August 2015, Russian-backed separatists deliberately destroyed a monument to the victims of the famine in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne – the same place from which separatists had launched the BUK missile a year earlier that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight 17, killing everyone on board.22 Also in August 2015, Sputnik News, a Russian government propaganda website, published an article in English entitled ‘Holodomor Hoax’. The article presented views reminiscent of the old era of denial, called the famine ‘one of the 20th century’s most famous myths and vitriolic pieces of anti-Soviet Propaganda’ and even cited Douglas Tottle’s long-discredited book, Fraud, Famine and Fascism.²³ The links that Tottle claimed between historians of the famine, alleged Ukrainian Nazis and alleged anti-Soviet forces in the West proved useful again to a Russia that once again sought to discredit Ukrainians as ‘Nazis’.²⁴

By 2016 the arguments had come full circle. The post-Soviet Russian state was once again in full denial: the Holodomor did not happen, and only ‘Nazis’ would claim that it did. All these arguments muddied the application of the word ‘genocide’ so successfully that to use it in any Russian or Ukrainian context has become wearyingly controversial. People feel exhausted by the debate – which was, perhaps, the point of the Russian assault on the historiography of the famine in the first place.

But the genocide debate, so fierce a decade ago, has subsided for other reasons too. The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people. It was one of several such assaults in the twentieth century, not all of which fit into neat legal definitions. That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.

Slowly, the debate is also becoming less important to Ukrainians. In truth, the legal arguments about the famine and genocide were often proxies for arguments about Ukraine, Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukraine’s right to exist. The discussion of the famine was a way of insisting on Ukraine’s right to a separate national history and to its own national memory. But now – after more than a quarter-century of independence, two street revolutions and a Russian invasion that was finally halted by a Ukrainian army – sovereignty is a fact, not a theory that requires historical justification, or indeed any justification at all.

Because it was so devastating, because it was so thoroughly silenced, and because it had such a profound impact on the demography, psychology and politics of Ukraine, the Ukrainian famine continues to shape the thinking of Ukrainians and Russians, both about themselves and about one another, in ways both obvious and subtle. The generation that experienced and survived the famine carried the memories with them for ever. But even the children and grandchildren of survivors and perpetrators continue to be shaped by the tragedy.

Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s – the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers – continues to matter. Even three generations later, many of contemporary Ukraine’s political problems, including widespread distrust of the state, weak national institutions and a corrupt political class, can be traced directly back to the loss of that first, post-revolutionary, patriotic elite. In 1933 the men and women who could have led the country, the people whom they would have influenced and who would have influenced others in turn, were abruptly removed from the scene. Those who replaced them were frightened into silence and obedience, taught to be wary, careful, cowed. In subsequent years the state became a thing to be feared, not admired; politicians and bureaucrats were never again seen as benign public servants. The political passivity in Ukraine, the tolerance of corruption, and the general wariness of state institutions, even democratic ones – all of these contemporary Ukrainian political pathologies date back to 1933.

The Russification that followed the famine has also left its mark. Thanks to the USSR’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory, many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation with a separate history. Many Europeans are only dimly aware that Ukraine exists at all. Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties. That ambiguity can translate into cynicism and apathy. Those who do not care much or know much about their nation are not likely to work to make it a better place. Those who do not feel any sense of civic responsibility are less interested in stopping corruption.

Ukraine’s contemporary linguistic battles date from the 1930s too. Paradoxically, Stalin reinforced the link between the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian national identity when he tried to destroy them both. As a result linguistic controversies continue to reflect deeper arguments about identity even today. Ukraine is a thoroughly bilingual country – most people speak both Ukrainian and Russian – yet those who prefer one language or the other still regularly complain of discrimination. Riots broke out in 2012 when the Ukrainian state recognized Russian as an ‘official’ language in several provinces, meaning that it could be used in courts and government offices. In 2014 the post-Maidan Ukrainian government tried to repeal that law, and though the repeal was quickly reversed, Russian-backed ‘separatists’ used this proposed change to justify their invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s challenge, both to the language and to Ukrainian sovereignty, has also created a different kind of popular backlash. In 2005, less than half of Ukrainians used the language as their main form of communication. Ten years later two-thirds preferred Ukrainian to Russian.25 Thanks to Russian pressure, the nation is unifying behind the Ukrainian language as it has not done since the 1920s.

If the study of the famine helps explain contemporary Ukraine, it also offers a guide to some of the attitudes of contemporary Russia, many of which form part of older patterns. From the time of the revolution, the Bolsheviks knew that they were a minority in Ukraine. To subjugate the majority, they used not only extreme violence, but also virulent and angry forms of propaganda. The Holodomor was preceded by a decade of what we would now call polarizing ‘hate speech’, language designating some people as ‘loyal’ Soviet citizens and others as ‘enemy’ kulaks, a privileged class that would have to be destroyed to make way for the people’s revolution. That ideological language justified the behaviour of the men and women who facilitated the famine, the people who confiscated food from starving families, the policemen who arrested and killed their fellow citizens. It also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification. Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were ‘enemies of the people’, dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.

Eighty years later, the Russian FSB, the institutional successor of the KGB (itself the successor of the OGPU), continues to demonize its opponents using propaganda and disinformation. The nature and form of hate speech in Ukraine has changed, but the intentions of those who employ it have not. As in the past, the Kremlin uses language to set people against one another, to create first- and second-class citizens, to divide and distract. In 1932–3, Soviet state media described the OGPU troops working with local collaborators as ‘Soviet patriots’ fighting ‘Petliurists’, ‘kulaks’, ‘traitors’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In 2014, Russian state media described Russian special forces carrying out the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine as ‘separatist patriots’ fighting ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ from Kyiv. An extraordinary disinformation campaign, complete with fake stories – that Ukrainian nationalists had crucified a baby, for example – and fake photographs followed, not only inside Russia but on Russian state-sponsored media around the world. Although far more sophisticated than anything Stalin could have devised in an era before electronic media, the spirit of that disinformation campaign was much the same.

Eighty years later, it is possible to hear the echo of Stalin’s fear of Ukraine – or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia – in the present too. Stalin spoke obsessively about loss of control in Ukraine, and about Polish or other foreign plots to subvert the country. He knew that Ukrainians were suspicious of centralized rule, that collectivization would be unpopular among peasants deeply attached to their land and their traditions, and that Ukrainian nationalism was a galvanizing force, capable of challenging Bolshevism and even destroying it. A sovereign Ukraine could thwart the Soviet project, not only by depriving the USSR of its grain, but also by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries, Ukrainian and Russian culture remained closely intertwined, the Russian and Ukrainian languages were closely related. If Ukraine rejected both the Soviet system and its ideology, that rejection could cast doubt upon the whole Soviet project. In 1991 that is precisely what it did.

Russia’s current leadership is all too familiar with this history. As in 1932, when Stalin told Kaganovich that ‘losing’ Ukraine was his greatest worry, the current Russian government also believes that a sovereign, democratic, stable Ukraine, tied to the rest of Europe by links of culture and trade, is a threat to the interests of Russia’s leaders. After all, if Ukraine becomes too European – if it achieves anything resembling successful integration into the West – then Russians might ask, why not us? The Ukrainian street revolution of 2014 represented the Russian leadership’s worst nightmare: young people calling for the rule of law, denouncing corruption and waving European flags. Such a movement could have been contagious – and so it had to be stopped by whatever means possible. Today’s Russian government uses disinformation, corruption and military force to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty just as Soviet governments did in the past. As in 1932, the constant talk of ‘war’ and ‘enemies’ also remains useful to Russian leaders who cannot explain stagnant living standards or justify their own privileges, wealth and power.

History offers hope as well as tragedy. In the end, Ukraine was not destroyed. The Ukrainian language did not disappear. The desire for independence did not disappear either – and neither did the desire for democracy, or for a more just society, or for a Ukrainian state that truly represented Ukrainians. When it became possible, Ukrainians expressed these desires. When they were allowed to do so, in 1991, they voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine, as the national anthem proclaims, did not die.

In the end, Stalin failed too. A generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians was murdered in the 1930s, but their legacy lived on. The national aspiration, linked, as in the past, to the aspiration for freedom, was revived in the 1960s; it continued underground in the 1970s and 1980s; it became open again in the 1990s. A new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals and activists reappeared in the 2000s.

The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending. But the history of Ukraine is not a tragedy. Millions of people were murdered, but the nation remains on the map. Memory was suppressed, but Ukrainians today discuss and debate their past. Census records were destroyed, but today the archives are accessible.

The famine and its aftermath left a terrible mark. But although the wounds are still there, millions of Ukrainians are, for the first time since 1933, finally trying to heal them. As a nation, Ukrainians know what happened in the twentieth century, and that knowledge can help shape their future.