Chapter 1

NON-SOVIET SCHOLARSHIP ON THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE

In order to understand non-Soviet scholarship on the Great Famine of 1932-1933, a few observations about this literature are necessary. Despite a clear link In Soviet ideology under Lenin and Stalin between what was called “the nationality question” and “the peasant question,” Western scholarship has persisted in treating each separately. 1 This, to some extent, is the inevitable tendency of every academic field’s inclination to divide itself into rather loosely connected subdisciplines. Scholars whose research interests lie in the Soviet peasantry and agricultural policy often have little familiarity with Soviet nationality policy and fail to distinguish either between the Russian and non-Russian peasantries or differences in agricultural policies in Great Russia and in non-Russian territories. Similarly, scholars of Soviet nationality policy, either in general or in reference to one group, are often unfamiliar with works on the peasantry and agriculture.

Moreover, the main intellectual reservoirs from which Soviet history flows are Russian history and Soviet politics. Both developed a strong Russocentric bias, often ignoring issues of nationality policy. In the English-speaking world, the academic study of Russian history was founded by emigre” Russian scholars like Sir Paul Vinogradoff and Michael Karpovich. Its practitioners tended to internalize the prejudices of prerevolutionary Russian opinion, which generally held that Ukrainians were not to be taken seriously or that they were “separatists” and traitors to the Russian motherland. The major exception among influential Russian historians in the United States before World War II was George Vernadsky. Vernadsky did write briefly on Ukrainian topics around 1940, but these writings lacked the influence of his other work. 2

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1 A notable exception is the classic 1957 paper by V. P. Timoshenko, cited below. Timoshenko was
best known as the author of the first detailed study of collectivized agriculture in the Soviet Union,
Agricultural Russia and the Wheat Problem (Stanford, Food Research Institute and Hoover War
Library, 1932), which was the standard work until Naum Jasny’s monograph appeared in 1949.

2 The two works are George Vernadsky, Bohdan: Hetman of Ukraine (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1941) and his preface to Michael Hrushevsky, A History of Ukraine (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1941). The latter work is a translation of a book published at the turn of the
century, written by an agrarian socialist who served as President of the Ukrainian Central Rada in
1917-1918, a member of both the All-Ukrainian and Soviet academies of sciences, and died under
mysterious circumstances in the Soviet Union in 1934. Yet, the book was denounced in a report
circulated to the FBI, State Department, and the US Army Military Intelligence Division as “an
expression of Nazi propaganda” which supposedly praised “pro-German Ukrainian Fifth Columnists
and presents Nazi racist myths about the Ukrainian people.” Decimal File 860E.20211/13- M1286-
Records of the Department of State; National Archives; Washington, D.C. Circulation among
government agencies of such disinformation indicates a climate of opinion in which it was difficult for
works on Ukrainian topics to exert much influence.