Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

historiography of the collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture. 104 Most significant was Radziejowski’s calculation of a “demographic loss” of 9,263,000 Ukrainians between 1926 and 1939. He explained:

The demographic loss consists of those who died prematurely (that is, were killed), the children not born to persons prematurely dead or to persons unable to marry or remain married owing to external factors, and those consciously or unconsciously assimilated to another nationality…
A closer determination of the relative proportions among these three types of loss does not seem possible on the basis of present data. But in any case, it is impossible to agree with the notion that this decrease in population (after five years of normal reproduction, 1934-9) can be attributed solely to the assimilation of Ukrainians by Russians. The later demographic history of this people precludes the likelihood of such an explanation. 105

Radziejowski also deserves a great deal of credit for pointing out something that ought to be obvious but has been all too often overlooked, “the purchasing agencies (to which those who seized the grain were obliged to deliver it—JM) were organized centrally and operated independently of the local authorities. The later development of agrarian relations constantly strengthened this centralization.” 106

Radziejowski’s article elevated the scholarly discussion of the Famine beyond the limits established by Dalrymple. He did this by pointing out that Soviet historiography was both available and indispensible for understanding the Famine which the Soviets themselves had never fully admitted.

A major landmark in continuing research on the Famine was a special project initiated by Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute in 1981 with financial support from the Ukrainian Studies Fund and the Ukrainian National Association. The most important work produced by the project was Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, which won immediate recognition as the definitive treatment of the Famine. 107

During the course of this project, Conquest worked with Mace, who also produced a number of publications, focusing in particular on the nationality policy aspect of the Famine. 107 Mace’s book, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, is the standard work on trends within the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine that were condemned as “bourgeois-nationalist deviations,” before and during the Famine. It explores how the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s was adopted by a Soviet government which had been imposed on Ukraine from Russia in an attempt to placate the Ukrainian national intelligentsia and its

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104 Janusz Radziejowski, “Collectivization in Ukraine in Light of Soviet Historiography,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, V2(9), Fall 1980, pp. 3-17.

105 Ibid, p. 17.
106 Ibid.
107 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, Oxford University Press, 1986).

108 See, for example, James E. Mace, The ‘Ukrainian Problem* and How Stalin Tried to Solve It,” Russia, No. 5-6,1982, pp. 15-34; idem., “The Man-Made Famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine,” Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, ed. Israel Charny (Boulder, Westview Press, 1984), pp. 67-83; idem.,”Famine and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine,” Problems of Communism, May-June 1984, pp. 37-50.