Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine

Attempts to speculate on historical events of 50 years ago to whip up anti-Soviet hysteria and encourage hatred for our country has turned out to be without prospects… But just as in the past, so now also, all this will gradually die down. 66

From the above-cited works, we have seen that in the early 1980s Soviet historians retreated from even a limited scholarly analysis of issues touching upon the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 to simple denial.
Yet, Gorbachev’s glasnost’ has begun to bear fruit, if not in the historical profession, then in the literary press. On July 16, 1987, the daily organ of the Union of Soviet writers in Ukraine, Literaturna Ukraina (Literary Ukraine), men¬tioned the Famine twice. Soviet Ukrainian literary critic Mykola Oliinyk wrote:

Perestroika (restructuring) opens up many possibilities for literature. Quite a few themes have been under seven locks, which conceal their “secrets,” and they await a true portrayal in the images and impact of art. It seems to me that the most important among them is ecological. Even the famine of ‘thirty-three with all its tragic results, on which the hand of the artist has hung heavy for decades and which has been ruthlessly erased—even it gives way before the all-powerful problems of nature. 67

Hardly a ringing call for a true portrayal, since the crux of the issue is not the ecological problem of crop failure but the political problem of crop seizure.
Interestingly, the same issue carried excerpts from the unpublished 1966 autobiography of the late Hryhir Tiutiunyk, a Soviet Ukrainian writer who died in 1980. In it he noted:

In the year ‘thirty-three my family was swollen from hunger, and my grandfather, my father’s Feodulovych Tiutiunyk, died—he was not even gray yet and every single one of his teeth was still strong… I still don’t know where his grave is… 68

This is a statement such as virtually any Ukrainian who came to the West from pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine might make, but hardly the type of statement one expects to encounter in the Soviet press. Once before in the Khrushchev period the writers of literature paved the way toward liberalization for the writers of history in the Soviet Union. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of a new such episode.

Among historians as well, a few courageous individuals have also begun to speak out in increasingly accessible public forums. V. P. Danilov in the October 11, 1987 issue of the mass circulation Sovetskaia Rossiia (Soviet Russia) denounced Stalin for forcing the peasantry into the collective farms and pointed out that in the Winter and Spring of 1932-1933 famine had claimed “a multitude” of lives. 69

…………………….

66 Ibid, Al/9-11, quotation from Al/11.

67 Mykola Oliinyk, “Chas i my” (Time and Ourselves), Literaturna Ukraina (Literary Ukraine),
July 16, 1987, p. 5.v

68 Hryhir Tiutiunyk, “Vichna zahadka: avtobiohrafiia” (The Eternal Enigma: an Autobiography), Literaturna Ukraina, July 16,1987, p. 6. I am indebted to Dr. Larissa Onyshkevich for this and the preceding reference.

69 V.P Danilov, “U kolkhoznogo nachala” (The Beginning of the Collective Farms), Sovetskaia
Rossiia (Soviet Russia), October 11,1987, p. 4.