Executive Summary

the collection Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933, edited by Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko. 105

In the Soviet Union, largely because of the stimulus of scholarship in the West, modest progress has been made in coming to terms with the Famine. In January 1988, an article in News from Ukraine, published by the Soviet Ukrainian Society for Relations with Ukrainians Abroad, admitted that the Famine took place and placed much of the blame for it on Stalin. But the extent of the Famine was minimized, the Communist Party was portrayed as doing what it could to ameliorate the situation, and actions by the Communist Party and Soviet state which exacerbated the Famine were ignored. 106 At the same time, Communist spokesmen in Canada have begun a major campaign of disinformation and denial of the Famine’s historicity by claiming that those who have studied it are either Ukrainian nationalist war criminals or their spokesmen. 107

The Commission on the Ukraine Famine has sought to fulfill its legislative mandate by attempting to answer some of the questions arising from one of history’s worst crimes against humanity. In so doing, it may well have helped to make such crimes less likely in the future by demonstrating that, though it may take more than half a century, the truth will come out Yet, it is hoped that the lessons learned about collective victimization, the use of food as a weapon for political ends, and the concealment of criminal policies by those who perpetrate them, might provide insights which can be of use in confronting the challenges of similar events. Sadly, collective victimization, the use of food as a weapon, and disinformation campaigns by oppressive regimes are far from being a thing of the past During the Commission’s existence, the world has seen Marxist regimes carry out not dissimilar policies in Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Sadder still, it would be naive to assume that these most recent instances are the last

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105 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New
York, Oxford University Press, 1986); Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, eds., Famine in
Ukraine, 1932-1933 (Edmonton, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986).

106 Stanislav Kulchytsky, “Historical Experience: Vital Today,” News from Ukraine 1988, No. 2, p. 7.

107 Capitalizing on the fact that some Ukrainians have at times misattributed photographs of the
1921-1923 famine to 1932-1933, a Canadian communist from Winnipeg has argued that such
“plagiarized” photos are the basis of a “Ukrainian genocide myth” and that those publicly bear
witness to the Famine are former “Ukrainian Nazis” and that non-Ukrainians who have studied it are
their front men. He concluded, The “Evil Empire’ image rests—if only in small measure-on the
interpretation of the 1932-1933 Famine as a deliberate, pre-planned genocide of millions of
Ukrainians. Cold War confrontation, rather than historical truth and understanding, has motivated
the famine-genocide campaign. Elements of fraud, anti-semitism, degenerate Nationalism, fascism
and pseudo-scholarship revealed in this critical examination of certain key evidence presented in the
campaign, of the political purpose and historical background of the campaign’s promoters underlie
this conclusion.” Douglas Tottle, Fraud, Famine and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from
Hitler to Harvard (Toronto, Progress Books, 1987), p. 133. Members of the Ukrainian community in
Canada are currently attempting to have legal proceedings initiated under the Canadian law which
bans “hate literature” in that country.