PROCEEDINGS

Congressman MICA: The Commission on the Ukrainian Famine will come to
order.

Let me just start out with a little bit of an apology; Dr. Mace specifically and espe¬cially set this meeting today because it was a week after the Congress would adjourn. I was to have been in Florida all weekend and Monday and Tuesday, fly back, and we have a meeting, uninterrupted As you may recall, the last meeting was interrupted continuously, so we thought if we planned it this way, with the Congress gone, we could have a good meeting and all get together and visit, and maybe have a little chance for coffee, lunch, or what have you.

The best laid plans often do not work. So, at any rate, the Congress is in session, there are other committee hearings and meetings going on again this morning. Unfor¬tunately, I just heard that we may not even get out this week, it may be the end of next week.

So, I will start the meeting, will have to leave in about five minutes, and be back in about 30 minutes, and in and out, it looks like. And I will ask you to continue the meeting.

The purpose of today’s session is twofold—to hear expert and eyewitness testimony on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 and to review the progress of the staff study on the famine that may well have taken seven million lives. We have gathered to share the experiences of some who lived through this devastation and the scholarship of some who have studied it. I have the particular pleasure of welcoming Dr. Robert Conquest, Scholar-Curator of the Russian Collection at the Hoover Institute and per¬haps the leading practitioner of that mysterious art known as Sovietology. Dr. Con¬quest is best known as the author of The Great Terror, the definitive study of Stalin’s massive purges of the late 1930s, and has now published what promises to be the definitive work on the Ukrainian famine, The Harvest of Sorrow: The Soviet Collec¬tivization of Agriculture and the Terror-Famine. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said recently that, mThe Harvest of Sorrow investigated the most serious, also up to now least re¬searched crime of Leninist-Stalinist communism.” There is little I can add to such a judgment I am certain that I speak for us all in expressing our gratitude to Dr. Con¬quest for his willingness to be with us today and share with us the fruits of his several years of research into the tragedy which this commission is mandated to study.

We also owe a debt of gratitude to those who have agreed to share with us the memories of what they witnessed during the period when the famine took place. A major priority of our work has been the collection of oral testimonies on tape. Until now, there has been great reluctance on the part of eyewitnesses to the Ukrainian famine to come forward and publicly state what they saw and what they lived through. For these witnesses to do so today is an act of courage. It is also vital to our mandate for the full commission to meet and hear directly from those who were so grievously wronged by the policies carried out by Stalin’s government in the 1930s. Dr. Samilenko-Tsvetkov will translate.

And I might ask, if you don’t mind, one of you take the chair as I leave in about five minutes, and just continue the meeting, and we will just have it without interruption right through noon, maybe 12:30.