Makuch, Andrij and Sysyn, Frank E. (eds) Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 559 Polish crisis of 1980–81, the ambiguous economic relationship between the two states before 1990, the era of perestroika and the collapse of Communism, and the post-Communist trajectories of both countries. As for the relationship of the Russian Federation and ‘sovereign Poland’ since 1990, both Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałecz and Artem V. Malgin take the long view. The former even argues that ‘present-day problems must not obscure the fact that, in historical terms, the period of 1990 to 2010 may well be considered a golden age in Russian-Polish relations’ (p. 540). If this is true, White Spots — Black Spots should be considered one of its main achievements. Malgin, however, sees a clear and present danger in what he calls ‘historical foreign policy’ and makes the interesting observation that ‘Russia and Poland are afraid to recognize their similarities’ (p. 563). Unfortunately the recent authoritarian turn in Poland, though it may bear some comparison with political developments of the Putin era in Russia, also promises a return to the ‘historical foreign policy’ of a decade ago. It would be a shame if the Russian-Polish dialogue over their common history becomes one of its casualties. Department of History Robert Blobaum West Virginia University Makuch, Andrij and Sysyn, Frank E. (eds). Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies. CIUS Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2015. viii + 126 pp. Notes. Works cited. $22.95 (paperback). This short volume is a high-quality primer on the state of Holodomor studies circa roughly 2013, when the conference of the same name was held at the University of Toronto. Olga Andriewsky reviews the scholarship on all the key issues: the number of deaths and the longer-term demographic losses; methods ofimplementation,includingtheblacklistingofvillagesandtheeffectofsuchan apparent ‘death sentence’ (p. 26, quoting Kul’chyts’kyi); the evidence of Stalin’s own involvement and intentions; and linkage to ‘colonialism and the practices of settlement and occupation’ (p. 31) and the case for seeing the Holodomor as a ‘cultural war’ that ‘marks the violent end of a particular social order: the end of a set of social structures, social institutions and social practices associated with Cossack history and culture in Ukraine’ (p. 39). Andriewsky also notes the areas that have so far been under-researched: strategies of survival, the fate of exiles, ‘the actual fate and history of blacklisted villages’, the role of gender and the urban experience, and the role of perpetrators (p. 38). Andrea Graziosi has written elsewhere on the strength of Ukrainian peasant resistance (at least in the early stages of collectivization) and the case for SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 560 viewing the entire period from the Bolsheviks’ initial consolidation of power as the ‘Great Soviet Peasant War of 1918–1934’. Here he makes many challenging points about ‘The Impact of Holodomor Studies on the Understanding of the USSR’. The Holodomor was far from being a brutal prelude to modernization, as argued by Valerii Soldatenko, the Director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory in 2010–14, and others. Soviet agriculture never worked: the compromises of 1935 allowing tiny private plots besides the collective farm behemoths simply meant that ‘the divergent interests regulating these two spheres of endeavour doomed them both to atrophy’ (p. 56). Only Stalin might have forced through collectivization through its failures and the Holodomor through its tragedies, but the whole Soviet leadership was blinded by ideology to the possibility for reform ‘in the crucial 1953 to 1964 decade, when a peasantry that could have profited from the disbanding of collective farms still existed’ (p. 63). By the Gorbachev era, there was no chance of the aged and drunken residual rural population pulling off what Deng Xiaoping achieved after 1976. But a state that could not feed itself would always be dysfunctional. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi makes the case for regarding the Holodomor as genocide, and for distinguishing it from both the ‘All-Union Famine of 1932–33’ and the holodomors (lower case ‘h’) in the North Caucasus and Lower Volga. As he argues, not everyone in the target group has to be killed for the label of genocide properly to apply. There...