had been working as a researcher at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in Edmonton for several years, I was extremely naive about how scholars arrived at estimates for major catastrophes on the order of the Holocaust of the Jews or the Holodomor in Ukraine.
When I was a young man, most of what I read suggested that each of these events took about six million lives. I thought that either the murderers kept a tally of their victims or else it was a fairly simple matter of subtracting the results of one census from another.
I began to realize the complexity of the issue in 1980. I was working closely with a scholar from Poland who was a visiting professor at CIUS, Janusz Radziejowski.
He had demographic training and was used to working with census materials, and he offered a brief estimate of the population losses from collectivization and famine.
The conclusion he came to was that there was a “demographic loss of 9,263,000” Ukrainians in the USSR between 1926 and 1939. I was astounded at this high number. I never realized, I said, that the famine killed over 9 million people. He patiently explained to me that a demographic loss is not the same as a death toll.
In addition to the latter, this number includes children not born to those killed, other children not born for other reasons connected to collectivization and famine, and Ukrainians who assimilated. Given the data available at that time, he doubted that we could sort out how much of this loss was attributable to each category.
My next encounter with the issues came in 1983. I was a Neporany Fellow at CIUS, and my only obligation was to work on my book about Galician villagers and the Ukrainian national movement in the 19th century.
I would spend every day poring over my sources and writing my monograph. In the room next to me was another researcher, also working on a book on the Ukrainian peasantry.
This was Alex Babyonyshev, better known under his pseudonym Maksudov. He was a former humanrights activist in the USSR and interested in demographic questions, history and politics. His book was about collectivization and the famine.
Needless to say, two researchers with a basement to themselves and working on related topics entered into intense discussions of their projects.
For me, it was like a yearlong seminar on how collectivization was implemented and on how to arrive at a more accurate estimate of the population losses. I learned that these estimates were much more complex than even Janusz had taught me. Alex was busy drawing up graphs of the age structure of populations, examining economic indicators that might help estimate the extent of outmigration from Ukraine in the 30s, and attacking the problem from other angles. He estimated that the total demographic loss in Ukraine came to 4.5 million.
Later in the mid1990s, I began to work on the Holocaust. My readings in this field only reinforced the lessons I had learned earlier on the difficulty of estimating the number of victims when mass murder was involved. It was often helpful to scholars when a particular German unit would report to Berlin that it had killed a number of Jews in such and such locality, but generally the picture was fuzzy.
I bring all this up to help explain why I am disturbed by blithe claims I see being made about 7 or 10 million Ukrainians killed in the famine. I know that President Viktor Yushchenko and his administration are also using the 10 million figure. That does not make it correct, however.
President Yushchenko once relied on a professional historian, Stanislav Kulchytskiy, for advice on historical issues, but now he seems to have decided to use history as a political tool and does not want to be confused by the facts.
In Ukraine, politicians frequently appeal to identity politics, since symbols are easier to deliver than better health care, education, or civil service.
Dr. Kulchytsky was among the ideological architects of Yushchenko’s campaign to have the Ukrainian famine recognized internationally as genocide. He devoted a number of publications in 2005 to explaining why the famine fit the definition.
In the texts, Kulchytskiy stuck to the results of his earlier research on the demographic effects of the famine in Ukraine: that there were 3,238,000 deaths directly attributable to the Holodomor.
Kulchytskiy had conducted careful research on the subject and published several works devoted to the demography of the famine. What distinguishes Kulchytskiy’s research from that of the earlier researchers is that it draws on statistical information that was not available before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives.
Kulchytskiy also drew heavily on recent studies by Australian historian and demographer Stephen Wheatcroft, who estimates that 3 to 3.5 million died in the Ukrainian famine.
Another serious attempt to estimate the losses in Ukraine was conducted by a team of French and Ukrainian demographers (Jacques Vallin, France Mesle, Serguei Adamets, and Serhii Pirozhkov). Here is their conclusion:
“The disasters of the decade culminated in the horrific famine of 1933. These events resulted in a dramatic fall in fertility and a rise in mortality. Our estimates suggest that total losses can be put at 4.6 million, 900,000 of which were due to forced migration, 1 million to a deficit in births, and 2.6 million to exceptional mortality.”
So how many people were killed by the famine? From 2.5 to 3.5 million. Those who died disproportionately were the rural population (predominantly Ukrainians) and little children. May their memory be eternal.
And let me add: may it be unsullied by falsehood.
I find it disrespectful to the dead that people use their deaths in a ploy to gain the moral capital of victimhood. To this end, they inflate the numbers. Let me just take one case.
Marta Tomkiw and Bobby Leigh are working on a film about the famine. The trailer opens with the following: “The Darfur, Sudan genocide claimed the lives of 180,000 people in four years. The Armenian genocide claimed the lives of 1 million people from 1915 to 1918. The Holocaust claimed the lives of 6 million people in nine years. They are not forgotten.”
“Unfortunately, the Holodomor has exceeded these tragedies by claiming the lives of 10 million Ukrainians in only 17 months. History knows no other crime of such nature and magnitude.”
Here I do not want to single out this particular movie project for criticism. These are views one can easily find in many other Ukrainian representations of the famine, particularly in the North American diaspora. But the trailer formulates them clearly.
The point of these ideas is that the Holodomor is bigger than the others, particularly bigger than the Holocaust. I do not understand why others are not offended by this competition for victimhood, even if the numbers were true, which they are not. I think the discussion of tragedies like these demands a certain moral probity.
Disasters like these should not be taken lightly, manipulated, instrumentalized, or falsified. Moreover, these are not simply deaths, but crimes, murders, and violations of the moral order. How much more careful we should be about them, how much more respectful of the truth.
Even if the Holodomor did account for 10 million victims, and even if this competition were decent, the final claim about this being the biggest crime in history would still be incorrect.
There was also a famine in China directly attributable to the campaign for the Great Leap Forward. Again, it is difficult to estimate the number of losses, but Western and Chinese scholars estimate that from 15 to 43 million peasants starved to death in China in 1959 to 61.
Here I have attempted to bridge that gap with information about the number of deaths actually attributable to the Holodomor. But I am also raising a moral question about how we should remember our dead.
I think it should be clear to all that the respect and honesty we owe the departed means that we should refrain from using their deaths to gain political popularity in Ukraine or to score points in interethnic rivalry in North America. Above all, we must be careful not to embed their deaths in a falsehood.
JohnPaul Himka is professor of Ukrainian and Eastern European history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
