Kiev Journal - A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/world/europe/16kiev.html?ref=world

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Advertise on NYTimes.com Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times A memorial to the famine, right, opposite a revered cathedral, was dedicated last November in Kiev. A museum is planned there. MOST POPULAR By CLIFFORD J. LEVY Published: March 15, 2009 E-MAILED BLOGGED SEARCHED E-MAIL

KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian PRINT 1. Whoopie! Cookie, Pie or Cake, It's Having Its Moment 2. Appenzell Journal: In Thin Air of the Alps, Swiss named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to REPRINTS Secrecy Is Vanishing concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that SHARE 3. Basics: In One Ear and Out the Other killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like 4. As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold 5. An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke? the legacy of Stalin. 6. Maureen Dowd: No Boiled Carrots 7. Cocaine Trade Helps Rebels Reignite War in Peru Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along. 8. Architecture: A New Paris, as Dreamed by Planners The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he 9. Thomas L. Friedman: Obama’s Real Test recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the 10. The Pleasure Principle

truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a Go to Complete List » golden , seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.

“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.” nytimes.com/opinion

The concrete memorial was dedicated last November, the 75th anniversary of the famine, in a park in Kiev, on a hillside overlooking the Dnieper River in the shadow of the onion domes of a revered Orthodox Christian monastery. More than 100 feet tall, the memorial will eventually house a small museum that will offer testimony from

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survivors, as well as information about the Ukrainian villages that suffered. The new frugality Also in Opinion: In the , the authorities all but banned discussion of the famine, but by the We have a winner! 1980s the United States and other countries were pressing their own inquiries, often at Video: sex, lies and photoshop How risky is that drink? the urging of Ukrainian immigrants.

In response, Communist officials embarked on a propaganda drive to play down the

famine and show that the deaths were caused by unforeseen food shortages or drought. ADVERTISEMENTS Professor Kulchytsky said he had been given the task of gathering research but Get Times Reader Free. A Digital concluded that the famine had been man-made. Newspaper That Reads Like The Real Thing.

“I became convinced that everything was not as I once thought,” he said. Get Home Delivery

He refused to falsify his findings and instead released them publicly, escaping punishment only because glasnost had begun under the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The famine is known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor — literally, death or killing by starvation — and the campaign to give it recognition has played a significant role in the Ukrainian quest to shape a national identity in the post-Soviet era. It has also further strained relations with the Kremlin, another of the festering disputes left by the breakup Ads by Google what's this? of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cluster Bomb Petition Israel cluster bombs in Lebanon. Children are victims! action.atfl.org The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange Revolution Is Jesus Really God? of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered because he wanted to decimate Scholars examine the facts about Jesus' claims to be God the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out aspirations for independence from Moscow. www.Y-Jesus.com/JesusFacts Spa Condo Upper East Side The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said Professor Kulchytsky, Spacious Homes, Pool, Private Park, Cafe, Massage Center, Pilates, Yoga who is deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kiev. www.515e72.com

Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the horrors of that time.

“It is difficult to bear,” he acknowledged. “The documents about cannibalism are especially difficult to read.”

Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially quarantining and starving many villages.

“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”

In recent years, Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, has regularly spoken out about the famine, and has even sought to make denying it a crime. Ukraine has asked other countries to recognize the famine as genocide and to establish memorials. One is being built in .

In Kiev, the memorial has started to become a pilgrimage site.

“Of course, it is needed,” said Hrigory Mikhailenko, 75, a construction executive from central Ukraine who stopped by during a business trip. “So many people died. Four members of my family. It’s very important to note what happened. That is why Russia is pressuring us.”

Russia has spurned the memorial. Instead of attending its dedication, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, sent a letter to Mr. Yushchenko accusing him of using the famine to discredit Russia.

“We do not condone the repression carried out by the Stalinist regime against the entire Soviet people,” Mr. Medvedev wrote. “But to say that it was aimed at the destruction of

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Ukrainians means going against the facts and trying to give a nationalist subtext to a common tragedy.”

Last month, Russian historians and archivists sought to bolster the Kremlin’s case, issuing a DVD and a book of historical documents that they said demonstrated that the famine was not directed at Ukraine. Many of the documents were translated into English, underscoring how the two countries are waging their fight on an international stage.

Professor Kulchytsky said the Kremlin feared that if it conceded the truth, Russia, considered the successor to the Soviet Union, could face claims for reparations. Still, he said he would not ignore misstatements by the Ukrainian side, either.

For example, President Yushchenko has said that as many as 10 million Ukrainians died, while Professor Kulchytsky that the figure is 3.5 million.

Nor is the professor enamored with the design of the memorial, saying that he would have preferred some of the other proposals. But he said there was no doubt that the country had to be reminded of its history.

“I know many people, including famous people — smart, intellectual people — whose relatives, grandparents, died in the famine, and they speak out harshly against focusing on Holodomor,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “They consider it not a part of the present. But how can we be quiet about what occurred? Our people were the victims of a great crime.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 16, 2009, on page More Articles in World » A11 of the New York edition.

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Past Coverage 75 Years Later, Survivor Helps Commemorate Ukrainian Famine (December 19, 2007) A City of Memorials Finds Itself Filling Up (December 30, 2006) World Briefing | Europe: Ukraine: Recognizes Soviet-Era Famine As Genocide (November 29, 2006) Pulitzer Board Won't Void '32 Award to Times Writer (November 22, 2003)

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