"Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" by Anne Applebaum

so welcome to the EBRD I have to say this is the we rarely have we had a book event that attracted so many people very gratifying my name is Larry char when I'm in the communications department and welcome to this evenings discussion of an apple bombs new book entitled read famine news app Obama's you know as a journalist a commentator a prize-winning author of several other books including gulag a history which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction she will be in conversation with mr. ed Lucas who was a senior editor at The Economist magazine and there will of course be time allotted for your questions we have two roving mics our man one and we can see where we go from there after the discussion we invite you outside for a reception where you will be able to have more than coffee and be able to purchase a copy of the book which the author will be willing I hope to sign okay and tonight's event was made possible by the Ukrainian Institute in London and Penguin Books so before I passed the microphone of money and a percent e of the Institute to say a few words that remind you that tonight's event is part of the e BR DS cultural program which and all of our events are open to the general public next Thursday October 5th were having an evening organised by the Georgian Embassy and we will be screening a Georgian documentary film unwind which is then followed by one the following Thursday October 12th we'll be showing an Uzbek film and the new ambassador from Uzbekistan will be attending and all events if you're interested are on EBRD comm under news and events and so now without further ado just a few words from is presenting Thank You Larry and thank you to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development it's very important for us that this Bank hosts this event which is crucial for the Ukrainian for the understanding of Ukrainian identity it's very important for the Ukrainian community in the United Kingdom and for Ukraine as a whole Ukrainian Institute London is uk-based charity and we are affiliated with the Ukrainian Catholic University in the Western Ukrainian city of Aliyev historic events events they do not come in isolations they are linked to what happened before them and they often have repercussions in the future and I think Ukraine's great feminine which is also known as Holodomor is one of those events in fact what happens in those years started right back in 1917 events we are now celebrating a centenary not celebrating marking or commemorating in some instances centenary of those events and this is something which is very well explained in an apple bombs book but in fact great famine started back then with a big conflict between Ukrainian peasants and the newly established Soviet authorities and that's precisely for this reason why this event is not only part of the IVIG cultural program but it's also part of the themed series that the Ukrainian Institute London has developed and has been running throughout 2017 which is called the century of Ukrainian revolutions and we will be holding more events from this series you are very welcome to familiarize yourself yourselves with them in the booklets and the leaflets which are available in this beautiful venue thank you very much and I'm passing the floor to an Applebaum and Eduard Lucas well thanks very much indeed marina I have to apologize my voice which sounds very creaky this is because I've spent a week in Washington going between icy cold air conditioning and the very hot and sweaty temperature on the street outside and I apologize for that um I want to first of all just give a big shout-out to the Ukrainian Institute and to you it really is the most fantastic organization I think it epitomizes everything that's going right in Ukraine and really what we're fighting for this conduct combination of academic excellence and independence and a very high ethical standards educating a new generation of Ukrainians if you haven't been to l'viv please go if you've been to live you've already please go again please look at the website by that give money help them in every way you can it's the most important and encouraging thing I think I know of in in Ukraine um I've known an for 30-something years I think plus or minus and her books are excellent they almost need no introduction but for those of you who have come from the Russian embassy or from Mars or whatever I would point out that she's best known for her trilogy I was I call it a gulag Iron Curtain and now red famine before that she also wrote an excellent book where she traversed the borderlands of Eastern Europe from from from from north to south epic epic journey at the time when this region was still very much off the map and she's a distinguished columnist as well many of you will have seen her columns in the Washington Post and elsewhere she even briefly worked at The Economist alongside me she went on to great greater things I'm gonna fire a few questions that have but we also look forward very much to your questions from the from from the floor we will finish fairly punctually at 7:00 but as I encourage you if you're going to ask the question just ask one rather than several and if you have a question which is also a comment perhaps mentally edit it before you ask it says is actually just a question but I'm going to kick off by asking an about red famine particularly about the well rather long word but rather important one the historiography of the of the famine because your book isn't just about this extraordinary and not very well known at least in the West episode of state-sponsored mass murder it's also about the way in which that story has been understood misunderstood lied about understated overstated and so on so explain where red famine fits into the historiography into the other histories and the other understanding of the Ukrainian Holodomor well first of all thank you for asking me an interesting question one that will take me two seconds to think about rather than rather than rather than otherwise and I also want to express my great gratitude to the Ukrainian Institute and to the EBRD for hosting this I'm grateful to see you all here so red famine is very consciously a part of the historiography of the famine and and it's it's in part an answer to a series of absences so the famine as as some of you will know and as if you don't know you need to buy my book and have it explained to you but the famine the famine took place in 1932 1933 it the Ukrainian famine was a smaller part well it was a large part actually sorry but it was a it was a it took place during a wider famine so there was a wider period of famine in the Soviet Union that was sparked by Stalin's decision to collectivise the peasantry which began in 1929 and that decision which I explained in the book I explained the reasons for it and why it happened and how it happened but it led to an enormous amount of chaos and food shortages and hardship all across the Soviet Union but there was a moment in the autumn of 1932 really the height of this chaos and difficulty when Stalin made a series of decisions and the Politburo passed a series of orders which heightened and deep into the famine very specifically in Ukraine and until quite recently really until the Soviet archives were published and until people had had or until historians that had time to go through them the sequence of that decision-making wasn't known and for a very very long time Ukrainians had a knew that there the famine had been they there their interpretation was that it was directed at them because they remembered how it had unfolded so again this was not a famine that happened because of bad weather it wasn't because of insects it wasn't a natural catastrophe it was it happened because Stalin took these decisions and then those had very concrete effects in in Ukraine and and and and the and the famine was exacerbated and and carried out by people who went by teams of activists who went from house to house from village to village and actually confiscated people's food there was then a cordon drawn around Ukraine that prevented people from leaving the country leaving the Republic as it then was and prevented peasants also from traveling from the villages into the cities so it was it was a set of decisions that were taken to to prevent to prevent people from getting food and those decisions were taking in the autumn and winter and then by the spring people began to die in very large numbers as I said Ukrainians remembered this but nobody officially nobody else ever remembered it after the famine during while the famine was taking place news of it was when you were not allowed to write about it or speak about it Western journalists who were based in Moscow had some inkling that there was famine going on but they were explicitly told not to transmit reports or write anything about it those who did do so were often even shouted down by other journalists who knew that they needed to keep their jobs in Moscow in their positions and therefore they and therefore they you know they they they they kept up this Soviet myth that there was no famine or anyway there was a little bit of hunger but no starvation and even in in the in the two or three years that followed the the Soviet system made enormous efforts to cover up the famine even going to the extent of using the results of the census that was taken in 1937 so big census taken in 1937 and it showed too many people were missing in Ukraine Stalin concealed that census the next census was published in 1939 and it had manipulated numbers so a lot of effort went into covering up the famine and the cover-up held and actually had held throughout most of the 40 50 60 70 s 80s in the Soviet Union but it was always undermined by a kind of counter narrative and the Ukrainians both in Ukraine but most notably outside of Ukraine ukrainian diaspora in western europe and the united states kept up the the memory of the famine and they published books they were very often very amateurish they were oral history books and memoirs and they published collections of memories and stories about the famine which appeared in the ukrainian community and they were written about sometimes by the diaspora but it was never but the the story were never really believed you know the idea that a state you know that a leader even a leader like Stalin would deliberately starve people that he would deprive people of food in order to kill them seemed for many people something that it just couldn't be believed and it wasn't really until the 1980s when the when you began to get some movement in Ukraine and you began to get some reporting from Ukraine that it began to be a little bit possible to speak about it and really the first couple of books about the famine published in the West were published at that time and most famous the most famous book was one by Robert conquest it was published in 1983 the conquest based his book on those Ukrainian memoirs that I've spoken of on newspaper reports and evidence from the time on the work of some journalists who had kept records and he he wrote a book which came out to sort of I wouldn't say great acclaim because it was controversial but certainly a lot of attention was paid to it almost immediately there was an enormous Soviet attack on the book there was a counter book that was published called fraud famine and fascism that sought to undermine conquest he was a CIA agent it said all the material in the book came from Nazi sources that it was a that this was a fraud this wasn't a true story and almost since then since the 1980s every time the famine has come up as a story or as a as a piece of history there has been a counter-attack certainly there was initially a counter-attack from the Soviet Union and later the Russian government decided that it too also wanted to undermine this story of the famine so that's a roundabout way of saying that the actually even the existence and the and the story of what happened have been controversial and have been suppressed since they happened and right up to and including into modern times once Ukraine became independent in 1991 the Ukrainians themselves began to work on the history of the famine they began to tell the story of the famine they did work on the archive as much of which I've used in my book other people had had the the the archival record had been established before my book explains that and adds adds more material but the government began to commemorate it they began to speak about it it became part of conversation about the history of Ukraine and almost the whole time there's been a kind of pushback from Russian authorities from Russian historians and from others who sought to question this idea that it that it really happened and as I was going to say up and up to and including the president the Ukrainian government has built famine memorials in different parts of the country and some of them in eastern Ukraine have been defaced during the recent war so it has become a kind of political football unfortunately and one of the things my book seeks to do is to put at least some of that to rest in other words by saying here's what we know here's the here's the collected evidence by by you know a generation now of historians here's the archival record here's the oral history record here here's what we think happened I think it's it's very interesting that you mentioned Robert conquest who was really was working basically from emigres sources that he had no access to save it sources and he did right and this huge spasm it was one of the last great spasms of Soviet propaganda I was working on the Soviet Union at the time and I remember this counter-attack and these this this attempt to try and paint black as black as white and it and I think it's very interesting the way that if you go through your footnotes you've got all these survivor tests many all this stuff that was available before and you've backed it up again and again with archival evidence and it shows that the what was dismissed as the sort of extreme ravings of embittered fascist emigrate and they're sort of you know Cold War cold warrior champions like conquest was pretty much bang on right and if anything they slightly under underestimated it was right I mean the specifying the numbers has been a big deal and actually the numbers have ranged from two million dead to ten million dead and we now have had a team of Ukrainian demographers who've gone through the archives looked at not at the not at the census material but at birth and death material that we know to be from other sources to be accurate and they've and they have established it so you know the the you know there there are things that conquest didn't have and couldn't have had but ya know the outline of the story has been available for a long time it's just been but I think you know I think the I think the archives solidify it they clarify it it's it's Stalin's motivations are a little bit clearer now to that because this is one of the one of one of the many sort of points that's made to try and blur and diminish the story of the Ukrainian famine is the idea that this was just part of a sort of terrible failed experiment or if you're really enthusiastic a very costly experiment and that was going on all over the Soviet Union and it's just those self-centered Ukrainians who are trying to make out that they were the center of the story actually it was just a general Soviet catastrophe and nothing particularly Ukrainian about it and I think you nail that very well by getting into Stalinist decision making and can you explain why he had such an animus particularly against Ukraine so this goes back to the why is why marina passante is so interested in this question of 1917 um actually when I was writing the book one of my initial I my previous books were multi-year in some cases multilingual lots of different countries and one of the advantages I thought of writing about the Ukrainian famine well it's only two years in one country no that's it keeps it quite straight but actually as I began to work on this subject I realized that it was impossible to explain the famine without going back to 1917 which was the year of course of the Bolshevik Revolution but it was also the year of the cranium national revolution so when az-zahra Zim fell apart in Ukraine a group of intellectuals came to power who for a brief period tried to create a ukrainian state it was not a it declared independence from russia and it had the idea that there would be a sovereign Ukraine that would be its own country much as in that period there were country of the Poland was being recreated Czechoslovakia Romania Bulgaria there were lots of new countries being created on the back of collapsed empires and Ukraine wanted to be one of those countries that didn't happen and it didn't happen because both because of the white armies which did not want to see a Ukrainian an independent Ukraine and they and they came back in the country and fought with the Ukrainian the Ukrainian troops the Ukrainian forces but more importantly because of the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks were very one of their primary military goals during the Civil War which lasted from 1917 through nineteen twenty twenty-one was to reoccupy Ukraine and they they were there were three attempts to occupy Ukraine and two of them failed and the second occupation failed very spectacularly in 1918 the Bolsheviks came in for the second time they tried to conquer Kiev and what happened and they ran the country for a short period of time and the effect of their running the country in which they brought in the Cheka their secret police they they they began nationalizing industry they began taking over taking over the state and the effect of it was a massive peasant rebellion on a scale that I think hasn't happened in Europe anytime before or since and the Bolsheviks remembered this rebellion it was it was an RKO it was chaotic it was it and it was sort of left wing and anti-bolshevik at the same time so it was the peasants the Ukrainian peasants were in favor of land redistribution they were you know they were had very radical revolutionary slogans and they were extremely anti-bolshevik as well and the memory of this rebellion which led to a period of terrible chaos in Ukraine I think the city of Kiev changed hands something like 12 times in 1919 and and and at one point the the the that allowed the white armies to come back the polish army came back but their memory of this chaos and the memory of the fear that it caused was something that stayed with the Bolsheviks for a long time so much so that they continued to write about it and I think Trotsky spoke about the terrible lesson of 1918 and 1919 and years later Stalin would refer back to this this period of chaos and they were afraid of both of the power of Ukrainian I have to be careful how I used the word nationalism because it was more than it wasn't just nationalism in the modern sense but that the Ukrainian national movement the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty the idea that it should be a separate country that would challenge Bolshevism it would present an alternative political model and they were afraid of that and they were afraid of Ukrainian peasantry whom they suspected of being anti-bolshevik and they were probably right and so with this this constant fear that it would happen again was something that's with the Bolsheviks and again that's you can see it in memoirs and archives and so on and when Stalin conducted collectivization in 1929 even before he did it there was a lot of good deal of fear how where the Ukrainians gonna react we need to there needs to be special attention paid to Ukraine and then of course the reaction was as he expected an enormous pushback in Ukraine there was armed rebellion people as anticipated went to their barns they got there the guns they'd stored there from the Civil War and they got them out and they started shooting at coma Tsar's and this this spectre of chaos in Ukraine and rebellion in Ukraine was at the forefront of Stalin's mind in his imagination and this was what he wanted to stop and in the in the it kind of height of the food crisis in 1929 he saw that this was the opportunity to do it and it's important to note that the famine was half the story the famine was as I said it was orchestrated there were teams of people who went into people's food away but at the same time he also conducted a kind of mass arrest and series of purges of the Ukrainian national inteligencia so there was the famine and then at the same time they got rid of the Ukrainian artists writers curators history professors and also Ukrainian Communist Party were thoroughly purged also in 1933 and continuing to 1934 and this kind of two-pronged movement was designed to eliminate this problem of Ukraine this idea of Ukraine as a as a competitor for the Bolsheviks I think it's very useful you've unpicked it like that because I think many people may here may have got on the back of their minds that grim phrase of Stalin's the liquidation of the kulaks as a class and it's easy to conflate that with the mass famine and what you're they happen together I mean so the the elimination of the kulaks and the attack on the peasantry did pave the way for what happened in Ukraine and it built up the the kind of anger and animus and the it was part of the propaganda that was needed to convince people remember Salah had to convince people to go into peasant houses and confiscate food and the background this hysteria about the kulaks and the and the peasants who are trying to undo the revolution and the enemies that the people and the enemies of the state and all that that was a that's an important background to the story that's part of why it happened but you're right it's a it's a it's a slightly separate story from the set of decisions that were taken inside Ukraine I was giving a talk the other day about this at a school and what her hand went up and someone said why didn't they call the police which is in a way an absurd question but it is interesting to think what must have been going through the minds of the Ukrainian communists and the Ukrainian NKVD because the people they were starving would have been you know fellow Ukrainians fellow subject to the Soviet Union but also possibly family members people you know there would be impersonal connections there and you I think you explained very well in the book this sort of tremendous sense of fear and divided loyalty that gripped the Ukrainian Communist Party so the Ukrainian Communist Party knew what was happening and the leadership knew and they they of course read the reports from the regions you know certainly certainly by in 1931 and 1932 they were raising the alarm they began asking Moscow for food and above all they began saying why because the vent one of the regions the fan that originally began because if not just because of chaos but also grain requisitions so they asked Stalin could he stop could he lower the rate of grain requisition in Ukraine and there is again in the spring of 1932 many of the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party begin writing to Stalin you know you know a terrible thing is coming disaster is heading our way can you make it stop and stones reaction was to treat them with suspicion and he wrote all kinds of angry letters to coggan ovitch and to his other allies saying you know these terrible Ukrainian communists you know do we really trust them you know I'm not I'm not sure they're really loyal and he had terrible suspicions about the Ukrainian economy his party being loyal and actually the Ukrainian Communist Party were again among the victims of this 1933-34 purge as well so so it was a you know him you know his his his attack was very focused on them there was a point at which in 3334 they became kind of cowed and they and they you know they they they understood that there would be no famine relief and that they had you know they had no choice to but to go along there one of them very spectacular ously killed himself I mean so there were people who who tried to prevent it and felt they couldn't and and committed suicide there were a couple of people so but they but the the drama inside the party was it was great and afterwards it didn't improve I mean I think most of the Ukrainian communists who weren't arrested in 1934 with an arrest in 1937 there's like only a couple of exceptions I mean by the end of the decade the whole party had been to people who were more reliably Stalinist I mean it's important to understand that the the situation of the police is a little bit different so the the Soviet secret police were were mixed they were not they would not all have been ethnic so-called ethnic Ukrainians and the activist brigades that went from house to house were also mixed and they had some some of them would have been police some of them would have been NKVD and sort of OGP use they then were some of them were activists from Russia some of them were activists from the cities and some of them were local so they were there were these local brigades that that actually carried out the famine one of the great controversies in a sense an artificial one is the question of whether the whether this was genocide or not and again it's one of the sort of rebuttals which is a little bit familiar for those of us you look at the Turkish Armenian thing but something you get quite often from from people on the sort of rotten Russia Russian side is to say yes this was terrible but it's it's wrong to call it genocide it wasn't was it wasn't genocide just the Turks a lot of Armenians got killed but it was a very tough time very confusing it wasn't genocide but I think you unpick very neatly in the book the the history of the term genocide in the way both in always simple taneous Lee both applies and doesn't apply yes I mean ironically the term genocide was invented by somebody who was born in what is today's Ukraine it was then Poland he Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who was from a town near l'viv and the the term genocide he wrote in his unpublished memoirs he wrote that the the his fascination with the whole subject and with this question of nationalists you know nations trying to destroy other nations of course came from where he grew up and and you know and his knowledge of the history of that region he he that the term wasn't used legally until the 1940s he wrote about it and spoke about it in the 1920s and and afterwards but it became it came into use during the sec world war and of course it became a legal term after the Second World War in the context of the UN Convention on genocide which was kind of it was a kind of after response to the Nuremberg massacres I mean master norburg trial that would be something else yes the Nuremberg trial when people felt the nerve until the questions and the UN Convention on genocide was supposed to solve some of these some of the problem of mass international murder legally Lemkin himself had a very clear definition the his idea of what genocide was was exactly what Stalin did in Ukraine in other words it was the attempt to destroy a nation its culture its identity its educational system its religion its churches and he actually it started at one point writing a kind of international history of genocide in which he also talked about colonialism and Spanish attempts to eradicate tribes and it was a very why he had a very wide idea of what he meant by that and he also wrote at one point a paper describing how the word genocide very much applied to Ukraine and he specifically talked about Stalin's assault on Ukraine as being in his mind the classic definition of the word genocide but as the word was translated into international law it got a little more complicated so the the the UN as it was debating this in the in the late 1940s of course a major participant in those debates was the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union was very keen that the definition of genocide in UN treaties and the understanding of genocide not be applicable to anything that the Soviet Union had ever done so the Soviet Union was very much involved in the creation of this legal term and one of the I mean one of the things they did was to eliminate the word political because the definition of genocide I'm now not gonna remember it by heart but it's something like people murder committed for religious ethnic cultural reasons and the Soviet Union took it and the original definition had the word political as well so that would of course included the kulaks it would have included all kinds of other mass murders by the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union was also keen that the word be very much attached to what the Germans did and that be interpreted basically interpreted as the genocide is equivalent of the Holocaust and because of that definition and that in Stalin's insistence on and the Soviet Union's insisted on that term it's become very difficult legally and internationally to use the term in a in a broader way in the way that Lemkin meant I really have no problem applying the term genocide to the Ukrainian famine but I I also you know I really feel that you know the point of my book was to establish the history and to establish exactly what happened and the word genocide I think is a legal term and not a historical term and I'd rather my initial instinct was to write the book and then let other people decide how to apply the term but I realized in the course of writing the book that part of this discussion of historiography had to be a description of what what is genocide and does the it does the famine meet the definition so as I said my conclusion was I mean it I wind up having to write about it but that it does meet the definition as Len can imagine it and I think as we all kind of intuitively imagine and we think of genocide as murdering people not for something that they've done you know but for who they are and the Ukrainian famine was an attempt to murder people because they were Ukrainian because they were in the way of Stalin's plans because they were an ethnic and political group that was that was a problem for the Bolsheviks and so in that sense I mean intuitively it fits it gets more difficult to apply the term strictly legally but that is again to do it the way that was the term was written good we've had about half an hour we've got about 25 minutes to go and I'd be very keen to get some questions from the audience but before we let me just ask hands up everybody here who is Ukrainian or how's Ukrainian connections okay you've all got by the book that's very good we've got a kind of 50 percent Ukraine Ukrainian audio all the audience but I also see some other faces here from countries which also experience Stalinist terror in different different ways in different different times say thank you I should have said the beginning thank you all very much for coming so if you want to ask questions I think we've got a microphone here and there and lots of questions I'm sorry I'm gonna what I'm going to do is I'm going to work my way felling methodically from this side of the room to that side of the room so let's start off with the gum hands yeah there's a gentleman the front row first of all kind of my finger Tim please stand up sir and can you introduce yourself and then second gentleman who's there three rows back he'll come next yes and I'm Dennis Agron Ukranians I'm in the 50% of the audience that is from Ukraine I'm also a Chancellor Kaya interest by trades and what they won't ask you about it may take you more than two seconds to think about that question too but have you ever thought about the impact of which is the famine was oppression in general by different states on the mental health of the population yes well well while anis is turning her extensive thoughts on that into a fairly short answer might flow to the gentleman behind you stand up sir so the lady can see thank you and then after that the gentleman behind you again thank you Michael Elmer in the years of the Cold War particularly in the 50s and 60s there was a program of Russian assassination of Ukrainians and the West any greys some of that perhaps was for reasons because they were generally opposed to Russian imperialism a Heastie communism is there any correlation between the victims and the degree to which they were trying to make known the facts of the famine great and then you just passed my friend behind you two gentlemen spectacles that hello my name is Martin Pospisil I come from the Czech Republic my wife is from Ukraine and her grandparents actually survived the famine and the interesting thing was that for for many decades they didn't even know they went through for me because of the Soviet propaganda my question well first of all thank you very much for for this can thank you also to to all the you know efforts that you put into understanding my region I I really appreciate that my question is you know you at the beginning you described you know all the sources that you are that you went through that you were able to access Kiev archives you know of course you were not able to access the Russian archives so my question to you because many of them are still closed my question to you would be to what extent you think your book might still be incomplete or our understanding of the of what happened was incomplete and what would be the the key questions you would want to have answered well thank you I've said you'll love these panels these are cracking questions thanks very much the standard we have to start answering them are gonna forget that case the first one is about I'll actually start with the last one because it it's actually not true that we don't have access to Russian archives I'm I worked a lot in Russian archives in the 1990s in Moscow and other people did too and this the the the archival record of Stalin's decision-making which was in Moscow but would have been there would have been echoes of it and repeats of it and other archives I think is established I mean it's not those were those are records that were found and you know 20 years ago so I don't think that in in you know there could be a few things missing there could be Stalin some personal documents missing in which he writes a bit I actually don't think on this particular story this particular narrative that there's not much missing the the Russian archives are known they were examined a lot of people worked in them the closing of the archives is something that's happened more recently and even now a lot of Russian historians are still able to get into them even if foreign historians aren't we luckily microwave that microwave microfilm them all and took them to the Hoover Institution Micra we microwaved microfilm some of them not all yes there were there were some that were taken to Hoover but so I I don't think actually on that score there's problem in the and the Ukraine and by the way the Ukrainian archives are among the most easy to use and accessible in Europe you can you can sort of walk in with you barely need an ID to use them I mean it's a remarkably open archival system so and and remember that they have all of their party records and their party records include Moscow party records and so on so that there's really actually my problem was never with this book was never lack of information there was actually always way too much the assassinations the nineteen-fifties in 60s I don't know the answer to that you know the the Soviet Union you know what was bothered by all kinds of people and I don't know that the famine was a particular was a particularly I mean generally speaking people who kept records of the Soviet Union or were interested in Soviet history had problems with the Soviet authorities all the way through and that included with emigration and not immigrants but I don't know whether there was a specific anything specifically connected to the famine um the story about that the question about child psychiatry and of course this is a huge question and people have thought about this in the context of the Holocaust they've thought about it in the context of all kinds of other mass murders and terrible political events and the answer is of course it affects people and of course it affects subsequent generations you know Ukrainians themselves have often you know sought to understand you know how did the famine shape our mentality as a nation I mean did it mean that does it explain you know there's a there's a there's a kind of a political but there's a there's a very you know to this day in Ukraine there's always been a feeling that you know the state if you work for the state or state institutions that's something else you know the real Ukraine is somewhere in the villages in our apartments in our cities and Ukrainians are fantastically good at organizing what we now call civil society you know they're they go to organizing themselves away from an apart from the state but this feeling that government authority is that the state is somehow something alien problematic and therefore corrupt is something that I think probably dates back to that era sorry you want to say something no I just didn't say we need to answer these brilliant questions more briefly if I'm gonna get all of it okay well then well yes the ideal answer hands up over there okay the lady in the front in the pair blue shirt is next and then the gentleman in the middle understand absolutely thanks Thank You Ursula wooly UCL and the Ukrainian Institute you spoke very briefly at the beginning of the session about the involvement of Key West and foreign correspondents in covering the story managing the story at the time of the famine can you tell us a bit more about that process and the lovely story in the book of John Hughes's governess his son and how he was and let's just have the gentleman there in the middle if you stand up sir Tony Palmer I have an observation and two footnotes first I want to thank you for an absolutely astonishingly wonderful book nobody said that it is this is you must all read it go by it and read it you're hereby absolved from my thing about only one question not least because it helps us understand what is happening in the Ukraine today that's the really important value of the book my observation is that the reasons which are not important I'm a visiting professor at a university in Western Ukraine looks my inaugural lecture oddly enough was in Lewis at the University to which the lady referred and I this is a few years ago now but not that long ago I know I'm going to be brief I gave the lecture about Lemkin who you've cited but also larger packed who was the other really remarkable lawyer coming from that area who coined the phrase crimes against humanity as you know and I asked this very distinguished group of academics at my inaugural lecture who has heard of Lemkin this is in l'viv who has heard of Lemkin or lauter pact not a single hand went up so my question is you cite endless contemporary sources in your book quite rightly so but don't you think that the Ukrainians today are completely unaware of the significance of what happened or even the fact that it did happen yes yes musical footnotes first is I'm sure you're aware that the reason that Stravinsky left Russia was that he had estates in western Ukraine and when he was in Paris he vowed that he would never go back as a result of the of the uprising secondly last I once asked Robert Conquest who I knew where did you get the phrase the harvest of sorrow and he looked at me and he said would you as a musician or part-time musician you should know this that it was the title of the very first song that Rachmaninoff ever wrote and he thought Rachmaninoff would appreciate the irony of that very good well thank you I don't regret giving you the extra time but please dad that didn't set a precedent two very good points I'm first of all please blast watered around seeing plays Gareth Jones and secondly the Ukrainian one of the absences is perhaps the there are no Lemkin streets were loud enough statues that where perhaps there should be so the there there were two very well one of them was famous at the time and one of them is more famous now but there were two journalists who one wrote about the famine and one didn't in Ukraine in the 1930s and their interactions and their story is a central part of a chapter in the book which talks precisely about Western reactions and Western understanding one of what went on and the one who has now become and it's very interesting actually how their historical reputations have shifted one of them was extremely famous at the time and this was famously Walter Durante who was the New York Times correspondent in Moscow he was kind of the Dean of the Moscow press corps he is his articles were famous all over the world and particularly New York he was so influential that Roosevelt sought to meet with him and speak to him he was he was really for for for the number of years he was there it was it was nearly a decade that he was there he was really the main interpreter of the Soviet Union to Americans and so he was really it's hard to underestimate how important he was and one of the favors he did for the regime in exchange for being allowed to live there for having best access of anybody I by the way people have looked for evidence that he was some kind of had some arrangement the secret police nobody has found but I don't I'm not even sure that would have been necessary but simply for for the for the for being able to stay there and do his job he suppressed that very actively suppressed the story of the famine he wrote a very famous piece that's what the title was Russians are hungry but not starving so he may have felt in order to hold up his own reporting he needed to make sure that nobody unfund he'd gotten that gotten collectivization wrong the other journalist was Gareth Jones who was indeed the grandson of this is a complicated one but John Hughes was a Welsh industrialist who founded the city which is now known as Donetsk and used to be known as Hugh silica okay and his nanny was the mother of Gareth Jones who was a young man who grew up in Wales but did Russian and German at Cambridge had some connection to Lloyd George he was Lord George's secretary after his retirement and went to Moscow in 1933 as a I think he got his visa on the basis that he was lloyd George's secretary but actually he went because he wanted to write and did the amazingly brave thing of getting a agreement from the Russian Foreign Ministry to go to har keep which was in the capital of Ukraine and took the train from Moscow to Harkey and actually got off the train about a hundred miles north of Kharkiv and walked and he walked along the train tracks and that meant that he was walking through the actually the worst-hit part of Ukraine because the worst the famine was the worst in Kharkiv and Kiev provinces the worst hit part of Ukraine in the middle of the famine this is in sort of March 1933 and he he was eventually picked up by the Soviet secret police who took him to his hotel he took him to his hotel in Kharkiv but he he took notes he kept a very extensive notebook and the notebooks are now published and then he left the Soviet Union wrote several articles and actually held a press conference in Berlin in which he in which he said there's enormous famine happening in Ukraine it's a terrible disaster in a tragedy Durante's durante wrote a piece directly in response to this saying it's all very well for this young Welshman to you know he's very enthusiastic and it's nice that he's gone to the trouble of learning Russian but actually he's missed the story and he's wrong and of course Durante was then the famous you know establishment journalist and Gareth Jones was you know 28-year old Welshman and Sir Durant he won that argument in the years since Gareth Jones is Gareth Jones actually died a couple of years after that in a very strange accident he was in Mongolia where he was doing further reporting but but his his story has been revitalized and remembered and there's a you know there are Gareth Jones documentaries and his notebooks have been published and he his his star has risen and his reputation is now as this really extraordinary young crusading journalist who wrote these very passionate articles and made this very passionate - this passionate press conference in Berlin about the feminine he actually has a kind of status even inside Ukraine as somebody who's remembered for telling the story so that's that's the story of the Western press I mean there's there's more to the story in the book as well but those are the two most interesting most interesting journalists this don't know why isn't limpkin better known in Ukraine there was actually a book on on Lemkin and latter part that was written which you probably know by Philippe Sanz it was published last year which was got lots of attention I think won the Booker Prize not the Booker Prize the Samuel Johnson Prize as it then was so the and actually the author of that book has said that he's he's now doing some kind of program promoting the memory of Lemkin inside Ukraine but I would you know one interesting thing about Lumpkin is his name wasn't just lost in Ukraine his name was sort of lost more generally he wasn't well-known in Poland which is where he's from and he was a he was he had some Polish government jobs and he wrote and spoke in Polish also until you know within the last decade and so the revival of Lemkin and his memory and what was the history of the idea of I think is something that started here and is now moving to Ukraine so it may be that that changes in the next decade so you've got time for a couple questions a gentleman at the back there and a couple questions down here quickfire questions please yeah it's a very simple question my name is Philip burrow I have no connection to Ukraine my question is let's say if I was a farmer in Ukraine at that time and if I did not resist collectivization so in other terms if I join the collective farm would I save my life and that of my family the answer is it depends it's certainly one of the effects of the famine after it was finished was that everybody joined the collective farms I mean that was the the famine ended any any remaining resistance and certainly there were people who joined the collective farms hoping to save themselves however the famine wasn't was was wasn't caused by you know just by the process of collectivization it was also these the confiscation of food and the confiscation of food did happen to people who lived on who are part of collective farms as well because this was part of a there was a requisitioning process you know people were meant to give over their food to the state and you would not necessarily save yourself of course that was you know the desire to save yourself was of course why people collaborated with the activist teams and and with collectivization process and so some people tried but known the answer is no not necessarily and the food shortages were so great and so widespread that they actually effected collective farm bosses and collective farm managers and all kinds of people who were collaborating in some ways I'm Nicola Kravitz and one of the things you mention in your book is that the famine shows that Ukraine has a separate history to you that Russia and I was you also mentioned that executed Renaissance and I was wondering would it be right to say that there are sort of the Ukrainian intelligencia of the 1930s was fundamentally different from the Russian intelligentsia because it was based on sort of a willing my desire to understand Ukraine better so is it there for place to the intelligence of Poland Czechoslovakia of that period therefore highlighting a father difference it's that of Russia and Ukraine let's hope that we'll get a whole bunch and then stops it behind all right but I'll forget those I'll remember yes good done bit risky ma'am you've talked about pushback from the Soviet government and more recently from Russia which is understandable in some sense politically but there also seems to be some pushback from Western Akademi as represented let's say by the by the exchange you had with Sheila Fitzpatrick I mean leaving aside personalities do you have any understanding of why there continues to be some pushback on the part of Western ed Kadima okay two quick questions two quick houses Sheila Fitzpatrick who is actually I think a great historian in a lot of ways she's a she has a tremendous you know it has is compiled amazing material and so on Sheila photographer Ridge '''l book on peasantry very much downplayed the idea that there was an intentional famine and she's argued against it for many years and she's as you know as part of a revisionist this is somebody by the way who reviewed my book in an odd way basically the review said well there's some very interesting book too bad about an apple Valmet something like that was but but she you know this is where the revision of school of history was sought for a long time to portray Stalinism as something normal in other words it's a different form of modernization it's a mistake - it's a mistake to use the term to tell it arianism to talk about it there were multiple centers of power which is actually not entirely untrue but they they and they've had a lot of trouble since the soviet archives were published because these books were all published in the before the archives were available and some of them not all of them have had trouble adjusting to the archives which have tended to underline the idea that it was a totalitarian country it wasn't normal and it wasn't a normal kind of modernization so I I looked on her that piece of her review which seemed kind of grudging I thought that was a you know that was a you know that trying to hold up the value of her previous work she wrote a book about Stalin's peasants which didn't talk about the famine the refers the Guardian they did publish my letter a week later pointing out about her if he was no I the question on the intelligentsia so you know yes of course the Ukrainian intelligence he was different from the Russian intelligence he I mean in that you know it had a it had different background and a different you know different life experience and people who were I mean to say even in the 1920s and 30s that your Ukrainian and to speak and use Ukrainian was a gesture of a certain kind I mean you had you would have had to be somebody who would have actively resisted Russification as because russification was a big part of Zara's culture and the Bolsheviks again wanted to Russa faik reign so so yes there was a different mentality to being a Ukrainian to lecture in the 20s and 30s just like there is now I mean there's also a different mentality to being polish or you know Lithuanian or British so I I'm I don't know that i don't know i wouldn't i wouldn't say that ukrainians and russians are somehow fundamentally different but if but of course the nature of you know what it meant to be ukrainian in the 20s you know and what it would have taken to read and write and publish in ukrainian meant that you had to be thinking differently from the way people were thinking in moscow so so yeah it was a different it was another interesting related question about the difficulty that the russian liberal intelligentsia sometimes has in equating their liberal mindedness with an acceptance that ukraine's the country but that's perhaps of questions i mean that's that's a problem that persists to this day the the i mean the and you can see it again and this in this period as well i mean one of the again one of the tragedies of the civil war era is that the the russian liberals and the right armies never sought to make common cause with the ukrainians because had they done so had they and the ukrainians or the poles but had they done so had they agreed to the breakup of the empire they might have been able to defeat the Bolsheviks together but that those divisions they were never able to understand that these were separate countries now we start a few minutes late and we will finish even fewer a small number and slay there was a lady there with what had I think you're the last question about go ahead hold the mic please introduce yourself thank you I'm sorry eraser Roy I am from Ukraine well I was born in Ukraine I've been living in this country for the last 21 yeah my parents and grandparents I survived all of them more of I mean I just wanted to ask you very sort of to extend personal question have you been to Kiev to Bukovina where a lot of people buried there to the cemetery to them not recently but but yes it's incredible yes and thank you very much for your book it's really exciting and very interesting and very easy reading and I also wanted to use this microphone and to advise the people in this auditorium to read the book of James Mays the people of truth I noticed that you used one of his first James mace is another interesting character in this historiography story because James mace was an American academic who worked with Robert conquest and who did an enormous amount of research he's a kind of expert on Ukraine before it was fashionable and helped Bob conquest write a harvest of sorrow right well thank you very much on that note I just have a one final thing I want to do is on hands up everyone who's already bought Ann's book right well that is no excuse for not buying and another copy you now know how good it is and you must give it as ideal for sorts of presents and things back and hands of everybody who hasn't bought a book right well then you know what you have to do and I've just given a very nice pen she'll be signing copies outside please join me you

Channel: Ukrainian Institute London

Views: 18,904

Rating: 4.6319017 out of 5

Keywords: Ukrainian, Institute, London, Anne Applebaum, Edward Lucas, EBRD

Id: 6OfvyLzKWTk

Length: 56min 55sec (3415 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2017