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Action Ukraine Report

"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR"
An International Newsletter
In-Depth Ukrainian News, Analysis, and Commentary

"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

THE WRITINGS AND LEGACY OF PROFESSOR JAMES MACE
To take time to remember is not to forget

February 18, 1952 - Muskogee, Oklahoma
May 3, 2004 - Kyiv, Ukraine

"I am certain that our society will duly honor the contribution
made by US citizen and Professor James Mace, to the making
of our independent Ukraine." [article three]

"I would hope that more fortunate historians than I in the twenty-first
century write about the happy history of an independent and affluent
Ukraine, about its economic progress, and about how things continue
to get better or its people." Prof. James Mace 1998 [article four]

"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR" - Number 476
E. Morgan Williams, Publisher and Editor
morganw@patriot.net, ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net
Washington, D.C. and Kyiv, Ukraine, TUESDAY, May 3, 2005

------INDEX OF ARTICLES------
"Major International News Headlines and Articles"

1. "THE JOYS OF LIFE"
By Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #26
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 16 September 2003

2. "A LESSON IN GENOCIDE"
Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #28
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 30 September 2003

3. "JAMES MACE IS FIFTY"
He had the Courage to Understand and Tell the Truth
About the Great Manmade Famine
I am certain that our society will duly honor the contribution made
by US citizen and Professor James Mace, to the making of our
independent Ukraine.
By Professor Stanislav Kulchytsky, Ph. D.
The Day Weekly Digest in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 19, 2002

4. "UKRAINE, A LAND IN BLOOD"
Totalitarianism, Famine and Genocide
"I would hope that more fortunate historians than I in the twenty-first
century write about the happy history of an independent and affluent
Ukraine, about its economic progress, and about how things continue
to get better or its people."
By James MACE, Columnist
The Day Weekly Digest in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, November 24, 1998

5. "2004 YEAR OF YUSHCHENKO"
COMMENTARY: By James E. Mace
Professor, historian, journalist living in Kyiv, Ukraine
Published by "UKRAINE REPORT-2004," Number 8
www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service (ARTUIS)
Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, January 16, 2004

6. HOW CAN YUSHCHENKO WIN THE PRESIDENCY?
----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: politics@infoukes.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: [politics] How can Yushchenko win the Presidency?

7. DON'T THE MUKACHEVE EVENTS REAFFIRM YOUR BELIEF
IN UKRAINIAN DEMOCRACY?
----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: E. Morgan Williams mwilliams@patriot.net
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:24 AM
Subject: quick takes

8. TRAGIC NEWS
----- Original Message -----
From: "gskl" gskl@voliacable.com
To: morganw@patriot.net
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 10:26 AM
Subject: tragic news

9. JAMES MACE HAS UNEXPECTEDLY DIED TODAY
----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: history@infoukes.com
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: [history] Looking for information

10. PLEASE PASS ON TO JAMES' WIFE MY DEEPEST CONDOLENCES
----- Original Message -----
From: "Orysia Tracz" orysia_tracz@hotmail.com
To: history@infoukes.com
Cc: jmace2003@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 3:15 PM
Subject: [history] James

11. A SAD DAY IN UKRAINIAN STUDIES
----- Original Message -----
From: Dominique Arel darel@uottawa.ca
To: Recipient List Suppressed:
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 7:10 PM
Subject: UKL233 (RIP-James Mace)

12 UNTIMELY DEATH OF JAMES MACE CAME AS A DEEP SHOCK TO ME
----- Original Message -----
From: Gleasonb1@aol.com
To: ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: UR-04 #72 May 4 Dr. James E. Mace Dies in Kyiv,
Ukraine (1952-2004); Lead...

13. LEADING SCHOLAR AND WRITER, DR. JAMES E. MACE, DIES IN
KYIV, UKRAINE, STUDIED AND WROTE ABOUT THE 1932-33
GENOCIDAL FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE
By E. Morgan Williams, Publisher and Editor
THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 4, 2004

14. VICTOR YUSHCHENKO SAYS DEATH OF JAMES MACE A
GREAT LOSS, HE SPOKE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE COMMUNISTS
AND THE 1932-33 FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE
"His life became an example of truth and love that Ukraine will not forget."
"Our Ukraine" Press, www.razom.org.ua, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wed, May 5, 2004

15. DR. JAMES E. MACE MEMORIAL HOLODOMOR FUND
Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA)
Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
=============================================================
1. "THE JOYS OF LIFE"

By Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #26
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, 16 September 2003

Our paper is celebrating its seventh birthday with its fifth photography
exhibition on September 20 through October 5 at the House of Artists
in Lviv Square, a circumstance that allows one to indulge in reflection.

Life has its vicissitudes, and this writer, when being trained as a
historian of East Europe and Ukraine, never dreamed that he would live
here, speak a language other than English at home with his wife, teach
political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, or become involved in
journalism. Yet, in the last decade these are the things that have come
to define my life, and I have to admit that fate (more precisely, God)
has been very good to me.

Even before coming here, when it became clear that Ukraine was in the
process of becoming independent, I shocked some people in the emigration
when I said at one conference that the Ukrainian cause they had so long
fought for was dead. It had been supplanted by a real country, which would
have a host of problems to face. Nobody quite understood the precise nature
of those problems at the time, but it was already obvious that the state and
society here would have to face problems that would in turn create a
situation fundamentally different from what anyone could have expected at
the time.

I have written about those problems more than once, but in the decade I
have lived here I have seen tremendous changes, some for the better, and
some not. I still remember the gray Khreshchatyk of the Soviet era, when it
seemed like they rolled up the sidewalks at sunset, the morning spectacle
of the changing of the guard at the former Lenin Museum in all its goose-
stepping glory, and the Brobdingnagian Lenin glowering down on
Lilliputian workers as he dominated what was then October Revolution
Square.

Now this has all changed: Khreshchatyk has been completely redone, lit by
neon advertising signs, spiced with stores and diversions most locals can
ill afford, and open to those with the energy and money to take advantage of
it until the wee hours. The Lenin Museum has become the Ukrainian House.

One can stop off for a bite at McDonald's, after one strolls past the
redesigned Independence Square where Lenin and his proletarian masses
have been replaced by a patina-green woman clad in something made to
look like gold.

When I teach my students, I often have to explain to them things about
Leninism and Soviet realities that their parents took for granted. The young
simply do not know the world their parents grew up in, and perhaps that in
itself is a sign of progress. There are things that they have to know in
order to understand the problems inherited from a world that is truly gone
with the wind, but they now have the opportunity of trying to understand it
without being distorted by it.

Progress is, of course, a relative concept, and nowhere is this truer than
in contemporary Ukraine, a country still struggling to find its feet, but
which seems to be making its way slowly but surely.

There is no time I feel this more intensely than with my students. The
Kyiv-Mohyla Academy had what ironically turned out to be the good fortune
of being closed down in the early nineteenth century and revived after
independence. This meant it could do without the dead weight of such
ideologically driven subjects as scientific communism and political economy,
which still cripple the intellectual processes in so many other universities
from the Soviet period where the Department of Political Science was
founded "on the basis of" the Department of Scientific Communism and
staffed with many of the same people who all too often continue to do things
as closely as possible to the way they always did.

Having put two step-daughters through other universities, I can contrast and
compare the cronyism, favoritism, and outright corruption that I have often
seen elsewhere with what I see where I have been privileged to teach. My
students are indeed the best and the brightest, some merely ambitious, but
many truly idealistic and determined to make this country a better place for
themselves and their posterity.

My colleagues and I try our best to arm them for the uphill struggle they
will inevitably face with the closest we can come, given the current
realities here, to a Western liberal arts education. And where I see what
some of my former students are now doing, I have no doubt see that we
are succeeding. Even if pride is one of the seven deadly sins, I cannot
help it when I see what they do at least in part armed with what we who
have taught them have been able to give them.

I am hard put to say what has given me more joy, the students I teach or
this newspaper, which provides me an intellectual home shared with some
of the best journalists and minds in Ukraine. It has given me friends for
life and colleagues I deeply respect. It has given me a forum where I can
reach thousands every week and through which I can also play my own
part in trying to make things better by attempting to add my own under-
standing from what at times seems a different planet to that of those
who understand things I probably never will, if only because I was not
born here.

Everyone sees the problems and limitations of this nation, which often
seems to be groping half blindly toward what remains for most an
incompletely understood Europe, as unknown and alluring as Khvyliovy's
beautiful commune on the far side of the hill. Yet we all do what we can.
What we at this newspaper are doing is as a rule very good and from
time to time truly outstanding. Again, I hope the Good Lord will forgive
me my pride.

Actually, I can say without exaggeration that I owe this newspaper my life.
Last winter I went through a series of operations and lay for a month in
intensive care. Here they call it reanimation, which tends to suggest that
anyone brought there is already dead and if anybody comes out other than
feet first, it constitutes a major victory.

In any case, my wife likes to remind me that thanks to my coworkers I have
no American blood left: it is now about 60% Ukrainian, 20% Russian, and
20% Jewish. I must admit that trying to be an intellectual without at least
some Jewish blood has always been something of a handicap, one that
I have now been able to overcome.

My greatest joy, of course, remains my Ukrainian wife, but on this topic I
can only defer to the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue
Masaryk, who took his wife's maiden name as his own middle name and
then bequeathed it to their son, Jan Garrigue Masaryk. "I love my wife very
much," he once said, "but I don't make a big deal out of it in public." -30-
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/260944
=============================================================
2. "A LESSON IN GENOCIDE"

Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #28,
Tuesday, 30 September 2003

As our permanent readers likely remember, our newspaper has repeatedly
published articles on the Ukrainian people's greatest tragedy, the Holodomor
or Manmade Famine of 1932-1933. This year alone we have initiated two
actions of The Day dealing with various aspects of this problem.

First was the Candle in the Window action, when we called upon all
Ukrainians to light a candle in their window on the Day of Memory of the
victims of the Manmade Famine and Political Repressions (the fourth
Saturday in November), thereby expressing their sorrow for millions of
their deceased compatriots. The Day published this call in January 2003,
and last week we reminded our readers of this action.

Another was in support of the campaign to revoke the Pulitzer Prize of
Walter Duranty, a New York Times journalist who in 1930s misled the world
with his mendacious articles on the situation in Ukraine, claiming that
there were no famine there.

On July 15 The Day carried an article by Professor James Mace, one of the
world's most prominent experts on Ukrainian Famine, with an in-depth review
of Duranty and his antipode Gareth Jones, a journalist who told the West the
truth about the Famine, and a cut-out postcard with which our readers could
contact the Pulitzer Committee to urge it to revoke Duranty's prize.

Simultaneously we sent an email to the Pulitzer Committee members and
to New York Times, calling on them to recall the prize. Unfortunately, we
never got any response from our addressees, nor much support from our
colleagues, Ukrainian journalists working for other publications.

Was the Famine genocide? Who is to blame for what happened to
Ukrainians? How can we overcome the consequences of the tragedy,
which are still felt? These are the questions Prof. Mace has attempted
to answer in his new article, which we offer readers today.

FIRST BREAD TO THE STATE

A draft resolution introduced in the United States Senate commemorating the
Holodomor Famine of 1933 has encountered vigorous opposition from Russian
diplomats in Washington, reports Radio Liberty. The resolution introduced by
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, Co-Chairman, U.S. Helsinki
Commission, on July 28, 2003, among other things would put the Senate on
record as recognizing that the Manmade Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine and
then the predominantly Ukrainian Kuban constituted an act of genocide as
defined by the United Nations Convention and support the efforts of the
government and Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to gain greater recognition of
this tragedy.

A separate resolution with different language but much to the same
effect has also been introduced in the US House of Representatives. Both
resolutions are attracting support in Congress, and the Ukrainian-American
community is actively lobbying for them.

The US Commission on the Ukraine Famine - a hybrid commission composed
of members of both Houses of Congress, representatives of the president, the
American public at large, and of which this writer was executive director -
earlier found that the Holodomor did indeed constitute an act of genocide,
but it did not put any other branch of the US government on record, although
there have been Congressional resolutions and presidential proclamations to
that effect.

According to the Radio Liberty report, the press secretary of the Russian
Embassy to the United States has taken a different sharply different view:
"The policy of collectivization in famine in Ukraine in the thirties in no
sense falls under the definition of genocide. The Russian side understands
one thing: we do not agree with this formulation that the situation in the
Soviet Union in the thirties, famine in Ukraine, and the processes that took
place in the period of collectivization and with the treatment of all these
events as genocide."

At the request of Radio Liberty, the press-secretary of the Russian Embassy
Yevhen Khoryshko said: "We categorically disagree with such an assessment
of the famine that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s. Many aspects of the
implementation of Soviet policies under Stalin's leadership in those years
were tragic for many peoples of the USSR, not only for Ukrainians, but also
for Russians, Estonians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, and many
others."

There is indeed a case to be made that the Baltic nations, Chechens, and
Crimean Tatars also were victims of genocide. What happened to Russians
and Kazakhs was a bit different, but their sufferings are also a matter of
record. Here the reader can be referred to an article, "Genocide in the
USSR" in the collection, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, edited
by Israel Charny and published in London in 1988. The author of that article
was I.

Now there are efforts to introduce something similar to the Campbell
resolution in the United Nations, and similar opposition from Russian
diplomats is only to be expected. This is unfortunate for both the
Ukrainians and the Russians, for if our Russian friends take upon them-
selves the task of defending Stalin, who was not Russian but used things
Russian for his own purposes, they also inevitably take upon themselves
blame for the things of which he was demonstrably guilty.

Ukrainians and Russians have their own histories, even when they were
associated in the same state, and the best path to enduring friendship
between them would seem to be an attempt to analyze those similarities
and differences.

Earlier, in a somewhat more measured statement, Russian Ambassador
to Ukraine Viktor Chernomyrdin stated that Russia would not apologize to
Ukraine for the famine but made no comment on whether it had or had not
constituted act of genocide by the Stalinist regime.

While some Ukrainians, especially in the emigration, have found his
statement objectionable (and it did betray a certain measure of
insensitivity), nobody is asking for a Russian apology, because the Soviet
Union was not strictly speaking a Russian state.

It was in the process of becoming more Russian, inter alia, by becoming
less Ukrainian, which is, as we shall see, what genocide is all about, but
Russia is not the Soviet Union, and all of us can only welcome the
independence of Russia from Ukraine and vice versa. What needs to be
discussed here is why Ambassador Chernomyrdin was right while his
diplomatic colleagues in the United States are wrong.

In order to settle the controversy over whether the Ukrainian Holodomor
was genocide, two questions must be addressed: What is the definition of
genocide? Does what happened in Ukraine and the then fit this definition:

WHAT IS GENOCIDE?

The world came to adopt the idea of genocide as a crime against humanity
only when the character of Nazi German occupation policies became clear
during World War II. At the time, Winston Churchill called it a crime
without a name. However, there was a man who was ready to give it a name,
and he personally drafted both the international documents that defined
genocide as a crime that had always existed and that now became recognized
for what it is. His name was Raphael Lemkin, and in order to understand what
genocide is, the basic task is to determine what he had in mind and what he
persuaded the international community to adopt.

A Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin wrote and lobbied through the
United Nations two documents: UN General Security Resolution I:96 in 1946
and the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the
Crime of Genocide in 1948. The actual idea, however, is older: in 1933 he
proposed the idea that those who out of hatred for a group of people harmed
the members of that group be considered guilty of barbarism, that those who
destroyed the cultural treasures of such a group out of hatred for it be
considered guilty of vandalism, and that such persons be apprehended, tried,
and punished wherever they might be found.

The model of what he later called genocide and what he persuaded the
international community to agree to was modeled on what Hitler did to the
occupied peoples throughout Europe, to cripple them so that the German
nation would be relatively stronger and those conquered by it would be
relatively weaker regardless of how the war turned out.

The idea of recognizing genocide as a crime against humanity that had been
committed from the beginning of recorded time was not modeled on the
Holocaust, although the destruction of European Jewry might be termed
the greatest and most terrible genocide of all time, but on something
broader, something designed to simplify humanity by ridding it of those
who were different and leaving in their place those who were the same.

Since Lemkin recognized that the greatest attainment of the human
civilization shared by all were made possible by contributions made
possible through participation in a cultural collectivity, he saw the
destruction or forcible diminishment of such a collectivity as thereby
impoverishing humanity as a whole.

When the international community discussed this concept after World
War II, the representatives of the various nations who came together in the
newly formed United Nations discussed mainly how they had themselves
been victims of genocide and how what had been done to them never be
allowed to happen again.

Thus to determine if something is genocide, one must compare
an event not to the Holocaust, a unique blot upon the history of mankind,
but to what Hitler did to the occupied peoples as set out in the documents
defining genocide as a principle of eternal and unchanging universal law.

WHAT HAPPENED IN UKRAINE?

Genocide is basically understood as an attempt to destroy or permanently
cripple a human collectivity as such in order to criminally alter the
national character of a given area through means specified in the Genocide
Convention, such as killing people and deliberately creating conditions of
life calculated to make it impossible to live. There are other means
specified to achieve this goal but these are the most important in the
Ukrainian case.

Even in the 1980s, when all Western scholars had to work with was the
Soviet Ukrainian press and asking people who had fled Ukraine
what in particular they had run away from, it was clear that in 1932-33
there were in Ukraine simultaneous campaigns to starve people to death by
taking their food and to cripple their culture by banning its treasures and
suppressing those who bore and created them - the latter process being a
more extended one lasting from 1929 to 1939, from the suppression of
the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and blows against the Ukrainian
intelligentsia to the mass slaughter of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine during the Great Terror.

The general scheme of this process was outlined on the basis of the
official Soviet press by the late Hryhory Kostiuk in 1960. The Holodomor
clearly fit into that scheme.

For this reason, the US Commission of the Ukraine Famine found that
Ukrainians had been victims of genocide. This writer drafted that finding
and stands by it.

We now know much more than we could have then. Ukrainian historians in
Ukraine have had over a decade to work in the archives, and what remains
unknown is largely locked in closed archives in Moscow. Still, even those
archives are slowly opening, and our picture becomes more complete
with each new historical work.

My friend and colleague, Stanislav Kulchytsky, deserves perhaps the
greatest credit for first cracking open the door when he, at the time a
loyal soldier of the Communist Party, persuaded the leadership of what
was still Soviet Ukraine that so much was becoming known that something
had to be said on the official level.

He persuaded then CPU First Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky to
include in his address of December 25, 1987, an admission that there had
indeed been a famine in 1933 in some areas of Ukraine. Stanislav
Vladislavovych was ready with more articles, as cautious as the times
dictated, but the door began to open, at first a crack, and then more.

Ukraine's writers entered the fray in force. I later learned that Ivan Drach
had first publicly uttered the word Holodomor at a writer's congress in
1986, but only on February 18, 1988 - it turned out to be my birthday -
could Oleksa Musiyenko publish the word in Literaturna Ukrayina (Literary
Ukraine). Then the trickle became a flood. The Writers Union established a
commission to study 1933, and Volodymyr Maniak was named to compile
a people's book of memory.

Kulchytsky was commissioned to write the questions in Silski visti (Village
news) in a way intended to show how the Communist Party had tried to
save people and make the best of a bad situation, but the address
given for those to send their answers was Maniak's. 6000 people wrote
letters, and the result was a book, '33 Famine: People's Book of Memory,
the literary editor of which, my wife, can say more.

Literaturna Ukrayina announced the formation of an organizing committee
for an international symposium on the famine. The committee was first
headed by Oles Honchar, then by Ivan Drach. I was invited to Ukraine,
took part in organizing that symposium, and the efforts of those abroad
were reinforced and ultimately overshadowed by those here who began
to take up the task themselves. It turned out that the Central Committee
had ordered the Party historians to search the archives and was shocked
by what it had found.

I was invited to be present and say something when on January 26, 1990,
the Party admitted that there had been a famine and that it had been a crime
committed by Stalin and his associates. They ordered the documents be
published, and by the end of 1990 the first collection appeared, albeit as
an instant bibliographic rarity, because certain members of the Central
Committee forced the official press run to be reduced from the officially
announced 25,000 to a mere 1500.

The symposium that Drach, Maniak, and I organized, took place in September
1990. Then came the documents from the state archives. Ukrainian historians
began to peruse caches of documents that had been closed for decades.
Kulchytsky's student, Vasyl Marochko, traveled to every oblast to seek
documents. Yury Shapoval began to pore through the KGB documents on
repression and later the personal archives of Vyacheslav Molotov and
Lazar Kaganovich, who were personally commissioned to organize
the horrors that were committed in Ukraine and the Kuban. Ukrainian
historians in Ukraine began to reconstruct their nation's history
themselves.

On August 11, 1932, Stalin wrote a letter to Kaganovich that Ukraine could
be lost and had to be turned into the most inalienable Soviet republic.
There was obviously understood to be only one way to do this, to remove
from Soviet Ukraine the Ukrainian national content that the Communists
had been forced to allow into it in order to stabilize the situation a
decade earlier.

On October 22, Molotov and Kaganovich were named to take direct
control of the grain seizures in Ukraine and the Kuban. On November 18,
Molotov pushed through a resolution blacklisting collective farms (closing
down the store, taking everything away from it, and expelling the collective
farm leadership) along with fines in food of individual farmers who
"maliciously" did not have enough bread to take (seizing the potatoes,
beans, chickens, cow, etc.).

On December 14 Communist Party of Ukraine was blamed for not finding
grain that did not exist, because they had allegedly been penetrated by
nationalists and thus came under a reign of terror, and the following day
saw an order to end Ukrainization and close Ukrainian institutions outside
Ukraine wherever Ukrainians lived in other republics of the Soviet Union.

In January the denunciation of the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine
was made public, Pavel Postyshev was made Second Secretary but de
facto dictator, and a reign of terror against even the Communist
intelligentsia began. Ukraine was de-Ukrainized by force, as the peasantry,
whom Stalin considered the basic reserve of the national movement, was
literally decimated. We can argue about precisely how many millions died,
but that millions died is beyond dispute.

That they were denied some of their most precious cultural values and
the memory of their creators for decades is also undeniable. In 1928, a
survey of lending libraries was published, finding that the most read
Ukrainian authors after Shevchenko, of course, were Volodymyr
Vynnychenko and Mykola Khvyliovyi. In 1933 both were banned and
the orthography in which they had written was altered without asking
those who had used it.

WHO IS TO BLAME?

There are from time to time irresponsible voices who want an apology or
reparations from the Russians. Stalin was not a Russian, but he was not
very nice to his Georgian kin either. He did use things Russian as a glue
for an empire he built under the name of Soviet patriotism, but Soviet
patriotism was not the same thing as Russian nationalism and the Soviet
Union, although it had a tendency to become more Russian over time,
was never really a Russian state.

Those in Russia who point out that Russians also suffered are quite right,
although they suffered in order to build a Russocentric but by no means
truly Russian state. Historians do not like to be judges, but they are the
inevitable instruments of their peoples' becoming aware of who were
their parents and what they would like their children to become. Ukraine
has suffered its own agonies as part of its own history.

Those who recognize this are Ukraine's friends, but those who deny this
are simply denying Ukraine its own history and will never enjoy mutual
understanding with them. This should be held in mind by those who seek
to deny Ukraine's rightful claim to the recognition of its suffering.

There were, of course, uncounted Ukrainian Communists who participated
in the campaigns that deliberately caused the death of uncounted millions
of Ukrainian peasants and the flower of those who helped give their nation
expression, if only because the choice became one of doing what one was
told or suffering the fate of those condemned by the force or orders that
same from Moscow.

Can a collaborator be blamed for choosing collaboration over facing the
firing squad himself and risking his family? We cannot blame the Russians
for the fact that Molotov was Russian any more than we can blame
the Jews for the fact that Kaganovich was Jewish or the Georgians for the
fact that Stalin was Georgian.

We can only blame the system that in its various ways crippled many
peoples of the former Soviet Union and attempt to overcome all that is
evil and debilitating in the legacy all of those born here have been
burdened with.

We can only try to help all who have been damaged understand and
recover, each community in its own way, from the evil that will hopefully
never be allowed to return to nations and individuals well rid of it. Let
the Soviet myth of the enforced friendship of peoples be replaced by
the truth of voluntary recovery from the Soviet evil in friendship and
mutual understanding. -30-
=============================================================
3. "JAMES MACE IS FIFTY"
He had the Courage to Understand and Tell the Truth
About the Great Manmade Famine

I am certain that our society will duly honor the contribution made by US
citizen and Professor James Mace, to the making of our independent Ukraine.

By Stanislav Kulchytsky
The Day Weekly Digest in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 19, 2002

The photo published here usually precedes the articles by James Mace, The
Day's expert and professor at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. He now permanently
resides and works in Kyiv. Incidentally, he also edits the English-language
Day. But this time this is not the photo of an author. It illustrates an
article on James Mace who turned fifty on February 18 [2002].

There can be hours of triumph in a human lifetime. It can also happen that
an individual, prepared for action by all his or her previous life,
encounters objective circumstances which force him/her to take some action.
My story is about James Mace, a Harvard veteran and expert in the history of
Soviet Ukraine. Let me start with the objective circumstances.

Drawing itself into the Afghan war in December 1979, the Soviet leadership
put an end to the policy of detente, which exacerbated the US-Soviet
confrontation. US President Ronald Reagan focused more attention on the
non-governmental and political organizations of an almost million-strong
Ukrainian diaspora, trying to use it for his propaganda campaign against
what he called the evil empire. One of the diaspora's leading political
figures, Georgetown University Professor Lev Dobriansky was appointed
US presidential foreign policy advisor. The US Congress established then
Ukrainian-Baltic Commission incorporating about 80 senators and
representatives. Congress passed a resolution to support the USSR's
non-Russian peoples.

Meanwhile, the US Ukrainian diaspora began to unfold measures to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of the 1933 famine. The diaspora's non-governmental
organizations decided on this anniversary to finally bring down the wall of
silence masterfully built by Stalin even outside the USSR. North America
already had research centers which conducted international-level Ukrainian
studies: the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of
Alberta in Edmonton and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute at in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. The University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada
organized a workshop devoted to the key problems of the famine, where
Bohdan Kravchenko, Sergei Maksudov (Aleksandr Babionyshev), James
Mace, and Roman Serbyn delivered the most exhaustive reports.

Following this, journalists from all over the world began to query Ukrainian
UN diplomats about the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine. The latter either evaded
an answer or denied "the falsifications of bourgeois nationalists." At last
they were forced to turn to Kyiv for instructions. The KPU politburo obliged
the Central Committee secretary in charge of ideology and the Ukrainian KGB
chief to study the matter. On February 11, 1983, Central Committee First
Secretary Volodymyr Shcherbytsky received a memorandum from them, the
essence of which is well illustrated by its title, "On Propaganda and
Counter-Propaganda Measures to Counter the Anti-Soviet Campaign
Unleashed by Ukrainian Emigration Reactionary Centers Concerning Food
Shortages that Took Place in the Early 1930s.

US public committees organized a demonstration in October 1983 to honor
the memory of the millions of Ukrainian peasants who died in the manmade
famine.

Simultaneously, Representative James Florio introduced a bill to set up an
official commission (a hybrid commission consisting of both congressional
and presidential representatives - Ed.) to study the circumstances and
consequences of Stalin's famine. Congressional members were at first
surprised at this unprecedented move. Never before had it been
parliamentary practice to investigate a fifty year-old crime committed in
a foreign country.

Yet, the irrefutable evidence of the crime itself (including materials in US
archives), a half century of silence on this matter in the USSR, and a
categorical denial of Ukrainian diaspora accusations by the officials of the
Ukrainian SSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Representation of
the Ukrainian SSR at the UN bore fruit. As early as October 1984, first the
House of Representatives and then the Senate held hearings on the bill.
Congress decided to set up a commission to investigate the 1933 famine in
Ukraine. On October 12, 1984, President Reagan signed the bill into law.

As the bill was indeed forced through, lobbying was done by the
non-governmental Organization of Americans in Defense of Human Rights in
Ukraine founded and headed by the late Ihor Olshaniwsky. This organization
took part in forming the commission which consisted of four representatives
in Congress, two senators, three sub-Cabinet officials appointed by the
president, and six representatives of the public, meaning the Ukrainian
diaspora. All these people were to do as commission members was get
together on a certain day in order to hear and approve the report of a
person who performed the legitimate functions of a researcher and director
of this commission.

In the mid-eighties, you could count on the fingers of one hand the
graduates awarded a doctorate in twentieth-century Ukrainian history. Among
them there was one non-Ukrainian American, James Mace. So Congress
confirmed him as researcher and director of the commission on the 1932-
1933 Ukrainian famine.

Before being confirmed in office, Mace supervised the taping, as part of an
oral history project, of about sixty famine eyewitness reports and thus had
experience in this kind of work. To help him, a research group was formed,
consisting of Olha Samilenko, Susan Webber, and Walter Pecheniuk, which
collected bibliographic materials and polled eyewitnesses using Mace's
methods. This essentially came down to a past-oriented sociological survey.
Overlapping each other, the testimonies corrected the subjectivism typical
of personal reminiscences, thus becoming a full-fledged historical source.

This was all the more important because the researchers had no opportunity
to use Soviet archives. They only had access to the archival materials of
the Smolensk Oblast VKP(b) Committee; the town of Krynychky, Dnipropetrovsk
oblast; and NKVD of district center Chernukhy, Poltava oblast, captured by
the Nazis and brought to the US after the war. Congress appropriated
$400,000 for the commission from the fiscal year 1985 onwards. Some
research funds also came from Ukrainian diaspora organizations and private
individuals.

There have not been many instances in the history of humankind when a
genocide took a death toll of millions. In the first half of the twentieth
century, the best known genocides were those of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915, of peasants in Ukraine and Kuban in 1932-1933, and the
Holocaust of the Jews and Gypsies in Nazi- occupied Europe. The documented
history of the Jewish Holocaust has been written by thousands of researchers
for many years, while the bibliography of Ukrainian famine was very scarce.

The commission was to convincingly prove the fact and show the extent of
the famine and, if possible, to find the reason why USSR leaders had kept
protracted silence over this action by Stalin and his associates. The fact
of mass terror in 1937-1938 had been officially acknowledged in the times
of Nikita Khrushchev.

As the KPU Central Committee (CC) estimated, the US Congress
Commission on the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was to finish work in
the summer of 1987 (it was actually scheduled for the spring of 1988 -
Ed.). The conclusion was hence made that the results of its work would
be used to unfold a broad campaign on the eve of the seventieth
anniversary of the October Revolution.

This is why the CC set up a commission of its own in the fall of 1986. This
commission members were expected to conduct thorough research to
"refute the falsifications of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists."

I was in contact with the CC people who set up this "anticommission" and
took part in its proceedings from the very first day. I will say now what
never occurred to me before. Stalin left many skeletons in the closet for
the coming generations of Soviet Communist Party oligarchy. Suffice it to
compare the 1932-1933 famine with other of Stalin's covert deals to
understand that it stands out.

Let us take, for example, the secret protocol to the Soviet-German
Nonaggression Pact of August 23, 1939, better known as the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In March 1985, new CPSU CC Secretary General
Mikhail Gorbachev was invited to certain premises, shown the original secret
protocol, and asked to sign the visitors' log which already contained the
signatures of his predecessors. Five years on, at the Second Congress of
USSR People's Deputies, Mr. Gorbachev sat onstage and listened to
Aleksandr Yakovlev's report being heard live by millions of people.

Relying on the German original of the secret protocol published after the
war (claimed a fake by the Soviets), Mr. Yakovlev convincingly proved that
the later events only confirmed that the Soviet original did exist. The
events occurred in strict compliance with the German-Soviet accords. Mr.
Gorbachev did not interrupt the speaker: he did not say that the Soviet
original is a few hundred meters away from the Palace of Congresses. The
point is that the publication of this inflammable document would mean
immediate release of the Baltic republics.

One can also recall the Katyn affair. It is a cynical crime when VKP(b) CC
Politburo members made a cold-blooded decision to wipe out thousands of
Polish POW officers. CPSU leaders knew only too well that admitting this
crime was incompatible with the existence of any kind of Communist Party
dictatorship. These documents were unveiled later by Boris Yeltsin.

But the famine bears no seal of state secret and not only because it was
common knowledge. This is an entirely different phenomenon: Stalin put his
seal not on the document, thus making it secret, but on human souls. There
is only one, extremely shocking, explanation of why a so-called
anticommission was set up to counter the American one. The founders of it
sincerely hoped for a positive result. In 1986, nobody knew for certain what
had happened in the Ukrainian countryside in 1932-1933.

The manmade famine stories of emigrants were regarded as malicious
falsification, while eyewitnesses in every Ukrainian village kept silent.
They were silent because they were afraid even to tell their children about
the past: God forbid they blurt it out and mar their lives. After all, it is
not only famine eyewitnesses who kept silent - so did a million GULAG
former prisoners released by Khrushchev, for they took a written pledge
not to disclose their past after the release.

Although the Mace commission had not yet finished its work in 1987,
eyewitness evidence made it possible to draw some far-reaching conclusions.
Preliminary information about the commission's proceedings also reached the
KPU CC. On November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a Kremlin report
on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution,
expounding the history of overall collectivization of peasantry according to
the Stalinist pattern. He did not mention the famine of 1932-1933.

Volodymyr Shcherbytsky could not follow the suit of his patron, for the
famine raged precisely in Ukraine. The findings of the US commission were
so convincing that the anticommission only confirmed them. On December
25, 1987, when the seventieth anniversary of Soviet power in Ukraine was
celebrated, the KPU CC first secretary delivered a longwinded jubilee speech
with six or seven lines about the famine. It was for the first time in 55
years that a KPU CC Politburo member broke Stalin's taboo and pronounced
the word "famine." From then on, historians obtained the opportunity to
study and publish documents.

The 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine commission had the last meeting in April
1990 to hear and approve the final text of its report to Congress. Soon
after, Mace published the report he had drawn up. In August of the same year
he presented several copies of the report to the Soviet Embassy in
Washington.

I have this book with a cover letter signed by First Consul of the USSR
Embassy in the US Oleh Diachenko. The letter was written in calm tones, for
the Soviet Embassy had no claims against Dr. Mace. Nor did the KPU CC have
any claims and allowed him to visit the republic. I must perhaps explain how
I got hold of this book and the embassy letter bearing the red seals of the
KPU CC's General Department. In the fall of 1991, I was an expert in charge
of transferring the documentation of the abolished KPU CC to the state
archives.

My job was to review the CC materials referred to as scrap paper. The
selection having been done by highly skilled archivists, the experts almost
always agreed with the latter. The US Congress commission report was not
part of the CC materials, but the red seal barred it from being transferred
to a library. Knowing my involvement in the famine issue, the leaders of
this campaign turned a blind eye to the rules and gave the book to me. I
think I can now confess this.

In 1990 James Mace came to Kyiv, bringing me the computer-typed three
volumes of the testimonies of former Soviet citizens about the famine. Later
that year the three volumes were printed in Washington. In December 1990 I
published the article "The Way It Was," as a review of the work in the
journal Pid praporom leninizmu (Under the Banner of Leninism). Now this
article can be regarded as a document. I will let myself a quote, "Listening
to eyewitnesses, J. Mace and his associates tried to establish a true
picture of the famine. They managed to do this, so reading the whole
verbatim, page by page, shocks you and inspires horror. It was just
impossible to invent the described apocalyptic scenes that occurred in the
agonizing Ukrainian countryside.

The physical condition and looks of the famine-stricken, the sufferings of
parents watching their children shrivel without food, the tragedy of
orphanages stripped of state funding, the attempts of peasants to survive by
eating various substitutes, the hopeless standing in miles-long lines for
non-rationed high-price bread made of the grain seized from none other than
them, the hair-raising scenes of cannibalism - all these stories were
committed to paper the way they sounded in front of the microphone, with all
the faltering, slips of the tongue, and stylistic errors."

The commission's three-volume publication come to a total 2,258 pages of
a small-sized print. The method of interviewing still remains unsurpassed.
It is thus difficult to overestimate the American researcher's contribution
to famine studies. Unfortunately, it turned out impossible to republish
Mace's four volumes (plus Report to Congress in English - Ed.) in Ukraine
for lack of funds, although some proposals were put forward as long ago
as 1993, when the sixtieth anniversary of the famine was observed.

Ukrainian history textbooks for senior grades twice touch on the subject
of the famine: for the first time, in the chapter about the total
collectivization of agriculture, and, for the second time, on the pages
about Gorbachev's perestroika turning from a bureaucratic campaign into
a revolutionary popular movement.

In 1988-1991 the subject of the famine helped arouse society from its
political lethargy and promoted the national liberation movement. No doubt,
this subject also turned many leading Communists into the sovereignty
communists who eventually banned this party in 1991.

I am certain that our society will duly honor the contribution made by US
citizen and Professor James Mace, to the making of our independent Ukraine.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHOTO: PROF. JAMES MACE, CONSULTANT TO THE DAY

JAMES EARNEST MACE, Ph.D. (HISTORY), MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY (USA),
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
OF THE "KYIV-MOHYLA ACADEMY" AND INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN
UNIVERSITY, MEMBER OF THE TEL AVIV INSTITUTE OF HOLOCAUST
AND GENOCIDE STUDIES, AND SCHOLARLY CONSULTANT TO THE DAY
Photo By Mykola LAZARENKO, The Day (http://www.day.kiev.ua/258534)
=============================================================
4. "UKRAINE, A LAND IN BLOOD"
Totalitarianism, Famine and Genocide

"I would hope that more fortunate historians than I in the twenty-first
century write about the happy history of an independent and affluent
Ukraine, about its economic progress, and about how things continue
to get better or its people."

By James MACE, Columnist
The Day Weekly Digest in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, November 24, 1998

I cannot say that there has been any prejudice toward me as a scholar,
researcher, or instructor. The intellectual atmosphere among social
scientists and political scientists has in general been characterized by
tolerance and a common path in search of understanding.

There have been so many serious projects not carried out. And now it seems
that the deaf do not hear, the blind not see, and stubbornly deny the facts
of repression in Ukraine during the communist period. However, such denials
are mostly grounded not on facts but are the products of manipulation by
certain political forces, by the consciousness and attitudes of people.

During the last eight years everything possible has been done of which whole
generations of researchers could only dream: researchers arrived at and
began to unravel such global questions as who we are, what happened to us,
why did it happen precisely to us, and where do we go from here.

I remember when in January 1990 I was asked to lecture in the Institute of
History before colleagues how the hall was gripped by a frightening
atmosphere. It was clear that the everyday working language was Russian, and
many of my Ukrainian colleagues had more problems with Ukrainian than I did.

I criticized the latest scheme of the history of the Ukrainian SSR published
a couple of months earlier in Komunist Ukrainy, the Central Committee organ,
and talked about issues that were either distorted or left out - about the
fate of national communism in the 1920s and thirties, the Great Manmade
Famine, repressions, and about Party policies toward Ukrainians.

At that time I did not intend to tell them, who were, after all, witnesses
no less than I, anything they did not know, for it was they who had access
to the primary sources but were forbidden to deal with such topics.

I simply analyzed the project worked out by fellows of the institute, which
paid much attention to the liquidation of illiteracy but none to the
repressed national revival of the 1920s or national communism, that the plan
mentioned the Cossacks and Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky along with historian
Dmytro Yavornytsky, but it did mention such figures as Mykola Skrypnyk,
Mykhailo Volobuyev, Oleksandr Shumsky, or Mykola Khvyliovyi.

My Ukrainian colleagues listened, bowed their heads, and said not a word
for or against what I had to say.

That institute was so under control and frightened even to the very end of
the USSR, and the official reaction was only that it had been a "very
critical presentation." However, I had mentioned one Soviet monograph on
the Machine Tractor Stations published in 1961, which in one chapter had
provided a wealth of material about the grain seizures that had in fact
caused the Holodomor, as they call the Famine of 1933. I mentioned the
author's name, I. I. Slynko.

After my talk an old shaven-headed gentleman came up to me and said, "I'm
Ivan Slynko." He was happy that somebody remembered his work, about which
everyone else seemed to have forgotten. Of course, he could not write about
the Famine of 1932-1933, because officially there had been none. There was
only the "socialist reconstruction and technological transformation of
agriculture." But he had written everything he could.

In historical terms little time has passed. Ukrainian scholarship was at
first highly uncertain of itself and only later began to assume confidence
and find its voice. My bookshelves are already overburdened from the books
and reprints that have appeared. There is a whole flood daily of Ukrainian
scholarly materials. Students now have perhaps less than perfect but more
or less truthful textbooks.

They can freely discuss various formerly banned, topics of philosophy,
historiosophy, religion, linguistics, and political science. This is a major
achievement, and I am proud to have taken part in it as a former "bourgeois
falsifier", "bearer of inhuman psychology", and "patented lover of Ukraine",
as I was once characterized in Soviet publications, although my own research
basically relied on those same publications.

Now I look at my students at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. They are young,
talented, educated, and self-assertive. Will they be able to find a place in
this sea of ignorance, total idiocy, drug addiction, hypocrisy, and
licentiousness? Or will they be strangled by economic problems and those of
everyday life? Or will they be broken by corruption? Will our young Ukraine
need their expertise, education, dreams, and efforts? Without doubt,
Ukrainian scholarship has done and is doing a great deal.

But the impression remains that the indubitable conclusions and material
presented by such serious scholars as Yuri Shapoval, Stanislav Kulchytsky,
May Panchuk, Ivan Bilas, Ihor Vynnychenko, Vasyl Marochko, et. al. interest
only those who already know such things.

The Institutes of History, Literature, Philosophy, the Congress of the
Ukrainian Intelligentsia, the Ukraine Society, Union of Writers, Memorial,
Association of Independent Researchers of the Famine Genocide, and
suchlike, all conduct their various demonstrations, conferences, press
conferences, and presentations, but the practically same people always
take part.

Few young people take interest, few new controversial ideas are put forward,
and little intellectual cross fertilization takes place among serious
politicians, cultural figures, and scholars. What does fails to seep down to
the people at large. I also often hear, immediately after I say how I teach
without any particular special right, how I am conducting some policy or
another, serving one interest or another, or in general am asked what I am
doing here or why I do not take the next plane to my beautiful and affluent
America that wants to conquer the world.

I often want to ask such "well-wishers" what happened to the hundreds of
thousands of displaced Ukrainians who went to America and still live there.
Nobody disputes their right to live and work there, to fall in love, and
have families.

In Kyiv my greatest impression is that when someone hears me speak Ukrainian
their eyes open wide and they say, "How well you speak Russian!" or "What's
the word for August (serpen)?" and still write "September" on my ticket. One
hears such pearls as "Talk in a human language" or "How long have you been
in Kyiv and still not learned culture," that is, speak Russian. In the
bazaar my wife asks in Ukrainian for something and hears, "How I hate that
swinish language." The Saturday before last, I went to the train station to
pick up an express letter and waited a good hour before hearing on the
intercom, "Speak Russian," and at last it was found.

My Russian, while considerably worse than my Ukrainian, is not all that bad
even for lack of use at home (my wife is from Western Ukraine where they do
speak Ukrainian), but one suspects that starting off in what is, after all,
the official language in this state, was the real reason I had to wait so
long. I have to admit that recently I was in the Ukrainian neighborhood of
Toronto and felt more in Ukraine than I often do on the streets of Kyiv.

All this is the difficult and heavy legacy of the past: being ashamed of
one's language and culture or always bowing and scraping before someone
more powerful or richer, be it Russians or the representatives of some fund
from America, Canada, or Europe. Other peoples also have their complicated
histories, but one must admit that in the twentieth century Ukraine went
through real hell, which can be called genocide.

But other peoples try to understand what really happened to them. In, say,
the USA there has been real injustice committed against Blacks, and it is
hard to come to terms with its legacy. The process is still incomplete, but
today any impolite word or incorrect behavior brings forth an immediate
response from the community and the law comes into play immediately.

One of the most shameful pages in American history relates to the Cherokees,
one of the most advanced tribes of the east coast, who in 1835 were forced
to walk from their ancestral lands in South Carolina and Georgia to what is
now Oklahoma. They call it the Trail of Tears, along which thousands
perished of hunger, cold, and disease. Some of my ancestors also walked that
road. Today in Oklahoma Indians still have many problems, but nobody raises
a hand against them, and their tragedy is the subject of scholarly research
and a major sore spot for politicians.

In Ukraine as well many talk of the difficult legacy of genocide, but real
steps to defend the Ukrainian language and culture are few. There are few
Ukrainian-language newspaper, journals, and publishers are de facto
paralyzed. In universities teachers and students often speak different
languages; these are different intellectual worlds and views of the world,
which more and more go their separate ways in time and space.

The sixty-fifth anniversary of Ukraine's Holodomor is a controversial date.
As early as 1927 Serhiy Yefremov wrote in his diaries about hundreds of
thousands of hungry in Kyiv, about the terrible lines for bread, about over
200,000 Kyivans who had been denied the right to buy bread at all, and
about peasant unrest provoked by state grain seizures.

But in 1932 hunger assumed the character of total destruction of Ukraine as
a state and Ukrainians as a nation. Thus, it is only right to now recall the
millions upon millions of innocent victims. They died with a single thought:
will the outside world know and say something? And will there be anyone to
pray for our souls?

In truth, US President Franklin Roosevelt, with full knowledge of the
Holodomor (I myself published the documents and can attest to their volume),
recognized the Soviet government in November 1933 literally on the heels of
the Famine. But now there are candles lit in churches, and the outside world
is saying something. In this context US President Bill Clinton's
proclamation to the Ukrainian people about these long bygone events is
particularly important.

In justice, one has to admit that an American presidential statement does
not mean much: a day in memory of the victims of the Ukrainian Famine or
Holocaust or broccoli growers is usually ignored by one and all. And
President Clinton's proclamation in memoriam of Holodomor victims is not the
first such, but it is perhaps the best occasion to talk about what happened.

I am by origin a typical American. My father was a railroad switchman.
Neither he nor my mother finished high school. But I went to university and
wanted to stay there. I studied Russian history. I studied Russian history
and went to graduate school. I was interested in Russian history and
culture.

When it came time for me to write a doctoral dissertation at the University
of Michigan, my advisor, Prof. Roman Szporluk, began to loan me Ukrainian
books. I bought a dictionary and began to read. I recall that my first book
by Panas Fedenko, The Ukrainian Movement in the Twentieth Century, took
me a whole month to read. Slowly, my reading picked up speed.

I chose for my dissertation the theme of national communism during the
Ukrainization policy of the 1920s. The Vietnam War was still going on, and
the theme of national communism was pretty trendy. Of course, there was
officially no such thing in the USSR. Later my colleagues here told me that
the topic had been a forbidden one in Ukrainian history and even
dictionaries. My road to Ukraine was thus closed, and I sat in the library
reading microfilm.

I do not know if in Ukraine somebody except spies know of that specific
pre-computer apparatus, but in American libraries it is common. I read the
journals of the period, one more or less complete newspaper, Visti VUTsVK,
the direct ancestor of Holos Ukrainy, and began to understand what happened
in Ukraine. I made acquaintance with long-dead figures then absolutely
unknown here: Georg Lapchynsky, Vasyl Shakhrai, Oleksandr Shumsky, and
Mykola Khvyliovyi.

I began to understand why precisely Ukraine was targeted for the worst
Stalinist repression: because it had more people than all the other
non-Russian Soviet republics put together and because it had tremendous
experience in fighting for its national liberation.

For Ukraine the lessons of the Central Rada and Hetman state had not been
lost without a trace. Up to 1933 Soviet Ukraine had a developed state
organism which, albeit within the police-state framework of the Soviet
Union, fostered significant development of the Ukrainian culture and spread
the Ukrainian language both among the proletariat and in the state
administration.

In order to transform the "complex entity," as Mykhailo Volobuyev had called
the USSR, into the Stalinist empire, Ukraine had to be broken. Public enemy
number one for Stalin and his cohorts was not the Ukrainian peasant or
Ukrainian intellectual; it was Ukraine itself. That is why in 1932-1933
Stalin made an undeclared war here, using all the military, police,
political, and economic forces he had available.

I defended and published my dissertation to an uneven reaction. I was blamed
for defending fascists and Nazi collaborators. I was told that the famine
had been caused by objective factors and that the terror had been a result
of mass hysteria, not some policy. The road Ukrainians trod from deadly
critical reviews of my work in the Western press to the President's
proclamation was not easy.

Truth about the Famine was hard to bring to the attention of the world
community. The Ukrainian Diaspora did everything possible and impossible to
break the wall of silence on this issue and make it an abject of scholarly
research. Professor Omeljan Pritsak of Harvard came to me in 1981 and said
there was a project to study the Famine. I was familiar with all the then
accessible sources of the period and able to research the theme.
When I arrived at Harvard I was told that I would do the research but the
book would be written by Robert Conquest.

1983 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Holodomor, and the Ukrainian
community took action. Public meetings and demonstrations were held. One
organization, Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine headed by the late Ihor
Olshaniwsky, came up with the idea of creating a government commission to
study the Famine.

Petitions were sent to Congress, and supporters there were found. Finally
Congress passed a bill to create the Ukraine Famine Commission. I became
Executive Director because it was felt that the view of a non-Ukrainian was
needed. Since the average Sovietologist knew that Ukraine was more or less
like Texas in Russia, if one of them had been put in charge nothing would
have come of it.

Those who had experienced the Famine were dying off. Its history had to
be preserved. I had a small staff: one collected eyewitness accounts, and I
read the written sources and wrote most of the commission's Report to
Congress.

After the first two years we obtained an additional two in order to prepare
for publication our three volume Oral History Project containing the life
histories of 200 survivors. We understood that as a government document
there would be two or three copies in every state. If nobody wanted to hear
us today, somebody someday would find the books we left behind. I never
dreamed of visiting Ukraine, but thanks to the political changes in late
1989 I unexpectedly received an invitation through the Soviet Embassy to
Ukraine.

In January 1990 I first set foot on Ukrainian soil. Perhaps I still spoke
Ukrainian rather poorly, but people understood me. Maybe thanks to my
commission more and more people began to study the famine, and the
Union of Writers set up a committee to organize an international symposium.
In the Institute of History Stanislav Kulchytsky had begun to write about
the Famine.

Preparation for the symposium was like a civil war between the Institute of
History and Central Committee, on the one hand, and the Writers' Union
and Institute of Literature on the other, for the latter were breeding
ground for the Popular Movement (Rukh) of Ukraine.

I recall a radio journalist asking me then, "Some people think Ukraine
should be independent, and others think it should stay in the Soviet Union?
What do you think?"

What could I answer? Of course, that the peoples of Ukraine, not I would
decide the issue. But it was clear that the USSR would soon fall.
On the morning of January 27 Ivan Drach called me to say there had been an
announcement in the press that the Central Committee had passed a decision
saying that the Famine had happened and that the documents would be
published.

The late Volodymyr Maniak, who was compiling a people's book of memory,
said that a meeting to set up a monument near Uman had been banned, but
maybe the local authorities would act differently if an American was
present. No hesitation.

We traveled by rented bus to Uman: survivor Dmytro Kalennyk, sculptor Yuly
Sinkevych, kobzar-writer Mykola Lytvyn, Volodya Maniak, and others. In the
village of Ryzhavka we were met by the two local policemen and ten sent as
reinforcements from Uman. Obviously, there would be no monument. Kalennyk
led us to the mass graves from 1933, marked by a simple iron cross next to
the official cemetery.

There lay thousands of victims from one village. The black soil was covered
by bumps, and under the bumps were people, a land awash in blood. We all
said a few words. I cried. From far-off America I tried to express my
sympathy, but finding the words was difficult. The peasants stayed away
except for two gray-haired women in black scarves who looked on from a
distance.

Then came a public meeting in the Uman soccer stadium, where both the old
Soviet Ukrainian and the still-banned yellow and blue national flags waved.
People were afraid that the police would seize the national flags, but
everything went on peacefully. Then we went to the cemetery, where there was
a large common grave from 1937-38. Two memorial services were being
conducted, one by a Russian Orthodox priest and the other by a Ukrainian
Autocephalous one, whom most onlookers mistook for Catholic.

There was a heated discussion with the mayor of Uman, and it became clear
that if we set up a monument, it would soon vanish without a trace. In fact,
on my last day in Kyiv I spoke at a meeting at the October Palace of
Culture, the former NKVD headquarters, where we put up a small bronze
plaque in memory of those killed in the basement of that building. Some
months later on my next trip to Kyiv, I was told that it had been stolen.
The times were like that...

And what about our times? Are they any better? Certainly, much has been
done, researched, and published about the Holodomor, Stalinism, and the
nightmare called Communism. But few buy Ukrainian books and almost no one
buys them on the history of Soviet Ukraine. Those who do not want to believe
it simply refuse to. There is no fact or document that can convince them.

One neighbor lady once told me, "So, you're a historian? Well, we had one
history; now we have another history. Who knows what really happened?"
And she had a point. There really was one history then, and there will
inevitable be another tomorrow.

I would hope that more fortunate historians than I in the twenty-first
century write about the happy history of an independent and affluent
Ukraine, about its economic progress, and about how things continue to
get better or its people.

But the overwhelming majority of my students see absolutely no prospects
that they will ever be able to change things for the better.

Is that not also a harvest of despair? [Article written in 1998]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James MACE was born in 1952 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA, and has
a Ph.D. in history. In 1981-86 he worked at the Harvard Ukrainian Research
Institute and in 1986-1990 as Executive Director of the US Commission on
the Ukraine Famine. Afterwards he was at Columbia and Illinois Universities.

Since 1993 he has lived in Ukraine. He worked in the Academy of Science's
Institute of Ethnic and Political Studies and since 1995 has been professor
of political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University. He is
author of approximately 160 works on twentieth-century Ukraine. He is also
consultant and a columnist for The Day in English.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/270457
=============================================================
5. "2004 YEAR OF YUSHCHENKO"

----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: Morgan Williams morganw@patriot.net
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 5:30 AM
Subject: Re: 2004 Year of Yushchenko

Morgan:

THE DAY would NEVER publish this, so feel free to go ahead after
making the necessary editorial changes. The pressure they have
already called down upon themselves over Gongadze etc. indicates
to me that the worst I have to fear is being sent back to the land of
hot showers and cold beer.

Even that would be difficult for them to do. Attached is a slightly
revised version but feel free to make any other editorial changes
you might find necessary.

Jim
=========================================================
UKRAINE REPORT-2004, No. 8: ARTICLE NUMBER ONE
=========================================================
COMMENTARY: By James E. Mace
Professor, historian, journalist living in Kyiv, Ukraine
Published by "UKRAINE REPORT-2004," Number 8
www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service (ARTUIS)
Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, January 16, 2004

The public opinion polls are unanimous that if presidential elections
were held today, Viktor Yushchenko would win over any conceivable
opponent.

The official information boycott of anything good he does only
augments his popularity in a country that is so used to being lied to
and so conscious of its being lied to. In an orgy of vote buying difficult
for a citizen of the civilized world to imagine, Verkhovna Rada is passing
a Constitutional amendment to give Verkhovna Rada the power to elect
the president and basically keep power where it is, in the hands of the
highest bidder.

So blatant is the bribery and this rigged attempt to take from the
people the right to choose their national leader, that the reservoir of
public resentment that everyday Ukrainians, long known for their
passivity, has brought them to the point that they have had enough.

Anyone who has ever studied the Ukrainian Revolution, which in some
ways makes the Mexican Revolution look tame and orderly, knows that
Ukrainians are slow to anger, but when they do, some very, very, very
nasty things could happen.

Viktor Yushchenko has such a reservoir of public sympathy, if only for
having been treated so unfairly by a regime already so detested, that
one way or another, the outcome of 2004 will depend on what he will do.

The question is whether he will become Ukraine's Washington or Mexico's
ill-fated President Caranza. And, of course, they could simply decide to
have him killed, but with the firestorm that has already happened with the
decapitation of Gongadze, that would simply light the fuse to the powder
keg.

In 1994 in the journal "Political Thought" (No. 4), this writer put forward
the idea that Ukraine had already become a kleptocracy (for the uninitiated,
rule of the thieves who psychologically just cannot help themselves from
stealing), that this system was not viable, and that Ukraine had but two
options - the Polish (moving toward Europe) or the Belarus (moving
toward Russia). The buyers of the Constitution and those who sold
their votes have now opted for the latter without Batsko (Papa)
Lukashenka.

Of course, Western states have always been willing to work with
authoritarian and corrupt regimes ("He may be a bastard, but he's our
bastard," as Roosevelt said of the elder Somoza), but they will never
ever be allowed into the club of Euro-Atlantic integration. Ukraine is a
rich country with a dysfunctional system of political and economic
relations that keeps its people poor.

When something as blatantly corrupt as these Constitutional changes -
about which the media has been relatively quiet except showing "the
opposition's obstructionist tactics" - it is only a pity that they have
never read Henry David Thoreau, who argued that when the govern-
ment is wrong, conscience dictates defying it, but that this must be
done in a civilized nonviolent way. They have not read Thoreau's
disciple, a Mr. Ghandi from India, who was once able to secure the
independence of his nation by precisely such means.

If the Ukrainian people are pushed too far without responsible and
enlightened leadership, very ugly things could well happen. Recall the
pogroms of 1919. This time it is likely to be a different target, but
everybody knows where most of the people's deputies live, in a valley
just off Lesia Ukrayinka Square, and no hired defenders can defend
against the rage of the people itself.

I cannot say that Viktor Yushchenko is above reproach as a political
mastermind. He has a tendency to do things off the cuff without thinking
them through and then not following through to see that they are actually
done (although he did a wonderful thing with the "Candle in the Window"
campaign that the media downplayed outrageously). He also has a
reputation for inflexibility and not being aware that compromise is some-
times the soul of governance. There are a number of people whom I
know have either left his campaign or are in despair because of these
things.

But the people of Ukraine want him as opposed to those whose honor
seems too weak to make any compromise meaningful or durable. If he
calls on those who look to him, there is Ukraine's biggest national
minority, about a quarter of the population called here "shchyri" (literally
"broad," but perhaps "real or authentic" would be as good as any translation
in this case) Ukrainians, who will follow. And as 1917 in Russia showed, a
quarter of the population is more than enough to make a revolution if the
old rules begin to break down.

This is something I pray does not happen. Ukraine's history is about as
bloody as one can image, and the chernozem black soil needs no further
fertilization with the bodies of those who would do better to till it.
Still, things could get out of control and nasty enough to make the former
Yugoslavia look like a walk in the park. It will demand wisdom from a figure
who has not yet demanded a surfeit of it.

To some extent the Kravchuk years (Kravchuk was and is a classical Great
Pacificator in the tradition of Henry Clay, and his current alignment with
the Social Democrats {oligarch} shows a bit more moral flexibility than I
would be comfortable with) and much more in the Kuchma years (the peak
was Lazarenko as premier but Yanukovych also has been convicted of two
crimes already and there is a prosecutor out there, who desires to charge
him for yet another), post-Soviet Ukraine evolved into a blatant kleptocracy
that every gypsy taxi driver can see and complain about to his passengers
when the conversation turns to such a topic.

They are not pleased to have what should be theirs (it IS their country
after all) ladled out to a privileged few, and should they decide to do
something about it, all hell could truly break loose.

Everything will depend on Viktor Yushchenko, long referred to as the
Hamlet of Ukrainian politics. Nobody knows what he will do, he will
certainly receive all sorts of bad advice, but he will have a chance few
are offered to right the wrongs and give people something they can live
with, embrace as their own, and be ready to defend to the death.

There is an art of compromise, with which I would do what I can to foster
if asked, but there is also a range of much worse alternatives that I fear t
hose in power might ineptly put into motion.

No friend of Ukraine wants to see this country, the history of which is so
marred with tragedy, suffer yet another. The people cannot be denied
their right to directly elect their president. If this move goes forward, I
fear for what might happen.

The moment demands statesmanship. Whether he acts as a statesman
or a simple politician, Viktor Yushchenko, the most popular and looked to
figure in the country, will largely determine what can and cannot be.

In 2004, upon his decisions and actions the fate of Ukraine will most
depend. -30- [Published by the Ukraine Report, Jan 16, 2004]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINK: http://www.artukraine.com/buildukraine/mace30.htm.
=============================================================
6. HOW CAN YUSHCHENKO WIN THE PRESIDENCY?

----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: politics@infoukes.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: [politics] How can Yushchenko win the Presidency?

I don't really think Yushchenko will be allowed to win the presidency.
They might just kill him first and then come out with explanations
borrowed from the Gongadze alleged investigation. The correct
Tex-Mex spelling is bandito, and they do control a lot of things.

I think our Polish friends started from the right point in the latter half
of the 1970s (I did Studium New Abstracts quarterly bulletins for the
North American Center for Polish Affairs, a job I inherited from Prof.
J.P. Himka of Alberta, whose Polish is still probably better than mine)
in discovering that when you do not and cannot control the state, you
start to defend society from the state that society does not and for
the moment cannot control.

This made a big contribution to the contemporary understanding of civil
society. They still have to learn about that here. I really do not see any
other way to go under current circumstances.
=============================================================
7. DON'T THE MUKACHEVE EVENTS REAFFIRM YOUR BELIEF
IN UKRAINIAN DEMOCRACY?

----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: E. Morgan Williams morganw@patriot.net
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 8:24 AM
Subject: quick takes

Dear Morgan,

Don't the Mukacheve events reaffirm your belief in Ukrainian democracy?
The article published in today's "The Day" might have had a few of the
stupider and dirtier passages cut, so please compare it with the BBC
monitoring text in order to give your readers a feel for the true meaning
of political prostitution.

I also appreciated that Verkhovna Rada yesterday rejected Yushchenko's
proposal to investigate the Mukacheve election. When I called into work
Monday morning, the first words I heard were: "Please, please, PLEASE,
don't write about Mukacheve!"

It will get worse here. There seems to be a full-court press to stop
Yushchenko, whose current campaign shows all the vim and vigor of
Wendell Wilkie in 1948. They can probably do it.

In any case, in order to prevent the redivision of property they are all
so frightened of, if need be I have no doubt that they would simply hire
hitmen and investigate with all the effectiveness they have shown in
the Gongadze case.

Not for publication.
=============================================================
8. TRAGIC NEWS

----- Original Message -----
From: "gskl" gskl@voliacable.com
To: morganw@patriot.net
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 10:26 AM
Subject: tragic news

Mr. Morgan,

I regret to inform you that my beloved friend and colleague James
Mace has passed away today (from what I know, the cause of
death is supposed to be thrombosis). God rest his soul. Please
relate the sad news to those concerned.

Respectfully, George Sklyar
=============================================================
9. JAMES MACE HAS UNEXPECTEDLY DIED TODAY

----- Original Message -----
From: James Mace jmace2003@yahoo.com
To: history@infoukes.com
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: [history] Looking for information

Dear Mr. Serbyn,

My name is Marina Zamyatina, and I'm writing to inform you that
James Mace has unexpectedly died today, May 3, at 3:45 pm,
of thrombosis. We used to work together at The Day, and his
wife asked me to inform his friends and gave me password to
his mailbox so that I could find the addresses.

We don't know yet when the funeral will be. We all loved Jim
very much and I can't tell you how much we are going to miss him.

Kind regards, Marina
=============================================================
10. PLEASE PASS ON TO JAMES' WIFE MY DEEPEST CONDOLENCES

----- Original Message -----
From: "Orysia Tracz" orysia_tracz@hotmail.com
To: history@infoukes.com
Cc: jmace2003@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 3:15 PM
Subject: [history] James

Dear Marina,

Please pass on to James' wife my deepest condolences. He
accomplished so much. I hope someone tells the story of his
determined work about the Holodomor at a time (1980s) when
it was so politically incorrect in N. America to do so.

Z-hadaimo nezlym, tykhym slovom

Orysia Tracz (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada)
=============================================================
11. A SAD DAY IN UKRAINIAN STUDIES

----- Original Message -----
From: Dominique Arel darel@uottawa.ca
To: Recipient List Suppressed:
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 7:10 PM
Subject: UKL233 (RIP-James Mace)

The Ukraine List (UKL) #233
compiled by Dominique Arel
[Ottawa, Ontario, Canada] 3 May 2004

A sad day in Ukrainian studies: the American historian James Mace
died today in Kyiv at the tender age of 52. Author of the classic
Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National
Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 (1983) and of the
monumental Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933, in
two volumes (1987-1988).

James paid a professional price for his sacrilegious claim-in Russian
studies, that is-that the Ukrainian famine was man-made. His scholar-
ship will survive the factional debates over the famine and his academic
non-conformism will remain an inspiration for the field.

A semi-biographical article of his was published in 2002 as "Facts and
Values: A Personal Intellectual Exploration," in Samuel Totten and
Steven Leonard Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies, New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 59-74.

Our sympathies and prayers go to his wife and family. DA
=============================================================
12. UNTIMELY DEATH OF JAMES MACE CAME AS A DEEP SHOCK TO ME

----- Original Message -----
From: Gleasonb1@aol.com
To: ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: UR-04 #72 May 4 Dr. James E. Mace Dies in Kyiv,
Ukraine (1952-2004); Lead...

Dear E. Morgan Williams:

This morning's news about the untimely death of James Mace came as
a deep shock to me. As you and other have said so well, Professor
Mace "knew" and understood Ukraine and Ukrainians as well as any
American could. He cared deeply about the fate and the future of a
people whose past has been scarred, often, by neglect, distortion,
and worse.

For me though, the memory of Jim is especially personal. We both
began teaching at Myiv Mohyla at about the same time, in 1995. Jim
was a political scientist and I am an historian, but one with a political
science bent (meaning that I jump back and forth between the past
and the present with relish and unencumbered glee).

And I remember that in 1995, when I came to Mohyla, Jim met me and
encouraged me to speak frankly with the students. That admonition was
well received because one of my first courses at Mohyla was a survey of
Russian'Soviet history -- before a class of students who came from that
cultural background and probably understood more about the nuances of
the history then I did.

But Mace persisted: "Bill," he said one afternoon as we stood outside the
main classroom building in the University courtyard, "do not hesitate to
address certain historical issues, such as the nature of Stalinism for these
people and the repression of dissent that was endemic to Soviet culture.
And above all," he continued, "do not hesitate to let them speak, so that
their voices, so long silenced and so long ignored, can finally begin to be
heard."

Years later, still teaching at Mohyla (I taught there for 5 years, from
1995-2000), Mace's words came back to me from that first time and that
first class. I recalled them because in the years that followed, student
after student came to me to express a degree of gratitude and, yes,
astonishment that their ideas and their notions of the nature of Soviet
history mattered.

And I recalled the advice of James Mace that first week -- advice that to
me reflected Mace the educator and Mace the humanist as much as
any other.

Best wishes, Bill Gleason
=============================================================
13. LEADING SCHOLAR AND WRITER, DR. JAMES E. MACE, DIES IN
KYIV, UKRAINE, STUDIED AND WROTE ABOUT THE 1932-33
GENOCIDAL FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE

By E. Morgan Williams, Publisher and Editor
THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 4, 2004

KYIV Ukraine.......Dr. James E. Mace, known world-wide as a leading
scholar, writer and professor regarding the genocidal famine [Holodomor}
in Soviet Ukraine during 1932-1933, which killed millions of Ukrainians,
died suddenly in Kyiv, Ukraine on the afternoon of Monday, May 3, 2004,
at the age of 52. Dr. Mace had faced some serious health problems in
recent years.

Dr. Mace is survived by his wife, Natalia Dziubenko-Mace, one son, William,
from a previous marriage, and two adult stepchildren. He was born in
Muskogee, Oklahoma, on February 18, 1952. He moved from the United
States to Ukraine in the early 1990's and has been since 1995 a Professor
of Political Science, Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University, and since
1997 also a consultant and writer for The Den (Day) Weekly Digest in
English, published in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Professor Mace spent most of his professional career researching and
writing about Ukrainian history and was a strong advocate for the fact that
the famine in Soviet Ukraine during the early 1930's was an act of genocide
on the part of Soviet leader Stalin. Dr. Mace was also vitally involved in
promoting his belief Ukraine had suffered for years under a post-genocidal
trauma as well as the oppression of being a Soviet republic but now finally
had a chance to become a strong, independent, prosperous, democratic
state, operating under the rule of law.

Jim Mace fought hard for what he believed in and told his many friends he
wanted to live and work in Ukraine long enough to see his dream for Ukraine
come true. Dr. Mace was unusual in his commitment to Ukraine in that he
did not have any Ukrainian heritage.

From 1986 to 1990 he served as the executive director of the US Commission
on the Ukraine Famine, Washington, D.C. and was the principal writer with
Olya Samilenko of the Commission's "Report to Congress." Dr. Mace
complied and edited with Leonid Heretz the three volume, "The Oral History
of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine," published in 1990.

Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa,
Quebec, Canada, wrote the following words in his publication "The Ukraine
List" upon hearing Monday of the death of Dr. James Mace:

"A sad day in Ukrainian studies: the American historian James Mace died
today in Kyiv at the tender age of 52. Author of the classic Communism and
the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine,
1918-1933 (1983) and of the monumental Investigation of the Ukrainian
Famine 1932-1933, in two volumes (1987-1988), James paid a professional
price for his sacrilegious claim-in Russian studies, that is-that the
Ukrainian famine was man-made.

His scholarship will survive the factional debates over the famine and his
academic non-conformism will remain an inspiration for the field. A
semi-biographical article of his was published in 2002 as "Facts and Values:
A Personal Intellectual Exploration," in Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard
Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, pp. 59-74. Our sympathies and prayers go to his wife and
family."

Another leading Canadian scholar, Roman Serbyn and his wife, Nadia, wrote
upon hearing about the death of Dr. Mace: "An American who was as
Ukrainian as anyone could be. A scholar, for whom truth was paramount,
an all-round decent human being. Everyone who came in contact with him
could not fail to like and appreciate him. Jim, we'll all miss you. Vichana
Tobi pamiat'! Nadia & Roman Serbyn."

Alex Kuzma, Executive Director of the Children of Chornobyl Fund, in
Short Hills, New Jersey, said yesterday, "I remember James well from the
time I lived in Boston and he was very active in the Holodomor research at
Harvard. He was truly a fine human being. Our community and the world
owes him a great deal for his courageous scholarship and his willingness to
challenge the academic status quo. Eternal Memory !"

The independent state of Ukraine, Ukrainians, and friends of Ukraine
around the world have lost a great friend. A friend who spent years
studying and writing about the genocidal famine in Ukraine, who spent his
last several years living, writing and teaching his students in Ukraine
while receiving a very, very modest, inadequate income, and a friend who
still had so much more to give and write about. Jim's sudden death is a
stunning, very difficult and sad loss. -30-
===========================================================
14. VICTOR YUSHCHENKO SAYS DEATH OF JAMES MACE A
GREAT LOSS, HE SPOKE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE COMMUNISTS
AND THE 1932-33 FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE

"His life became an example of truth and love that Ukraine will not forget."

"Our Ukraine" Press, www.razom.org.ua, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wed, May 5, 2004

KYIV - My heart bled when I learned about this great loss. James Mace - an
eminent scientist and a remarkable person - passed away. An American
professor and academic scientist had a unique feature, rare in our times:
complete integrity, he wanted to learn the truth and spoke nothing but the
truth.

It was not a coincidence that James Mace was invited to the United States'
Congress committee on investigating the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine - his
absolute honesty and integrity guaranteed objective conclusions.

The work at the committee became his calling. He was one of the authors
of the White book on the famine, which had been caused by the communist
regime.

His efforts broke the wall of silence that surrounded one of the gravest
crimes of the XX century. Millions of people who were tormented to death
[touch a chord in the global conscience] and reminded the world about the
tragic fate of the Ukrainian people, about Ukraine, which was not even on
the map then.

Nevertheless, James Mace was able to see the strong character of the
Ukrainians in that great tragedy. He believed in Ukraine and made his
choice - decided to live in it and work for the sake of its future.

He lived in Kyiv for the last ten years, taught at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,
edited a newspaper and a magazine, and wrote scientific articles. He was
a very important figure: he was one of the pillars that supported an
intellectual bridge between Ukraine and the surrounding world and did
everything in his power to energize movement over that bridge. James
Mace told the world about us through the language of "truth and science"
and taught that language to our students.

He departed this life before time because his heart felt all the pain that
was collected in the multi-volume book about the famine - the main one in
his life.

His life became an example of truth and love that Ukraine will not forget.
===========================================================
15. DR. JAMES E. MACE MEMORIAL HOLODOMOR FUND

Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA)
Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania
Tuesday, May 3, 2005

A special "Dr. James E. Mace Memorial Holodomor Fund" was
established by the Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA) in May
of 2004.

The special memorial fund to honor the life and work of Dr. James
E. Mace, is being administered as part of the program of the UFA, a
non-for-profit USA charitable and educational organization organized
in 1991, according to Dr. Zenia Chernyk, chairperson of the
Federation's board of directors.

The UFA is dedicated to the preservation of Ukrainian culture and
heritage and providing assistance to Ukraine in its drive for full
democracy as well as social and economic advancement."

"Donated funds are being used to support the Holodomor Education
and Exhibition Program in Ukraine, that Dr. Mace was involved in,"
according to Vera Andryczuk, UFA president, "and other projects to
honor Dr. James Mace's commitment to telling the truth about the
genocidal famine in Ukraine during 1932-1933, as approved by the
Federation in consultation with Dr. Mace's wife, Natalia Dziubenko-
Mace.

Donations to the "Dr. James E. Mace Memorial Holodomor Fund"
can be made by making out a check or other financial instrument to
the Ukrainian Federation of America, in US dollars, designating the
donation for the "Dr. James E. Mace Memorial Holodomor Fund,"
and mailing the check to:

Dr. Zenia Chernyk, Chairperson
Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA)
930 Henrietta Avenue
Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania 19006-8502
=============================================================
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Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer Private Equity Investment Group
P.O. Box 2607, Washington, D.C. 20013, Tel: 202 437 4707
mwilliams@SigmaBleyzer.com; www.SigmaBleyzer.com
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Director, Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA)
Coordinator, Action Ukraine Coalition (AUC)
Senior Advisor, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF)
Interim Secretary-Treasurer, Ukraine-U.S. Business Council
Publisher, Ukraine Information Website, www.ArtUkraine.com
& www.ArtUkraine Information Service (ARTUIS)
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