14 November 2011
New York, NY (UCCA) – On November 10, at New York University’s Torch Club, scholars, community leaders and the general public had an opportunity to hear, perhaps for the first time, that following WWI an active liberation movement existed not only in western Ukraine but also in the eastern half of the country. The special Ukrainian Historical Encounters Series event, entitled “The People’s War: National Liberation Struggles in Eastern Ukraine (1917-1932)” was opened by Dr. Walter Zaryckyj who provided a brief overview of the Series and then introduced the evening’s guest speaker Mr. Roman Krutsyk, President of the Kyiv Memorial Society and Director of the Museum of Soviet Occupation.
Accompanied by a slide show presentation, Mr. Yuri Symczyk, First Vice President of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine, read Mr. Krutsyk’s remarks in English, opening with the compelling assertion that following renewed independence in 1991 Ukraine began its new life without a political history. Elaborating on this thought, he explained that generations of Ukraine’s citizens had been raised on a history that was written by their occupiers, and that most archival materials pertaining to Ukraine’s resistance to Soviet occupation were banned and marked “secret.” It wasn’t until 1991 when Ukraine’s parliament passed a law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions” that democratic members of Ukraine’s parliament frequently began to raise the question of recognizing the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (the OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA) as World War II combatants.
Although some research in the early years of Ukraine’s independence was accomplished, Mr. Krutsyk credits former president Viktor Yushchenko and especially the former head of the Secret Service of Ukraine, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, for declassifying documents and providing access to the archival material. Over a two year period, from 2008 to 2010, Mr. Krutsyk was able to study more than 1,300 archival files from approximately 350 collections held in state oblast archives and branch archives of the SBU in eighteen regions of Ukraine. Reviewing these documents convinced Mr. Krutsyk and the Memorial researchers that the armed national liberation movement in eastern Ukraine was proportionally just as large and widespread as the activities of the OUN and the UPA. Emphatically, stating, “these materials definitively reveal an interpretation of the struggle for state independence, known as the Civil War, which absolutely differs from the official Soviet interpretation of this process.”
Based on the archival material located in the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Mr. Krutsyk resolutely refuted the Soviet myth that Ukraine “voluntarily” joined the USSR, stating that “the seizure of Ukraine was carried out exclusively by force.” Documents clearly exposed that fact that because the Bolsheviks were utterly mistrustful of the rebellious Ukrainians, trained cadres from Russian military districts were dispatched to Ukraine to occupy positions in military units and military commissariats. Moreover, if a military formation on the territory of Ukraine was comprised of Ukrainians, it was quickly disbanded and replaced by people sent from Russia. In 1920 even Trotsky declared that the “Soviet power in Ukraine was able to hold its ground only with the aid of Moscow’s forces, Great Russian communists of the Red Army.” To substantiate this claim, Mr. Krutysk revealed that material provisioning of the occupation was centralized from Moscow, and in 1918, in the month of November alone, the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR allocated 22.5 million rubles to the commander in chief of the Soviet armies in Ukraine. By late 1920 Ukraine was occupied by a total of 1.2 million Red Army troops from Soviet Russia, and as a result, the annexation of Ukraine was carried out exclusively by forcible rather than legal means. And it was this Red Army that succeeded in crushing the Ukrainian national liberation movement and established a harsh occupation regime.
Mr. Krutsyk goes on to mention that the Ukrainian nation’s liberation struggles did not end, but acquired guerrilla warfare forms. The mass scale of the clandestine struggle against the Soviet occupiers is revealed in the criminal cases that were discovered in SBU archives located in various oblasts of Ukraine and exposed the fact that a “total of 642 clandestine organizations and their centers operated throughout Ukraine.” Moreover, practically every armed uprising [from 1918–1924, 155 uprisings took place, and between1928–1932, 113 armed uprisings were recorded, but this is not a definitive figure as the search for new documentation continues] resulted in the destruction of Bolshevik administrations and the creation of self-ruling bodies. Often, territories newly liberated from Bolshevik rule were proclaimed as separate, local republics. In many cases, the peasant rebels called their elected self-ruling bodies’ temporary governments.
Memorial’s research proves that after various punitive actions, the first Holodomor of 1921–1922, and Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy, known as the NEP, armed uprisings in the period from 1924 to 1927 practically ceased. The armed resistance movement resumed with extraordinarily high incidence of spontaneous peasant protests in 1928, following the Soviet government’s announcement concerning total collectivization. This resistance greatly alarmed the communist leaders in Moscow, who feared they might lose Ukraine, and sparked Vsevolod Balitsky, the head of the OGPU in Ukraine, to report to Stalin on December 23, 1932, of the escalating resistance among Ukrainians and about the preparations for a nationwide Ukrainian uprising by “Petliurites”. Five days later, on December 28, 1932, Stalin sent Balitsky’s memorandum, together with his own accompanying letter, to every Ukrainian oblast, demanding that the state grain deliveries and accompanying repressions be intensified. On January 1, 1933, Stalin sent a personal telegram of identical content to Stanislav Kosior who in turn sent a telegram on 2 January 1933 ordering the leading members of raion committees and collective farms to adopt all possible measures to fulfill the state grain deliveries, “including the use of repressions targeting the peasantry.”
From years of studying government archives, Roman Krutsyk emphatically concluded that “the Ukrainians’ resistance to the communist occupation [in Eastern Ukraine] and the numerous uprisings, spontaneous protests, and terrorist acts against communist functionaries explain why terror by famine was instituted against the Ukrainians. Numerous archival documents and eyewitness testimonies prove that the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation. It was carried out by the Russian occupiers with the goal of crushing the Ukrainian people’s war and breaking their resistance to the forcible annexation of Ukraine to Bolshevik Russia.”
Following his enlightening presentation, a lively question and answer period ensued. The event was sponsored by: American Conference in Support of Ukraine, Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine, Women’s Association in Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine; Ukrainian American Youth Association, Society of Veterans of UPA, National Tribune, and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
