Should there be a Holodomor memorial on the National Mall?

Below is an op-ed I recently wrote in response to an article in the Washington Post that argued against the construction of a national memorial to the victims of Ukraine's famine-genocide - the Holodomor, as it is called by many Ukrainians. This is a topic very close to my heart, as I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the efforts of Ukrainian diaspora activists in North America and the UK to achieve "official" genocide recognition for the Holodomor. In my research, I explored the long-term impact of trauma and victimization, the meaning of recognition, diaspora-homeland relations, and post-Soviet nation-building. In the process, it became very clear that the politics of memory, which includes the construction of memorials, is always as much about the future as the past - in particular, defining identities and boundaries and policy priorities and staking moral and political claims. It is sometimes noble, and sometimes not. But is is important to study memory politics in a broader context and to focus on positive outcomes that can come from resurrecting the past.

I am fully aware that this op-ed does not address controversies surrounding the collaboration of some Ukrainians with the Nazis in the persecution of Jews during World War II, or the failure of some elements of the Ukrainian diaspora community to meaningfully confront the abuses of the past. However, in arguing in favor of the Holodomor memorial, I take the position that the famine does not deserve any less attention because of these facts. I believe there are important lessons to be learned from studying the famine, and the victims of the Holodomor should not be used as a bargaining chip in forcing Ukrainians to confront their crimes against Jews. Indeed, if we are to take seriously the claims of many diaspora activists that the Holodomor should be commemorated in the broader context of the world history of genocide, then Ukrainians' commemorative efforts should come hand in hand with a reckoning with an ugly chapter that occurred in their history just a decade later - and was not without precedent.

So without further ado, here is the op-ed:

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott raises important questions about Public Law 109-340. This 2006 law empowers the Ukrainian government to build a monument on the National Mall memorializing Stalin’s 1932-1933 famine-genocide against Ukrainians. Kennicott laments the growing disarray of the memorial landscape in our nation’s capital and encourages Americans to more clearly define our parameters for who, or what, should be memorialized within our borders. But in this case, his chief concern is that we cannot count on Ukraine to continue paying for the monument’s maintenance in the future, since it is “a conspicuous if not unprecedented example of an unstable, democratically challenged foreign government in charge of memorializing an event about which its own population is divided”.

Kennicott is correct that the political climate in Ukraine has shifted dramatically since 2006, when the U.S. was still hopeful that the outcome of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution would be a reform-minded government committed to transparent, accountable governance and the protection of human rights. I, like many others, am deeply disappointed that the Orange forces proved ineffectual and that the current President, Viktor Yanukovych, has shown little respect for democratic values.

Throughout the political turmoil of the 2000s, attitudes to the famine have been a useful lens into Ukraine’s contested nation building process. Disputes over historical responsibility highlight unresolved questions about the country’s relationship with Russia as well as its own Russian-speaking population. An American famine memorial can never definitively resolve these debates, nor should it try to. But the state of Ukraine’s democracy should not be a deciding factor in whether this memorial deserves space on our National Mall.

Indeed, such a monument can show that Americans are committed to exposing the public about gross human rights violations whenever and wherever they occur and to educating generations to come about the consequences of despotism - an ongoing problem in international affairs. Just as the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum highlights present-day genocides such as Srebrenica and Darfur within its walls, so too can our National Mall serve as a reminder that genocide against one people is really a crime against all humanity.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the most effective ways to accomplish this, both for this famine and for other mass atrocities. However, it is worth recognizing and appreciating the fact that President Yanukovych has neither blocked the progress of this memorial nor the inscription that explicitly lays blame at Stalin’s feet, as many feared he would.

Given this backdrop, the absence of public discussion about the purpose of the famine memorial is beside the point. For many Ukrainian Americans, the goal of such a monument is precisely to provoke conversation about one of history’s forgotten atrocities. Although there is now a general consensus among scholars that between three and four million Ukrainian peasants starved to death, the vast majority of Americans have never heard of the famine and are shocked to learn of such a massive death toll in such a short period of time. For those who are aware of the starvation, there is often a failure to distinguish its unique causes in Ukraine from the general scourge of collectivization and dekulakization in the wider Soviet Union. This is despite the fact that the U.S. government knew about the devastating famine as it was occurring, and despite diaspora efforts to call public attention to it in the press.

In the years I spent interviewing diaspora Ukrainians throughout North America and the UK for my doctoral dissertation, I learned that many are motivated by the desire to educate the general public about why the famine happened and what its consequences were. They point to North Korea and to Zimbabwe to show that food continues to be used as a weapon in peacetime, arguing that raising awareness of the Holodomor can help ensure that we pay more attention to famine crimes in the future.

In fact, the memorial on the National Mall is simply one of many attempts to achieve a form of recognition for the famine that transcends official genocide recognition by the U.S. Congress and in fact, transcends Ukrainians themselves. Ukrainian Americans have educated teachers and designed high-school social studies curriculums that describe the famine in the broader context of genocides throughout human history; they have held canned food drives to help alleviate hunger both at home and abroad; and they have constructed memorials and held commemorative services in conjunction with other historically persecuted ethnic groups in both small towns and large cities across the Western world.

The National Mall should never serve as a blank canvas for foreign governments to make political statements. However, the undemocratic nature of a foreign government is not a convincing argument against engaging in an important form of civic education - reminding the public that gross human rights violations come in many different forms and reiterating our desire to mean it when we say “never again”.