Holodomor Conference Proves Great Success

December 2, 2008

The Conference “Visualizing the Holodomor: the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 on Film” which took place on December 2, 2008, was the largest international event conceived and organized by the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia. It became possible thanks to an active support of the Ukrainian Studies Program and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University as well as the Ukrainian Studies Fund. The Columbia Conference sought to offer a novel approach to raising awareness worldwide of this largely unknown human calamity and proved a success by far exceeding the expectations of its organizers. The conference focused on film, and filmmaking as a means to understand the consequences of the Holodomor for Ukraine and the world. Meant to appeal to a wide audience, it brought together academics and filmmakers and investigated analytical and empirical perspectives on the Holodomor.

Yuri Shevchuk opens Conference.

Yuri Shevchuk, opened the Conference by a word of welcome to all participants on behalf of the organizers. The Conference organizers, he noted, hoped that “… it would become a step in raising the international awareness of a human tragedy that, until recently, has been a blank page in world history.  Paradoxically, it has remained outside the collective consciousness of the very people that suffered it.

The Great Ukrainian Famine-genocide came to be known as the Holodomor. The word stems from holod the Ukrainian for ‘famine’ and ‘mor’ the Ukrainian for mass death. Hence the Holodomor – ‘mass death by famine’.  By different accounts from 2.6 to 10 mln. Ukrainians died as a result of the artificial famine organized by the Soviet government.

The subject of the Holodomor is far from being of purely historical or political importance. What happened to Ukraine 75 years ago is directly pertinent to the current state of Ukrainian society. In a wider sense, as any human calamity of such proportions, it is directly related to European history and the current state of affairs in Europe. It reveals many important aspects of Russian history and Russian present. Volumes are spoken by the peculiar reception of the subject of the Holodomor by official Moscow, but more importantly and often sadly – by Russian cultural elites and society. They seem to be in a state of denial either of the fact of mass murder of Ukrainians, or of its genocidal character.

Roman Serbyn speaks on Holodomor as genocide.

We are only starting to examine what happened 75 years ago with a simple desire to understand who we are. Now that Ukrainians can travel, they can compare their country to others. And as they do, they see how strikingly different Ukraine is. It is different not always in a positive sense of the word. Can a Russian or a Pole imagine an entire province in their respective countries without a single Russian or Polish language publication? Can they imagine members of their national parliaments publicly and with impunity denigrating their statehood. Can a Russian or Pole imagine the entire population of their countries having no right to watch films in their native language or to develop a national cinema? This and many other questions that sound unimaginable to Russians, Poles or other nations, are statements of fact for Ukrainians.

That a Russian today feels very much at home in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv or Odesa in terms of language, and culture, if not mentality, is hardly proof of the cultural proximity of Russians and Ukrainians. Rather it is evidence of the brutality visited on Ukrainians and their culture by the Soviet empire. This “zone of comfort” ends with the old 1939 Polish-Russian border, the border of the Holodomor.

Audience at Conference panel-2.

The Conference organizers sought to approach the Holodomor from an angle that would be uniquely Columbian and capitalize on what we consider strong aspects of the Ukrainian Studies at Columbia. Given the fact that we are the only academic center outside Ukraine with perhaps the biggest Ukrainian film collection, Ukrainian film courses taught regularly and an international recognition, it seemed called for to examine the Holodomor from a cinematic perspective. This task is quite a challenge. To look at the Holodomor as reflected in film, in Ukrainian film, is problematic. Since the tragedy and well into the 1980s, the mere public mention of the subject of this man-made famine was forbidden in the Soviet Union. When the censorship was abolished and Ukrainian filmmakers were free to choose any subject, the problem of financing stood in the way of making films, any films. As state support for cinema became the thing of the past, independent producers saw little promise of box-office success in the subject of the Holodomor. Whereas films on other formerly taboo themes were made, the Great Famine remained somehow unapproachable for Ukrainian film producers.

(left) Ambassador Yuri Sergeev with unidentified conference attendant.

A notable exception was the film by Oles Yanchuk “Famine-33” released in 1991. It was shown on TV nationwide on the eve of the referendum of December 1 that overwhelmingly voted in favor of Ukraine’s independence from Moscow. Even though there were a few more films – mostly documentary - dedicated to the Holodomor, the discussion of what happened in 1932-1933 was unfolding mainly outside filmmaking – in the press. We thought it entirely justified and useful to take a look at film as 1) a forum for public discussion and education about the Holodomor, and; 2) as a historical document of events and the way people, who experienced them, come to terms with them, remember them, and try to make sense of them.

Film is a great way to get a wider public in Ukraine and the world to think of the Holodomor. Film is uniquely capable of taking this discussion outside the academic sphere with its understandably narrow approaches, or politicians with their often questionable motives. Film can put a human face on this tragedy, tell individual stories which are easy to identify with, stories that can move even the most indifferent individual.

Our Conference focuses on film as a record of memories of the Holodomor by eye-witnesses whose numbers quickly dwindle, as well as a way of discovering a deeply repressed story, narrating it, and thus making it part of the public discourse. All this serves one overarching purpose to try and visualize the enormity of what happened in 1932-1933 and hopefully to start coming to terms with the Holodomor and its consequences.”

(left) Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University.

In his paper Roman Serbyn, professor emeritus of the University of Quebec in Montreal, addressed perhaps the most politically charged issue – the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people. He discussed the writings by the Polish Jewish humanist Rafael Lemkin who coined the very term genocide and used the Great Famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933 as an example. Serbyn had recently found in the New York Public Library a type-written text by Lemkin in which he elaborates the genocidal logic of the Holodomor as a four-pronged attack against the Ukrainian nation: 1) destruction of the nations brain – the intellectual and cultural elite; 2) destruction of its soul, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; 3) destruction of Ukrainian peasantry, the repository of it traditions, and culture; and 4) decimation of Ukrainians by coercive mass resettlements of them to other parts of the empire and bringing in non-Ukrainians to live on historical Ukrainian territories. Read more...

Panel Two “Unearthing the Great Famine by Filming It” featured a short documentary Kolky by Natasha Mykhalchuk, a film student from Parson School of Design of the New School for Social Research. Natasha, who was born and lived till her early teens in Odesa, Ukraine set out on a journey to trace the history of her father’s family. She visited his native village of Kolky in the Podillia region, south-western Ukraine. Meeting and talking on camera with the locals, she unearthed the memories of a continuous chain of disasters visited upon Ukrainian peasants by foreign invaders: the earliest being the Holodomor of 1932-33 and concomitant collectivization, followed by World War Two, Nazi occupation and slave work in the Reich, and another famine after the war.

Cathy Nepomnyashchy (second from right) introducing Serhiy Bukovsky (1st from right), Viktoria Bondar (1st from left) and Mark Edwards.

The second speaker of the panel Dr. Crispin Brooks, archivist of the Shoah Foundation Institution, University of South California in San Diego, discovered more than 750 eye-witness accounts of the Holodomor in the massive documentary holdings of Jewish Holocaust survivors at his institution. He gave an overview of the archival holdings with reference to the Holodomor and brought to light new perspectives drawn from the testimonies. His presentation was accompanied by video footage of selected eye-witness testimonies. They all are waiting to be thoroughly studied and described.

Both panels were very well attended. The audience number fluctuated around seventy-eighty and Room 1512 of the International Affairs Building were they took place was filled to capacity. Among those present were Yuri Sergeev, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Mykola Kirienko, Ukrainian Consul General in New York City, Columbia students and faculty and a wider public.

The crown jewel of the conference was the US premier of feature documentary "THE LIVING", directed by Serhiy Bukovsky. Mr. Bukovsky and his wife and co-producer Viktoria Bondar arrived in New York specially to take part in the Conference and attend what was the de facto US  premier of THE LIVING. Also present was Paris-based producer of the film Mark Edwards. Professor John Coatsworth, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, opened the third panel by a word of greeting to the guests and the audience. He said that the fact the Conference is taking place with such a remarkable level of international representation and interest on the part of the academic community is evidence of the vibrancy of the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia. He then introduced Professor Cathy Nepomnyashchy, the director of the Harriman Institute. She in turn presented to the audience of some 250 Mr. Bukovsky, Ms. Bondar and Mr. Edwards. A specially moving moment before the screening was a surprise appearance of Margaret Siriol Colley, the niece of the legendary Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), perhaps the only Western journalist who wrote the truth about the Holodomor, trying to alert the world public opinion to the atrocities being committed against Ukraine by the Bolsheviks. One of the plot lines of THE LIVING evolves around Gareth Jones’s travel notes about the Holodomor discovered in the early 1990s by Ms. Colley. Her coming to the Columbia Conference all the way from Wales gave the event a special poignancy.

The reception of the film by the audience was warm and the post-screening discussion with the film crew mediated by Yuri Shevchuk lasted almost as long as the film itself. Here are some of the viewers’ opinions:

“The Living" is a beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the lived experiences of one of recent history's greatest yet little known horrors - the Ukrainian Holodomor, or terror-famine under Stalin's direction in 1932-33. Developing slowly and meditating on the subtle significance of simple images, facial expressions, broken memories of survivors, the film opens up the paradoxical humanity of events that continue to escape all-encompassing narratives. At times eliciting genuine laughter, at others, painfully sobering, the film never allows the viewer to make quick or easy judgments about this dense story that only comes to life in the plurality of voices that have survived the purges of the historical record. Avoiding simplistic moralizing and sentimentality, filmmaker Bukovksy opts instead to foreground the complex relationships of power, voice, and vulnerability that extend the tragedy outside the borders of Ukraine and beyond its isolated historical moment, exploring, for example, the rarely told story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who persistently tried to convey the extent of the mass deaths in Ukraine to a deaf international audience.

 The Holodomor is an experience of terror that continues to haunt survivors and the Ukrainian national imagination, and must be better understood by Ukrainians, Russians, and the rest of the world. But Ukrainians must also be able to mourn, something they were never allowed to do under the blanket of silence and denial defining Soviet official history of the period, and The Living reminds us that this process is incomplete and will remain forever unfinished - but must continue nonetheless. The film participates in this mourning process, meditating on the devastating losses, but also, perhaps above all, dedicating itself to the resilience of human life that survives the most abject circumstances to continue telling its stories. The film deserves to be experienced over and again in order to better hear them.

 
Zenia Kish, graduate student, New York University

"The Living" was an extraordinarily poignant film that approached the seemingly unapproachable in a very resonant way. The film gave a breath of life to the survivors, not shying away from heartwarming and humorous instances in their lives.  Bukovsky gave the survivors a beautiful sense of space, which is very rare in the documentary genre.  The film was a memorial in the best sense of the word; it honored the survivors and victims, while reminding us that the gift of life should never be taken for granted, even in the face of such atrocities. 

 

Allegra Panetto, Barnard College, Columbia University

 

The conference was very interesting and attendance was great, there were not enough chairs in the room, people were dragging chairs from the closets. The evening screening of the film by Serhiy Bukovsky was an incredible experience. I cannot say I enjoyed the film because it is not be enjoyed but I found it very well made, informative, educational and distressing/harrowing at the same time. It is a miracle that they could find so many actual witnesses still alive, and put it in the context of the documents left by the British journalist, and some original footing. Because of these three diversified strata the film provided a depth to the narrative, it was persuasive and moving.

For me it was both - painful to watch, and fascinating at the same time. The filmmakers truly succeeded in the task of showing how people survived the famine itself, and then so many years of oppression to bear witness. I think the whole conference was a success but the screening and the discussion following the screening was a truly memorable event.

 

Anna Frajlich, Professor of Polish, Columbia University

I really appreciated the new and unique approach that "The Living" utilized. It is too easy to take the Holodomor issue and focus on images of brutality in order to shock the viewer without making a coherent argument. "The Living" brings to light exciting and little known evidence which contributes interesting new facts to the general discussion of the Holodomor. At the same time, the film tries to present accounts of survivors of the genocide but in my opinion it underemphasizes their testimonies. Nevertheless, I believe that "The Living" has great potential to become an important film!

 

Konstantin, Tchergueiko, student, Columbia University

The Living presents candid interviews with survivors of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s.  Shot beautifully, the film is informative yet captivating.

 

James Williams, student, Columbia University, Olympic silver medalist in fencing.

I found the film to be profoundly moving due to the manner in which Serhiy Bukovsky approached the film, through the lens of the living.  As was discussed in the Q&A session after the screening, Bukovsky sought to relate the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in a way that was not macabre.  He interjects the horrific stories told by his survivors with their songs and laughter, showing the beauty and triumph of the Ukrainian identity. The sharp clarity and color of the shots, in addition to these interjections, indicate that images of the living possess power equal to that of (if not more than) those of the dead.

 

Tanah Spenser, student, Columbia University

Conference program

"The Living" trailer

"The Living" website