Daria Mattingly: Culpability of Rank-and-File Perpetrators in the Holodomor

In this episode of Not to Forgive, but to Understand, we are joined by Daria Mattingly, a historian whose work focuses on perpetrator studies and the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union, with particular emphasis on Ukraine. The conversation centers on the Holodomor, examining how famine policies were enforced at the village level by rank-and-file actors and perpetrators rather than solely by state elites.

Drawing on archival research, memoirs, literature, and oral history, Daria discusses how ordinary people became involved in famine enforcement, the role of youth and women among perpetrators, the use of euphemistic language to obscure violence, and the moral pressures produced by hunger and scarcity. The episode also explores how these perpetrators have been remembered, silenced, or contested in cultural memory within Ukraine and across the diaspora, based on her dissertation “‘Idle, Drunk and Good-for-Nothing’: The Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine and Their Representation in Cultural Memory” and her forthcoming book Stalin’s Activists.

00:00 – Introduction & Guest Background

02:35 – Studying Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the Holodomor

08:45 – Famine Policies and Legal Enforcement

18:34 – Beyond Top Leaders: Grassroots Perpetration

26:10 – Youth, Cadres, and Rank-and-File Violence

30:11 – Euphemisms, Obedience, and Moral Justifications

35:10 – Women Perpetrators and Gendered Representation

40:47 – Empathy, Hunger, and Moral Collapse

46:05 – Literature, Memoir, and Cultural Evidence

49:41 – Memory, Diaspora, and Competing Narratives

Transcript

0:00

You are just at the heart of the Holodomor here, especially during the famine, when you are reduced to the basic instincts of just survival, really, when you choose between whether it's your children or your neighbor's children who are going to starve to death and indeed, that perpetrator that I mentioned, when I was recording him, he was telling me in Bolshevik terms about how they believed it. But also he mentioned that his mother's legs were already swollen because they were starving. So she was swollen with hunger. And between the lines I could read that, not complying, questioning, or refusing to follow the orders of his uncle, who was a headmaster of the school. So one of the perpetrators on the ground who organized the logistics. He spoke about general context within which there was very little room for compassion. Today we’re joined by Daria Mattingly, a historian whose work focuses on perpetrator studies and the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union, with particular emphasis on Ukraine. In this conversation, we discuss her research on the Holodomor, examining the role of rank-and-file perpetrators and actors involved in the on-the-ground enforcement of famine policies. Our discussion draws in part on her dissertation titled

“‘Idle, Drunk and Good-for-Nothing’: 2:21

The Rank-and-File Perpetrators of the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine and Their Representation in Cultural Memory,” as well as her forthcoming book, Stalin’s Activists. Daria, your dissertation was on the perpetrators, the rank and file, involved in the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine known as the Holodomor. Tell us more about it and tell us what prompted you to research the area and eventually also tell us about your findings. Thank you, that is the very important question indeed, because not many people internationally know what the Holodomor is, unless they've heard about Ukrainian history or have friends from Ukraine or follow up the news about Ukraine. Ukraine's history is rich. And rich, for better or for worse, for the most part of the 20th century, Ukraine was part of the USSR. And USSR as a Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, was a communist country, at least on paper and one of the socialist policies of a communist country was to industrialize and to collectivize, to make agriculture mechanized and to force or voluntary or not, farmers and peasants into collective farms. And collectivization as a policy proved to be very ineffective in a way of producing economic results. But for political reasons, for political aims, it was a successful policy because it ensured that the Soviet leadership had total control over body, over space, over any activity, the countryside, over the peasantry. And one of the outcomes of immediate collectivization, was that people starved in the countryside, and at the time it was a peasant country, the Soviet Union; in the 1930s, when collectivization was enforced. At the time, most of the population lived in the villages and they starved because once you are herded into collective farms where nothing belongs to you, and no matter how hard you work, you don't own the means of production, you don't own the results, the products of your labor. People felt that they were not motivated to work. To till the land that didn't belong to them and to look after the cattle, look after the livestock and the implements they didn't own. So productivity on the collective farms was low and the state still collected what it considered was due. And so people in the countryside, the producers of food, did not have food. This famine, all Soviet famine, covered not only Ukraine, but also Kazakhstan, Volga region, in Russia proper, and Ukraine and Northern Caucasuses. And what was very specific to Ukraine though, in 1932-33, was that in Ukraine this all Soviet famine was exacerbated even further by specific policies applied to Ukraine alone and mortality rate was higher than anywhere else apart from Kazakhstan, but that's a different story. And the famine that started in 1931-33, it finished, but it was also about sedentarization of nomadic population. But in Ukraine, it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union at the time, we have specific policies such as sealing the borders of the republic. Very high, impossible to fulfill quotas that the state imposed on Ukraine, of grain, to submit to the state, and also concurrent persecution of political, religious, and cultural elite of Ukraine. So de facto it was just destroying civil society and anything that would have made Ukraine potentially different to the rest of the USSR. So that specific period was an all Soviet famine that followed collectivization was called Holodomor in Ukraine because for half a year it was an intense policy of starving the population of Ukraine together with persecution of its political elite. And as a result we have around 4 million people dead when there was no war, no armed conflict. We have destruction of material culture of Ukraine, of cultural heritage, as well as any suggestion that there could be an independent Ukraine in the foreseeable future. Obviously, Ukraine became independent in 1991, but this Holodomor is death by hunger, if you translated from Ukrainian. It refers to a specific half a year, winter 1932-33, when people were starved and there were policies preventing them from leaving the republic, from leaving their villages, which was not applied anywhere else in the Soviet Union or was applied later. But it was punishing Ukraine for the events of ten years prior, following the October revolution in Russia, when Ukraine did not support the Bolsheviks and did not want to be part of the new Soviet state. And it took years, couple of years to subdue Ukraine. And then you had ten years of relative peace with Ukraine. And then during collectivization, Ukrainians rebelled against the policy, nobody wanted the collective farms, not even in Russia proper, and then it was punished. So that's in a nutshell. So you spoke about the policies early. Earlier you mentioned the policies that were implemented at the time. Could you tell us more about these laws in more specific detail? After collectivization, the state, not after even during collectivization, the state was a command planned economy, wanted to know how much and what was produced, how much it would export, how much it would invest, and how much resources it would have to pay for industrialization. And many economic historians argued that the Soviet leadership was constricted by ideology and it was stuck in certain ways on industrialization. And it had no choice because it didn't have overseas colonies. And Stalin writes about that in his articles that they had to squeeze the peasantry. And sometimes it is referred to as internal colonization and that it had to get that capital somewhere and the peasantry, majority of the population, had to give it to the new young state. So the policies were quite not modern in their essence, how they were enforced and how they were conceived. In a way, it just assumed that the state or the Kremlin, the leadership knows best. It has epistemological authority and everything else is to follow. But obviously people were revolting against these policies and some perpetrators, and that's why I'm looking at them, did not want to enforce this policies or facilitate them and they would desert their positions and leave. And so these policies, for example, after and during collectivization, it was to bring all land into collective ownership, but de facto it was owned by the state. The two types of collective farms, one was state farms and so owned by the state, but majority were collective farms and they were supposed to be all the land in the collective farm, and all the implements were supposed to be owned by the collective, but de facto it was still the state who decided what was to be sown, what was to be harvested, and how much of it would be left in the village to be consumed by the very collective farms who produced that grain or corn on the cob or whatever. So in a way, these policies were conceived in the top and there was no precedent in history how to enforce them and how it would all work. And there were many conspiracy theories around in the countryside that women would be collectivized or there would be no god, but there were so many different things. Children would be collectivized and they would be brought up as Soviet citizens and so on and so forth. But in practice, the village would consist of one or two or maximum four collective farms. All fields would be redrawn. In 1930, there were the whole policy of redrawing the fields and where and how all the implements would be collected from collective farms. And usually it was in the premises of the former big industrial scale farmers who were dekulakized or dispossessed and deported and sometimes executed and deported sometimes to Siberia or far north in Russia. And some of them actually stayed within the Ukrainian Republic in less productive parts of it. But so their premises, their houses would be the basis of the collective farm. Due to the high number of acts of armed resistance in Ukraine during 1930, in particular, proportionally more than anywhere else in the Soviet Union against collectivization, Stalin even wrote his infamous or famous, it depends which perspective you espouse, article about dizziness with success claiming collectivization was amazing as a policy, and its some, not so good, excesses as he called them, excesses of collectivization. They were just the people on the ground to blame. Sometimes they get dizzy with success. They are so taken aback by the speed of collectivization and the results it’s achieve and that they sometimes allow themselves excesses such as closing the churches in 1931 or synagogues or mosques. And then they sometimes allow themselves cruelty or they want to discredit the Soviet authorities. They were enemies of the people as well. They were already in the rhetoric. But otherwise collectivization is there to stay and is purely voluntary. And as a result, and that was in March 1930, by summer, we have millions of collective farmers leaving collective farms and not wanting to stay there. But it was just a respite for Stalin and a half a year late in the drive to bring people into collective farm started again. And tortures, dekulakization, as I mentioned, dispossession, and deportations. In Ukraine alone, we have 1 million kulaks or industrious and wealthy peasants and farmers. And those who were simply opposed to Soviet policies or critical of them, were deported to Siberia and north of Moscow to the White Sea. And then we have policies that promptly followed collectivization such as the law of five ears of wheat or sometimes three spikelets, but it's official name of this decree is “On the Protection of Socialist Property”. So when collective farms don't work and people starve, they naturally try to obtain food somewhere else. And you go to the fields, you go to the store, warehouses, storehouses, and that's where that property was protected. And you could end up in jail for ten years, or sometimes you would be executed. The majority of those cases, it's about between 2 to 3 years. So if you were caught gleaning or pilfering the fields, collecting something in the fields, some food, some leftovers after the harvest, you could go to labor camp or forced labor to work for free pretty much at the collective farm or indeed you would be put in prison. So those faminogenic policies that were used as well as sealing of the borders, so if you want to go to Russia and Belarus and indeed many Ukrainian peasants did go there. We have thousand stopped at the border and sent back or they went through filtration camps to just ascertain they were not enemies, counter-revolutionaries, or Petliurites, which is the name of the Ukrainian national movement ten years prior, which loomed large in Stalin's correspondence with his envoys to Ukraine, because he always feared there would be some counter-revolution in Ukraine with national undertone, and they would be backed by Poles and Polish counter-revolution is the worst of all. So, yes, all these policies were to keep Ukraine in check, to create conditions under which you would decide who could eat and who could not. Another policy included blacklisting, which means a village or collective farm would be put on the blacklist and all essentials for cooking would be taken out of the village, such as kerosene or gas. Salt, matches, anything to help you to prepare food to cook would be taken out, Because if you have food then it means you didn't submit everything you had to the state to fulfill those quotas which were impossible to fulfill. And then you would be hoarding. And therefore you are not allowed to eat until you fulfill your plan. You meet the target. And just to briefly answer your question, I was looking at people who were facilitating these policies. Who went with searches from house to house to see what people were hoarding and hiding from the state. I also looked at teachers. Obviously village officials, collective farm officials, different activists, communists, party cells and so on and so forth. So to see how they were involved, what they did, what motivated them, how they made sense of their experience later on. So basically, in most cases of genocide, we tend to automatic fully blame the higher echelons. So if you take, for instance, I did my PhD on the Cambodian genocide and we inevitably blame, for instance, the policies that were implemented in the labor camps on Pol Pot and his clique. But what we often overlook is that the injustices, the cruelty of all of these policies are being implemented by the people who are who are at the grassroots level. And I think that's exactly what your thesis does. It focuses on the ordinary people who were involved in the perpetuation of this cruelty. Tell us more about this. Absolutely. This is the best question you could ask me, because even though it's been years since I, and I'm finishing my book about them, it's been years since I've been researching them, I cannot stress enough that, like in any other case of genocide or mass violence, the Holodomor is not unique in that it was made possible because of the participation of ordinary people on the ground. And in the case of the Holodomor, Yes, of course, the Kremlin and its policies. And this is the high command. Likewise the Holocaust wouldn't have been possible without Hitler, but it builds on something that is already there, whether it's antisemitism or low value of human life like it was in the Russian Empire. This habituation of the population to violence, especially with all the Civil War and October revolution that followed, February revolution and all this uncertainty. And it habituated people to violence to begin with. And then in Ukraine after you eliminate civil society and the remnants of the previous state, because Ukraine, after October revolution, had a brief time when it was fighting for its independence, it had its army, it had in its political elite. When you eliminate that, at the same time, it's very easy for the Soviet authorities to position themselves as the only alternative on the ground. There is no other Ukraine, there is only Soviet Ukraine and people on the ground where talking about, majority of the perpetrators in the Holodomor were local Ukrainians, either from the cities or from the villages where they came from and they were working there. It was them who made the Holodomor possible. And a majority of them were conforming. They were following the orders just like they always did. And when we're talking about on the village level, we're talking about 30% of the village being involved in one or another capacity in facilitating the famine, whether it's conducting the searches, whether it was taking account of how many chickens such and such have, or how many cows or how many coats they have or embroider shirts and other valuables that could be exchanged for food later on, or taking sacks with grain to the train station or gaurding them in the warehouse. It's all a mechanism of the faminogenic policy in the countryside that involved many people. And of course, it wouldn't have been possible without the orders from Moscow. And we see them very clearly how they are sent and followed and overseen by Stalin's envoys. And Stalin was acutely aware of what was happening on the ground. He was in touch by telegraph with his envoys, Molotov and Kaganovich. Which Molotov, obviously we know him. He's famous for Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but before that, in 1932-33, he worked on the ground. He went to Odessa in Ukraine, he went to Northern Caucasuses, and he was sending telegraphs to Stalin and it was back and forth, back and forth, how to make district officials in Ukraine pump more grain or how to make them teach them a lesson. So they are talking about political agenda here is not about getting grain. And in fact, grain didn't play a crucial role in 1933 in finance in the industrialization, because simply because during the Great Depression there was overproduction of wheat in the world and there was a crisis in 1933. So the prices were falling and you wouldn't get much for Ukrainian grain on an international market. And it was actually gold, in the first half of 1933, that the Soviet Union was selling, and that provided capital for industrialization. And at the time the Soviet Union did not have any gold mines in the far east. It was buying gold from the population and ta-da. Why was the population selling jewelry, wedding rings, earrings, necklaces or anything valuable? Because it was starving. And the majority of that population was from Ukraine. And we have figures. It's not my research, it's a research by Elena Osokina in the US, but she draws on all the archives in Moscow. She's a Russian historian working in the U.S. She has two books now published and she shows the exports in the 1930s and how industrialization was financed, and it was gold in 1933 from the people desperate to survive. And again, we have people on the ground involved in how it was possible, and even to procure that gold from the starving population in rural Ukraine. So to organize these state owned, not pawn shops, but they were ironically called,“Trade With Foreigners”. They were set up to trade with foreigners, foreign engineers, and foreign specialists, and experts who came to help with industrialization efforts, whether it's a power station or a plant being built. There were American engineers, for example and they would come with foreign currency and these shops facilitated the exchange of that currency into Soviet rubles. But in 1932-33, they were very conveniently set up in rural Ukraine to procure gold and money. Ethnic minorities, Germans, Jews, and Poles who would have from their relatives from abroad. So, yes, people working in those shops were also part of this mechanism of the Holodomor. And Ukraine in that way was unique from, let's say, Kazakhstan, because it had a large Jewish population, obviously it dates back centuries who had gold and they were exchanging that gold for food. So I noticed after reading your thesis that people do not speak about the rank and file, those cadres who were young boys in their teens who were the ones who were implementing these injustices onto the people. What about their stories? Is my big question. As someone who grew up in Ukraine in the 1980s and 90s, when the Holodomor was no longer silenced and these family stories, you could put it in a broader perspective of what was happening, rather than hearing from your grandparents or your parents, what happened to them. You could appreciate the scale of the famine and you could appreciate why it was happening. I was always puzzled that neither in my grandmother's account or my grandfather's account of their experiences during the Holodomor, they never explained why. Who were these people who came and took their provisions away and what happened to them? Only on one occasion, and which was also confirmed in other novels on the topic. My grandmother mentioned that they were punished by divine intervention during World War II, some of them lost a leg, or they became alcoholics or some accident happened to them. Something happened to them and they died or they were maimed. So there was some poetic justice done to them because obviously the states supported these policies and there was no remorse and there was no justice otherwise. And it wasn't a sufficient answer to me. Neither in the novels I read, not in this anecdotal evidence on the subject. And there was no scholarship either because just like with the Holocaust and other cases of mass violence, there had to be either a pause between the event and the reflection, or there was obviously silence imposed and censorship by the Soviet authorities. So together with my colleagues and from a different generation, we looked into social history of the famine and there was Oksana Kis who looked into gender history and how, for example, women's survival strategies differed from an experience from that of men, children, elderly, disabled people, what medics did and so on. And I looked into perpetrators specifically and yes, I used a generational approach because I intuitively thought it would be younger generations believing the ideals, especially there were memoirs left by different perpetrators. And I was lucky to interview one of them, who was 15-16 at the time, and he was Komsomol, and he spoke Bolshevik and he tried to convince me when I was recording him that it was because they believed they were changing things and there was no other way. It wouldn't have been possible even to think about defying the orders or not doing what he was told. Likewise, Soviet dissident Kopelev talks about himself not having blood on his hands. Very convenient. They just, like Eichmann said in his account, and that we did believe some of these Ukrainian peasants were Japanese spies. We did believe that the war was imminent and we needed to procure this grain. And he didn't see any people die. Actually, he did, because I went to that village and I worked in the security services archives and he was very economical with the truth but so are all perpetrators because there is this self-representation motivation. Neither myself, I wouldn't talk about how bad I am. You would only hear good things about myself, obviously, though perpetrators are no different. Very often I think we see this trope, this common trope in all genocides where primary perpetrators or the ones who are most responsible. Usually they always bring up this defense rather, or this excuse that they were doing whatever they did for the greater good of humanity, and they had altruist humanistic motives. And normally what happens typically is mid-level and lower level perpetrators. As you mentioned earlier, say we were just following orders. So these are the typical defenses or excuses that these different categories of perpetrators bring up either in a court setting or even in an informal non-legal setting whenever they need to explain whatever did it. Now in your thesis and again, I picked on little things here, I hope it's okay, but I noticed that you speak about euphemisms and I think we must speak about this subject again, a common trope in a lot of jurisdictions, or rather in many genocides that have taken place. People tend to disguise the horror of what they are doing. So they use euphemisms. So in the case of the Holodomor, you mention the term food difficulties. Of course, this is probably translated, but could you tell us more about the use of these euphemisms? Because for instance, right now what I read is that even newspapers are censoring themselves in the US and they don't use words such as, in the context of Gaza and Israel, they don't use the word occupied territory. They're avoiding these kinds of words which might be inflammatory in terms of the reactions that they will get. So tell us more about these euphemisms that were unique to the Holodomor. Yes, you already mentioned food difficulties. Many of them were quite military in how they sounded for example, grain procurement was called grain front, so as if there was a war. And indeed some perpetrators were interpreting that as a war that wasn't finished in ten years prior. It was an unfinished revolution because peasantry still owned property and in a socialist state or indeed communist state, there should be no private property, certainly not arable land, should remain private property. So many of them used euphemism quite naturally, and it was generally used that they saw as class enemies, peasants as class enemies or unreliable enemies or for difficulties of course. And right now in the war with Ukraine, Russian leadership is using “Special Military Operation”. They don't even call it the war. And all politicians would avoid using the words that would not fit their picture. How they picture the world and whether they did consciously or subconsciously is a different question, but they construct a reality. They they construct a narrative they want to believe. And the narrative in the case of the Holodomor was that there was resistance, there were kulaks, and kurkul in Ukrainian, which the word which was actually the very made up word, especially for Ukraine, it did not exist before Lenin introduced that in Ukrainian , “kurkul”. It was just, you know, to describe somebody who is tight fisted. But there was somebody who is very greedy and after the profit, but otherwise there was no group or social group as such as it was divided. The village community was divided later during the collectivization into kulaks, middle peasants, and poor peasants. So yes, euphemisms were used. And it's interesting how they were later used by dissidents or somebody who wanted to talk about the famine amid the censorship and yes, it's incredible how things changed in the 1980s during glasnost, when it was possible to discuss the evils of the past and everything surfaced and this language was no longer used. But until then, it was incredible how this almost surreal constructed reality just, you know, filled the actual reality. And when you live alongside somebody who killed your family and you cannot even call them what they did, the murderers or you cannot vocalize and articulate your trauma simply because there was no famine, food difficulties, everybody starved and otherwise there was no Holodomor as such. My question now is about something that's very close to my heart at the moment, because I am teaching a course on women, crime, and justice. You mentioned in your thesis that the portrayal of women perpetrators was very different and very unique. And you delved into that a little bit. So women as criminals are usually always portrayed in a skewed fashion. They are seen as abnormal, they are seen as going against their nature. And this nature in those days especially, well thankfully for feminist writing, that's changing that image. But in those days, women criminals were seen to go against in nature as carers and nurturers and protectors. Now tell us how this played out in the portrayal of women criminals or women perpetrators who were involved in the Holodomor. That's a question very close to home simply being a female researcher in Ukraine, which still remains fairly conservative raising this issue in one of the articles, then which was translated and published in Ukraine, it created quite a heated discussion between historians and just general public, simply because these stereotypes are still alive about nurture and nature of women. And the area of violence, especially mass violence, is reserved for the men, it's not natural for women to be involved. But as we know and many studies show that women are capable of perpetrating mass violence just as men are and so, yes, indeed, their portrayal is still in Ukrainian novels and in Ukrainian drama and film is described as abnormal. So it’s motherhood or something is wrong with the mother in question or a women are described as promiscuous or they are monsters and so on and so forth. So this all is present. And when you work in the archives, however you see incongruity between how they are depicted and how they actually experienced that on the ground, which is congruent and well, there is incongruity, but it's pretty much congruent the actual experience, what really happened, with society going through modernization. And that modernization is quite turbulent, quite violent. And women are beaten up. They're subject to sexual gender violence, they're subject to starvation no less than men. And we see they are depicted as promiscuous, extremely unnaturally cruel, and they mete awful and as a result, they are punished. There is also justice, not only for committing violence, but also for not meeting gender expectations and transgressions. So crossing that line, becoming a man cutting their hair short, wearing leather jackets, short skirts, and being modern woman, trying to become this Soviet emancipated woman. This is not what Ukrainian traditional rural society was expecting of them. And in fact, when I was researching them, they will be in my book this is not in my dissertation in more detail as to how vital “Shock Workers” in the countryside, these young female collective farmers who were driving tractors, so defying all these gender norms. Who were jumping with a parachute from the planes, who were shooting rifles, who were part of all these Soviet youth organizations and just embracing the opportunities that were offered to them, but as well as perpetrating for the Holodomor, because otherwise they wouldn't be activists and celebrated. When I'm looking at their experience, it tells a completely different story. But they were trying to make sense of the famine as well and their participation and some of them actually showed remorse while others said, well, this is how life is and those were the best years of my life and they were motivated. And I could see that a very few of them actually were motivated by ideology. Majority of them were just jumping at a chance to have new shoes, to have new clothes, to go and study, to see Moscow, to see Stalin and we have video footage to show that they actually enjoyed themselves. So for women, how they experienced the Holodomor, starvation and perpetration, was very diverse and dependent, if I'm not mistaken, on the individual. But also, yes, unfortunately, gender stereotypes persist and that's why we historians help to slightly chip at those stereotypes. That's absolutely true. So I have a question now about empathy. Very often genocide scholars speak about the importance of empathy in terms of even just preventing genocide, preventing violence. But I think whenever I imagined or I pictured that whole setting when I read your dissertation, because you spoke so much about the rank and file, for me, the rank and file, who indulged in these cruel actions against others. For me, there were two categories of them, or actually, let's not reduce anything to binaries here, but let's just say, I sort of thought about what if I was there and I was in that time in that space, and for instance, I was deprived of food. What I'm trying to get at is that the quality of empathy, the emotion of empathy, the sentiment of empathy can only be afforded in good times, in times of luxury, when everything is comfortable and when we are given what we need, we are not, for instance, facing hunger or the deprivation of basic needs. Now, among all of these perpetrators, among all of these rank and file, what I was thinking about was how many people were pushed to also be cruel and go against their nature and not be able to afford the luxury of empathy. So is this something that you probably confronted or had to deal with or thought about while doing your thesis? Absolutely. And I think this is the crux. I mean, You are just at the heart of the Holodomor here, especially during the famine, when you are reduced to the basic instincts of just survival, really, when you choose between whether it's your children or your neighbor's children who are going to starve to death and indeed, that perpetrator that I mentioned, who was 15-16 and Komsomol at the time when I was recording him, he was telling me in Bolshevik terms about how they believed it. But also he mentioned that his mother's legs were already swollen because they were starving. So she was swollen with hunger. And between the lines I could read that, not complying, questioning, or refusing to follow the orders of his uncle, who was a headmaster of the school. So one of the perpetrators on the ground who organized the logistics. all these young high school students going around and collecting food. He spoke about general context within which there was very little room for compassion. And yet we have these moral dilemmas, quandary, that these perpetrators faced. I mentioned this article by Stalin, “Dizzy with Success” and there was reaction to that article by the perpetrators themselves who wrote to Stalin himself, to the Kremlin, to local committees in Ukraine. When I worked in the archives in Ukraine, this is where I actually fished them out of local committees in which in these letters they questioned, how could we step back when we went that far already listing and in very vivid detail, the experiences on the ground when they had to sentence a family to death by taking their meager possessions and foodstuffs and saying, and now we've done it for nothing. You, Stalin, let collective farmers leave the collective farms and we already did so much. And so actually admitted to committing the crime. And then Stalin going back on his policy and allowing people to leave the collective farms was a betrayal for all the sacrifice, moral sacrifice they made as perpetrators of mass violence. And we also have cases when people were deserting their positions or crying, and sometimes children were describing their parents who were perpetrators experiences, how they would conduct a search, come home and cry because they were doing that to their distant relatives or friends or neighbors. And I believe that is the special feature of the Holodomor, if you like, as a case of mass violence and genocide as a famine, that it left very little room for maneuver and for this empathy. So for those people who I call them compromised perpetrators. For them, it was something they later spoke about either to their families or to their readers in memoirs, or sometimes they just kept it until they died and never mentioned it again because it was too painful. You resort to plays, novels, memoirs and poetry, among other things, to note the role of the rank and file in the Holodomor. What were the challenges that you had to face in collecting this material? And in the course of analyzing it? Yes, this is excellent question, because how can we trust a fiction essentially, right? And I didn't. And that's why I went to the archives, so, with Kopelev leaving memoirs he named the villages where he went. And I went to those villages and collected oral memory and as well as just interviewed people. The same with Stakhanovites, these shock workers. I went to their families, I listened to one side of the story and then I went to the archives and, looked what was recorded and what other statements they made. So I was reading their testimonies in tandem with archival documents. And sometimes I could see they were lying completely. And my research was reminding me of detective work. My supervisor, very often in the event, called me a sleuth because you collect different pieces of evidence to see what actually possibly and probably happened. And this I borrow from Christopher Browning when he said that if a perpetrator describe something in very great detail, then it most probably was true. Whether it was probable or possible and sometimes they go against self-representation. So their own personal interest. And there was another account which I found very moving and poignant and uncanny, if you like, by Vasily Grossman and I interviewed his daughter. I went to Moscow for that. That was before the war. Well before the war. And she told me that that account of the perpetrator, a female perpetrator, was based on a real person and gave me her details. And then later I found out that he did her poetic justice because the heroine or this antagonist in his novel died of cancer. And she repented and she made a confession that she really regretted what she was involved in the Holodomor. But in real life, the prototype was far from that, and she enjoyed the benefits, the cooperation the secret service offered her. She participated in the Holodomor. She reported on Soviet dissident writers, and many of them ended up in Gulag, and she received, for that, a two bedroom apartment not far from the Kremlin. So she really cooperated. So that's to answer your question about how you work with novels that are full of poetic justice and memoirs that are full of self-representation, in good way. And the answer would be try to draw on many other independent of each other sources, and then you actually see what was probable. possible, and most likely that happened and you meet somewhere in the middle. So that would be the answer. Tell us more about the differences that you felt existed among all of these texts that you explored. When we had a chat informally, when were here in Arizona, in Flagstaff, we talked about how these different works could be distinguished on the basis of the people who were writing them. So people within Ukraine had a story to tell. People who were part of the diaspora community had a different story to tell. So there are all of these different perspectives on who were the real culprits of the Holodomor, and these are some of the distinctions that you actually noticed. And you wrote an article, a full blown article on that as well, so tell us more about that. Yes, that's interesting because we observe specific tropes and how they describe the famine one trope and it relates to the agency who did it in a way. So people are staying in the Soviet Union and more or less loyal to the regime. And I'm talking about everybody on the ground to the very top. And I did mention in Flagstaff that even the general secretary of the Communist Party, Brezhnev, decorated man, and which was associated with the 1970s, late 1960s and early 1980s, so the golden part of the Soviet history. He himself was in Ukraine, in central Ukraine, procuring grain from the peasants as part of student trade union at the time in 1932-33. And he in his memoir too, describes that as necessary. Yeah, there were some excesses and kulaks were not happy, but otherwise these people would describe it as something they embraced because it was part of the Soviet history and it was part of necessity. And they didn't preoccupy themselves with human rights, or whether it was empire, whether it was colonialism, in effect, it was in non-Russian Soviet republics. They didn't ask these questions in their tropes. They embraced it to say, I call it an embraced agency. And then the were people in diaspora who left the Soviet Union during World War II, for example, or even prior to that, later that dissidents and Ukrainian nationalists in particular so he interpreted the Holodomor as an assault on Ukraine, one of many in Ukraine, the history which is rich for its conflicts with Russia. And they saw that the Holodomor was possible primarily because of the Russians. So they placed the agency in Moscow and there was of course antisemitism and that as well. So it was Judeo-Bolshevism, especially during World War II. So that trope is there as well. But they place it firmly in Moscow, so without Moscow, nothing would have happened. And the Holodomor is an attack on Ukraine, its soul, its body, which peasants were associated with, and ultimately only an independent Ukraine could protect itself from another sort and which we are now witnessing in a way, this interpretation does make it logical. And then there is a third trope, which I think is the most nuanced, and it shows how ordinary people for banal reasons sometimes to settle scores or to get somebody's wife or husband or to revenge for the past wrongs they embrace, not embrace, but they do participate in the mass violence. They do kill their neighbors and there is a myriad of reasons why people commit violence. Yes, ideology plays a role, but ultimately it is a tragedy and that trope could be found in many novels by dissident writers as well as some after Ukraine became independent. But it requires a lot of reflection to say that the agency is dispersed so there are different agents, just like in any cases of genocide and mass violence. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand, with our guest, Daria Mattingly. To our listeners, don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.