Letters from Kharkov

A few days ago, the Kijevo-Mohylana Academy in Kyiv hosted the presentation of the book “Lettere da Kharkov. La carestia in Ucraina e nel Caucaso del Nord nei rapporti dei diplomatici italiani, 1932-1933” by the Italian historian Andrea Graziosi, containing the reports of the Italian diplomats about the famine that in 1932-1933 killed nearly 10 million Ukrainians. “The Ukrainian population is deeply bonded to the Italian culture – commented the Italian Ambassador to Ukraine, Pietro Giovanni Donnici, according to whom “Golodomor is a fairly unknown tragedy”. Hence his gratitude “to historian Graziosi for having looking for a truth on which Europe has kept silent for years. Italians have made their contribution to the collective memory of these populations”. According to mgr. Ivan Jurcoviè, apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, “the presentation of the truth about the famine in Ukraine is an invitation to the Italian diplomats and the other peoples of Western Europe to be as brave as Italy has been and start to speak about things that have been kept discreetly under wraps so far. The time has come to speak of the other tragedies that communism sowed all over the USSR, such as the murder of millions of martyrs for their faith”.One of the worst tragedies ever. “ The documents sent to Rome by the Italian diplomats to the USSR about the famine of 1932-33 force us to reckon with one of the greatest tragedies of the XX century in Europe. They have dramatically changed my understanding of Soviet history and the way I look at the last century”, said Andrea Graziosi. “The news of their publication in Ukraine filled me with joy, and I think it should also be translated into English and Russian, not least because these Letters, which immediately turned out to be the best sources available, remained such, even after the opening of part of the former Soviet archives, which also unearthed some valuable documents”.The relations with Fascism . Going through the history of those years, Graziosi noticed that, “despite its anti-communism, fascism continued being in favour of the new State, by rebuilding, after the formal recognition in 1923, a wide consular network. The intelligence it sent was carefully read by Benito Mussolini. A large part of the reports that arrived in Rome, including the Letters, had been initialled by him with a blue pencil, meaning that Mussolini was perfectly aware of the Soviet tragedies. However if we go and look at the newspapers of those days, especially those of spring-summer 1933, we notice, went on the historian, “that the headlines about the USSR, instead of speaking of the famine and the ‘crimes of communism’, announce the successes of the Italian-Soviet friendship. In the early Thirties, the Soviet experiment was judged by the Italian press as comparatively good, as an attempt, wrong maybe but made in good faith, to get out of the crisis of the ‘Western democracies'”.The “mood” of those days. “After all, even if it had wanted to, fascism would have had problems using the Letters for an ideological war”, explained Graziosi. “Notwithstanding all the words that one might have added, the ‘bad ones’ were too clearly the State and its establishment, the political police a despot, and this could not please those who – although on a completely different level and using infinitely lower doses of violence and cruelty – still fed on such myths. Speaking of the extraordinary quality of the Letters, one should keep in mind however that they reflect the rumours and the mood of those days as well. There is in particular one report that, even if it blamed Stalin and his collaborators for what was happening, has a definitely anti-Semitic tone”.The figures. “Between the end of 1932 and the summer of 1933, in the USSR famine killed about seven times more people than the Great Terror of 1937-38 in less than half the time – announced Graziosi -. Those months were the peak of a series of famines that had begun back in 1931, the turning point of the decade and at the same time the most important event in Soviet history before the war. With its five million victims (not including the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even one million and counting, who had died in Kazakhstan and elsewhere since 1930), the famine of 1932-33 was also the worst in Soviet history (both in 1921-22 and 1946-47 one to two million people died), on which it has left a political, psychological and demographic mark, which is still visible, as visible as the mark it has left on the life of the succeeding states, first and foremost Ukraine and Kazakhstan”.