CCRI Prof. Cheryl Madden holds the Order of Princess Olha medallion

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

WARWICK — A history professor at the Community College of Rhode Island, who has been honored for helping to document the extent of the Ukrainian genocide and to make it known to Western audiences, will be a principal speaker at the opening of a month-long commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the “unknown genocide.”

Prof. Cheryl Madden said people in the West know so little about the starvation of an estimated 10 million Ukrainians under the rule of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin that it shows how effective he was in terrorizing the populace and manipulating the flow of information to keep it from the outside world.

“Even today, I find older Ukrainians who are afraid to talk about it,” says Madden. “Under Stalin, if you even used the word Holodomor — which means murder by starvation — a person could be shot and often was.”

Madden, a lifetime Rhode Islander with no Ukrainian roots, said she came upon the story by accident when she went to Ukraine in 1999, under a Metcalf grant from the Rhode Island Foundation, to do research for a novel she was writing.

After hearing stories of the forced famine that occurred in 1932 and 1933, she went home and did further research. The resulting exploration led her to letters that had been written by Ukrainians to friends and relatives in the United States at the time of the famine.

The policy of mass starvation came about, Madden says, because Stalin was desperate for grain that he could trade on the open markets, since most banks would not recognize the ruble. To answer that need, according to historians, Stalin set out on a policy of confiscating all the available grain in Ukraine and withholding it from the local population.

“There was a deliberate campaign of starvation,” says Madden. “Anyone over the age of 12 could be shot for the appropriation of Soviet property. Property, as they defined it, could include any food at all, even a dead horse. I read a letter that said, ‘We are killing the cat today, because there is nothing else.’ ”

Knowing that the people were desperate, she says, the Soviets set up a special store where the populace could “purchase” a loaf of bread in exchange for a painting or a wedding ring.

Yet, the most catastrophic aspect of the policy was the sealing of the borders around the region of Ukraine to ensure that no one could get out, and then wait for everyone to starve, says Madden.

She says that while some journalists attempted to report what was happening, Stalin was able to discredit their reports with the help of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, the paper’s Moscow correspondent. Duranty had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports from the Soviet Union, including an interview with the Soviet dictator, who told the world there was no famine.

After a second trip to Ukraine in 2002, Madden published an annotated bibliography of materials on the famine, The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933: Holodomor. That, along with writings and reviews in various academic journals, have made their way into libraries and universities all over the world. In 2003, as a result of that work, she was invited to the United Nations to participate in a commemoration of the genocide, though because of opposition from Russia, the United Nations has not formally declared it genocide.

Last month, the Parliamentary Assembly European Union passed a resolution calling the Holodomor “an appalling crime against the Ukrainian people and against humanity.”

Madden said she does not know if her own writings had any influence on the European Union’s deliberations, but observed that she recently received a letter from a child in Ukraine who wrote that her teacher had told the class to read her bibliography as a way of learning about the genocide.

Madden, who teaches history of Western civilization, said she was surprised last year when she was notified that Ukrainian president Victor Yuschenko announced he was awarding her the Order of Princess Olha award, the highest civilian award that can be given to a woman, for helping to make the genocide known. Ukraine’s first lady, Katerina Yushchenko, personally delivered the award to her last February at a ceremony in Washington.

The CCRI exhibit, by Erika Namaka, an art director at Rhode Island School of Design, is scheduled to be shown in Room 4080 at the Knight campus, through Dec. 5. The opening, at 5 p.m. tomorrow, will feature a presentation by Madden, as well as a showing of a short film about the Holodomor made by local playwright and director, David Eliet, in collaboration with theater students in Ukraine. A reception will follow.

rdujardi@projo.com