About Лихоліття України (Troubled Times in Ukraine), Vasyl Mudry’s 1933 Booklet on the Holodomor

Throughout the interwar period, Vasyl Mudry closely observed the international situation, covering developments in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s (although under censorship restrictions) as a columnist for Dilo, the most influential and oldest Ukrainian newspaper. As the situation for Ukrainians in the USSR continued to deteriorate in the 1930s – terror reigned, both for the elites and the peasantry Ukrainian political forces consolidated in 1933 around an urgent and practical campaign to aid the victims of the Holodomor.

Galicians played the leading role in these efforts, in particular the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO – the largest Ukrainian political party in interwar Poland) and Vasyl Mudry personally. In July 1933 as head of the Business Committee of the Ukrainian Public Committee for the Rescue of Ukraine, he initiated the establishment of a network of committees to help the starving in Ukraine and called on Ukrainians around the world to create similar public aid organisations. Considerable funds and material aid were collected, but the Soviet authorities turned down offers of assistance, claiming that the famine was a fabrication of anti-Soviet forces.

This large-scale information campaign of the Committee for the Rescue of Ukraine deserves close study. Their network managed to disseminate information to Ukrainians in all corners of the world, and through them, to the foreign press. The network also played an important role in obtaining information about the situation in Ukraine. Despite strict censorship, letters from relatives did sometimes make it across the border, and the recipients then forwarded them to local committee branches.

It was not only Soviet agents that sought to hinder dissemination of information about the
Holodomor but also the neighbouring states of Poland and Romania. Harboring illusions of
normalising relations with the USSR, in the summer of 1932, Poland signed a non-aggression
pact, according to which any action directed at the territory of Ukraine was considered a hostile
act. Later, in 1933, the Soviet authorities resorted to direct threats against Poland through
diplomatic channels, and the Polish administration banned public events in support of starving
Ukraine after the Ukrainian community in Galicia launched the relief campaign and established
the network of organisations in the summer of 1933, planning a mass public action for the end of
October 1933.

In Troubled Times in Ukraine, Mudry analyses Bolshevik policy, starting with the 1917 coup and the subsequent war against Ukraine, through the Bolsheviks’ nationalities policies of the 1920s, to various aspects of the Bolsheviks' colonial policy, which he called ‘a policy of economic exploitation and ruin in Ukraine.’ He devotes most of his attention to agricultural policy, addressing the brutal exploitation that was a component of the Holodomor. A section of the brochure consists of reprints of Soviet documents. In the brochure, Mudry also includes a selection of materials on the famine in Ukraine from the foreign press, primarily English-language but also French sources. The last part of the brochure consists of letters from Soviet Ukraine written in the spring and summer of 1933.

After the brochure’s publication and wide distribution, the Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) in mid-November 1933 declared virtually all Ukrainians abroad to be enemies of the USSR. Vasyl Mudry characterized these resolutions as a declaration of war on the entire Ukrainian national movement, not only in Ukraine, but throughout the world. Troubled Times in Ukraine constitutes only a small part of Vasyl Mudry's interwar legacy, collected in the three-volume edition Vasyl Mudry. The Art of the Possible: A Democrat in the Age of Dictatorship and Totalitarianism, which convincingly demonstrates the tradition of Ukrainian democratic thought.