近期有一部與烏克蘭有關的電影「烏克蘭悲歌」"Bitter Harvest"（https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARGFzk0x0G8），可作為同學在短時間內對這個苦難的國度產生臨場感的捷徑。然而，任何影片的敘事角度都是主觀的，甚至可能因執著於某個視角而忽略了其他群體的感受。劉老師為此訪問了4/24即將來所演講的烏克蘭訪問學者Igor Piliaiev教授。他很熱心的提供了他的視野，讓我們看見了不同族群對同一歷史事件敘事角度的感受。這部影片可以在圖書館四樓借到（現場觀賞不可外借），再搭配Igor Piliaiev教授的說明，想必感受更為深刻。

On 2019-03-24 01:21, Игорь Пиляев wrote:

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your information with regard to our planned meeting and arrangement at the Institute on April 24.

As you've asked, I send beneath my comments on "Bitter Harvest".

Propagating all over the world the knowledge about Holodomor as a terrible crime committed by Bolsheviks against Ukrainians is very necessary and important in order to discover the truth about Bolshevism and to prevent similar crimes in the future wherever they potentially might occur.

Meanwhile, to my mind, The Bitter Harvest is fully based on the white-black dichotomy view. It is clearly not only anti-Communist but also culturally anti-Russian (from this viewpoint Russification is almost equal to such catastrophy as Holodomor but it fails to get out of the cognitive dissonance: how can anyone forcefully russify Rus? (the name of the vast state with capital in Kyiv (Kiev) in the 9-13th centuries, and then the title of vast lands in the Galicia-Volyn Principality, Lithuania, Poland and Rzech Pospolita respectively during 14-18 centuries).

The introduction indoctrinating thesis of the film is historically and ethically quite disputable:

The film starts with the voice behind the scenes telling that the death of the tsar (massacred by the Bolsheviks without a trial together with his family – wife, 4 virgin daughters and 14 years old son - in Yekaterinburg in July 1918, a year and a half after his voluntary abdication) allegedly "brought Ukraine several glorious years of independence, but soon the Soviet power destroyed everything."

In fact the Ukrainian People’s Republic as an independent state with the democratic legitimacy existed only since January 22, 1918 until March 1918 when it was occupied by the Central powers’ troops according to the Ukrainian-German-Austrian-Hungarian separate peace treaty of Brest dated January 27, 1918. In April 1918 General Pavlo Skoropadsky backed by Germans accomplished coup d’etat and promulgated himself as Hetman of Ukraine. But in fact he Ukrainian Hetmanat was a fully dependent the Central Powers’ Protectorat. After the Germans’ defeat and the consequent fall of Hetmanat in December 1918 the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic was proclaimed restored by rebellious Otaman Simon Petliura but in fact it was only his military dictatorship without any legitimate succession with the previous one and it controlled Kiev (Kyiv) only since December 14, 1918 till February 4, 1919 and since April 1919 controlled only much lesser part of Ukraine than the Bolsheviks or the Whites. In November 1919 the Galician Army – the major and most disciplined part of Petliura’s Army – abandoned him and joined Denikin’s White Army (then after the strategic defeat suffered by the Whites from the Reds the Ukrainian Galician Army went to the side of the Red Army). Finally Petliura fled to Poland in December 1919 and since that time never played an independent role.

The film builds up the emotional-semantic row: Stalin-Kremlin-Moscow-Russians-Holodomor.

But in reality probably the most furious and large-scale resistance to Bolsheviks was offered by Russian Don Cossacks and White Volunteer Army since November 1917 until 1920 as well as by Tambov region Russian peasants in 1921 (the Tambov rebellion). When Bolsheviks took Kiev for the first time on February 6, 1918 they shot down there in one day about 2 thousand former Russian army’s officers which responded and came for the declared registration procedure at the Opera Theatre while only a few Ukrainian nationalists were pursued and repressed.

In 1919 comparable numbers of people of the Ukrainian origin served respectively in Petliura’s Army, in the Red Army and in the White Army (approximately per 100 000 in each).

In automn 1919 – at the midst of the Civil war – most of modern territory of Ukraine was controlled not by Petliura’s Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and not by the Bolsheviks’ Red Army but by Denikin’s Volunteers’ (White) Army (officially supported by Entente) which advocated for convening the democratically elected All-Russian Constituent Assembly (forcefully dissolved by Bolsheviks in January 1918) to decide the political destinies of Russia and Ukraine.

Just Bolsheviks carried out strong policy of korenizatsia (Ukrainization) during the 1920s on the territory of the Soviet Ukraine since at that period they considered the Russian anti-Bolshevik resistance to be their main enemy (for examle, about 2-3 mln. people, including 100 thousand military officers (!) of the former Russian army, escaped from Bolsheviks and lived abroad as Russian political emigrees, many of them ready to renew the anti-Bolshevik struggle, only in Berlin there were about 300 thsd White emigrees in 1922 and in Paris – 100 thsd).

The first great famine under the Bolsheviks struck the Volga region of Russia (Povolzhie) in 1921-1922 and caused the toll of 5 million famine victims. The estimates of the 1932-1933 Holodomor victims on the territory of Ukraine vary within 3.9-7 million while in Russia – 3.2 million and in Kazakhstan – 1.2 million.

It is also notable that the main negative character of the film Russian Bolshevik Comissar Sergey Koltsov has a very evident face and appearance of a Mongol Khan’s Baskak and played by Tamer Hassan - an English actor of Turkish Cypriot descent. It should obviously draw parallels to a spectator that Stalin and Bolshevik are successors of the Mongols’ Horde. It is an expression of a widely spread among the Central and Eastern Europe post-Communist political and cultural circles as well as among the Ukrainian diaspora in the North America the ideological perception of "New Orientalism" perceiving the East as a culturally backward, perfidious and despotic by spirit antagonist to the West (see: Lyubchenko, O. The Ukrainian Crisis: A Case of 'New Orientalism'. Acta Politologica. 2017, Vol. 9. Issue 1. P. 45-60).

Evidently, for the flm’s sponsor and the scenario’s author their ethnonational values and ‘truth’ are above all and the Friend-Foe dichotomy within this coordinate system is absolute. Their anti-modernization, anti-urbanization rustic culture as if stagnant for a millenium is their ideal, their model of paradise and perfection on the earth. To restore this culture some Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals hailed another totalitarian devil Hitler against Stalin and then after the former’s defeat were to escape at first to Germany and then to the North America. Today their children and grandchildren are quite active and influential not only among the Ukrainian diaspora of Canada and USA but also as the strongly ethnonationalist Ukrainian lobby in the US and Canadian establishment. Their ideology appeals to Dmitro Dontsov’s and Stepan Bandera’s integral nationalism based (as, for examle, Timothy Snyder, John-Paul Himka, Serhiy Kvit et al. substantially argued) on the fascist totalitarian ideology.

They propagate their substantially ethnototalitarian ideas in historically multiethnic, multicultural Ukraine, where half a population lives in the very urbanized areas capable to produce space missiles, aircraft, scientific discoveries, etc. And they wish to transform Ukraine (which in 1991 produced GDP (PPP) roughly equal to that of the then mainland China but today produces less GDP than in 1991) into "great agrarian power" - the oxymoron they strive for amidst the globalized highly dynamic and competitive modern world.

Best regards,

Igor