By Steve Gutterman, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW The 1930s famine that killed millions of peasants, mainly in Soviet Ukraine, should not be considered genocide, Russia's lawmakers said in a resolution Wednesday.
Renowned writer and Soviet-era dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn backed the Kremlin line on the divisive issue, dismissing Ukrainian claims that the famine was genocide as a "fable."
The 370-56 vote in Russia's lower parliament house and the rare comment from the 89-year-old Solzhenitsyn were a pointed rejection of claims by Ukrainian leaders that the Soviet authorities engineered the famine to target Ukrainians.
They came amid Russian anger over the pro-Western Ukrainian leadership's drive to join NATO, which will decide at a summit this week whether to grant the nation a road map for membership.
Russia has opposed the Western alliance's eastward expansion and is particularly concerned about potential membership for Ukraine, a large country with far closer cultural and historical ties to Russia than any other that has joined NATO.
Historians agree that the 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet authorities under dictator Josef Stalin to force peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms.
Ukraine, with its rich farmlands, suffered the most. Authorities confiscated grain from village after village and prohibited residents from leaving, effectively condemning them to starvation.
Some are convinced the famine targeted Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Others argue authorities set out to eradicate private landowners as a social class and say the Soviet Union sought to pay for its rapid industrialization with grain exports at the expense of starving millions of its own people.
"There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country," the Russian State Duma resolution said.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is leading a bid to gain international recognition of the famine as an act of genocide.
Solzhenitsyn criticized that effort in a front-page comment in the daily Izvestia, writing that the famine also affected Russia's neighboring Kuban region.
"This provocateur's cry of 'genocide' began to germinate decades later -- first secretly, in the moldy minds of chauvinists maliciously set against (Russia), and now elevated to government circles of today's Ukraine," he wrote.
Solzhenitsyn suggested the Ukrainian appeal might be supported by Western governments for geopolitical purposes. "They have never understood our history, all they need is a ready fable, even if it is an insane one," he wrote.
In Ukraine on Tuesday to stress U.S. support for its leaders' NATO aspirations, President Bush visited a memorial honoring famine victims along with Yushchenko and their wives.
A document signed during Bush's visit said that "Ukraine and the United States will closely cooperate to promote remembrance and increase public awareness of the 1932-33 man-made Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine, including within the framework of the international organizations." Holodomor, or death by hunger, is what Ukrainians call the famine.
The Duma warned the West to stay away from the issue.
"This tragedy does not have -- and cannot have -- any internationally recognized indications of genocide and should not be used as a tool for modern political speculation," it said.
President Vladimir Putin's government has clashed with former Soviet bloc nations over interpretations of 20th century events, accusing them of seeking to rewrite history and cast Moscow as a culprit.
Yushchenko has said up to 10 million Ukrainians died of hunger in 1932 and 1933. Stanislav Kulchitsky, a respected Ukrainian historian, believes the number is closer to 3.5 million.
Under Stalin, who ruled from 1922 until his death in 1953, some 20 million people are estimated to have been executed, imprisoned or deported to other parts of the former Soviet Union under Stalin, and more than 10 million of those are believed to have died.
Associated Press writer Mike Eckel contributed to this report.
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