The 76th anniversary of the man-made famine that killed millions across the country was commemorated on Nov. 28.
The 76th anniversary of the Holodomor famine that killed millions across Ukraine was commemorated across the country on Nov. 28. Leading politicians were among a large crowd that gathered at the memorial in Glory Park to place candles and offer prayers.
Holodomor, or death by hunger, was unleashed by Stalin in 1932-1933 as part of an attempt to forcibly collectivize Soviet agriculture. It coincided with a systematic attempt to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism, which was seen as a threat to the integrity of the Soviet Union.
A separate ceremony was held in Lviv on Nov. 28 to rebury 602 bodies found in an unmarked grave four years ago. They had been shot trying to flee a second famine in 1946-1947, when Soviet forces seized grain to feed other parts of Eastern Europe following the end of World War II.
President Victor Yushchenko has assiduously promoted commemoration of the Holodomor and pushed for international recognition of the famine as genocide of the Ukrainian people.
But the question of whether the famine was genocide or not still provokes debate. Not only does the Russian leadership deny this, saying it was directed at a number of areas of the Soviet Union, not just Ukraine, but a November survey by the Horshenin Institute revealed that 66 percent of Ukrainians believe that the famine was not genocide. Thirty-two percent believe it was, while two percent say the Holodomor didn’t happen at all.
Kost Bondarenko, director of the Horshenin Institute, said that Yushchenko’s attempts to convince Ukrainians that the Holodomor was genocide have suffered because the question became politicized.
“Yushchenko uses the word ‘Holodomor’ too often, and in this way devalues the meaning of the tragedy by politicizing it,” Bondarenko said. “Yushchenko failed to convince people that it was genocide because instead of using arguments, he started to talk in slogans, which are ineffective.”
Bondarenko added that people have a negative attitude towards the idea that the Holodomor was genocide simply because of their lack of trust in the authorities who are promoting this idea.
Stanislav Kulchytskiy, a leading Ukrainian historian who has carried out extensive research on the Holodomor, agreed that politicization has hindered a sober understanding of what happened. “There’s a lot of work ahead to convince Ukrainians [that the Holodomor was genocide]. Politicians have politicized this issue to such an extent that historians must now take the lead,” he said.
Kulchytskiy explained that people tend to confuse the two stages of the famine, which began as a famine across the Soviet Union in 1932. But towards the end of the year, repression was stepped up in Ukraine and the Kuban (where two-thirds of inhabitants were Ukrainian) by seizing all food from the peasants. “The aim was to destroy the potential for uprisings, which was building up in Ukraine and threatening to explode. The terror by hunger was a primitive weapon used to discipline the population,” Kulchytskiy said.
Yushchenko’s attempts to gain international recognition of the Holodomor have been boosted by attempts in North America and the United Kingdom to increase public awareness of the forced famine, which lags behind other mass murders, such as the Holocaust.
The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association launched a campaign recently to persuade governments across the world to recognize Holodomor as genocide, by sending a postcard featuring the words of Raphael Lemkin, who is known as the father of the U.N.’s genocide convention. He described the “destruction of the Ukrainian nation” as the “classic example of Soviet genocide.”
A documentary was broadcast last month in the U.K. about Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who defied travel restrictions to report on the famine from Ukraine. His diaries are currently on display at the University of Cambridge.
Rory Finnin, a lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at Cambridge, said that stories like Jones’ can provide a link for modern Western readers to something that can seem distant in time and space.
“It’s a different angle on the story that is not academic, or focused on statistics,” he said. “The immediacy of his diaries is profound, and they help to refocus the attention from the political fighting to the voices of the victims. Listening is the best kind of recognition.”
