Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Any estimate of the Holodomor need not take into account Ukrainians who could have been born, or those murdered in subsequent purges.

to determine the Holodomor’s official death toll, according to Australian Stefan Romaniw, its chair.

Such an effort is commendable, since the Holodomor’s detractors, distortionists and deniers use the lack of a concrete figure as among their key arguments.

Among the Jewish community’s successes in raising the public’s Holocaust awareness is the uncontested, universally agreed upon casualty figure of six million Jews murdered, and six million non-Jews.

Unfortunately today’s Holodomor scholars have fewer research options and materials than Holocaust scholars. Whereas the Nazi’s meticulously documented their atrocities and these records were immediately available after the war, the less-than-meticulous Soviet authorities' documents on the Holodomor only became available a few years ago, about 60 years after the fact.

As a result, the Holodomor lacks clarity, and establishing it will prove challenging. Even the most respected historians disagree, with estimates ranging from 3.2 million (Ukrainian Stanislav Kulchytskiy) to 7.5 million (the late American Holodomor scholar James Mace).

In its quest for a final casualty figure, the coordinating committee should convene a commission, inviting the world’s pre-eminent Holodomor scholars, including Ukrainians Kulchytskiy, Yuriy Shapoval, Vasyl Maroshko, Volodymyr Serhiychuk and British historian Robert Conquest (Mace died in 2004), as well as Holodomor Researchers Association leaders, such as Luhansk native Iryna Mahrytska, who traveled to villages and recorded testimonies offered by survivors with pen and paper – all they could afford without government support.

The commission should stick to the cold evidence: any estimate of the Holodomor need not take into account Ukrainians who could have been born, or those murdered in subsequent Soviet purges. It needs to determine a figure that most accurately captures the number of casualties directly inflicted by the Holodomor in order to most effectively refute the detractors and deniers.

An official, accurate figure on the Holodomor's 75th commemoration will further the cause of gaining its recognition as genocide by the UN, the Russian Federation and Great Britain, all of which have yet to do so.