Few people embrace feasting like we Americans, and soon we’ll belly up to our dining room tables, loosen our belts a notch or two, and dig into Thanksgiving dinner, the gladiatorial games of gluttony.
The annual meal that proves beyond any doubt that if something’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing. Pterodactyl-sized birds will be carved, Himalayan portions of stuffing heaped upon plates, and any remaining abdominal spaces will be filled with pumpkin and pecan pies topped with whipped cream. Thanksgiving is to dining what spring break is to binge drinking.
A few days before our joyous, exhausting journey of communal consumption, Ukrainians marked a very different occasion, a true antithesis of Thanksgiving – the Holodomor. Remembered on the fourth Saturday of each November, this was one of the history’s great man-made crimes, visited upon the Ukrainian people in 1932-33 by the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. Through his mad policy of agricultural collectivization, the peasant class was crushed at an incalculable cost.
Impossible production targets for grains were imposed upon farmers by the state. Wheat, corn, potato, sunflower seed and other crops were mercilessly confiscated for sale overseas. Rural families often had their only cow or pig taken away. Homes, fields, and storerooms were searched by special brigades for any food that might have been hidden. The grimly named “Law on Five Ears of Grain,” enacted in August 1932, made stealing even a few stalks of grain from state storehouses a capital crime. The result of course was massive famine.
Historians debate the exact death toll, but the best estimates are that between three-and-a-half and five million people starved over two nightmarish years. Some were driven to cannibalism by their desperate hunger. There were even isolated cases of parents killing and consuming their own children.
The Holodomor is a stark reminder that being Russia’s neighbor means living in a state of permanent danger, that the beast to the east cannot be trusted.
Stalin was arguably mankind’s foremost monster, with the blood of perhaps as many as 20 million people on his hands, ranging from the victims of political purges, to ethnic minorities deported to remote parts of the vast Soviet empire, to those who froze or died of overwork in the notorious gulag prison camp system.
Yet the Holodomor may have been his crowning criminal achievement in that it not only broke the back of Ukraine’s small farmers, forcing the survivors to accept the Soviet collectivist system, but it also crushed a burgeoning movement of Ukrainian national identity.
It is no accident that as Vladimir Putin has moved to exercise near total control over Russian society, his fellow strongman Stalin has undergone a bit of a rehabilitation. Statues have been erected to the mustachioed despot in various cities and towns, including one at a Moscow metro station and another, chillingly, in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol.
The prominent Russian human rights organization Memorial, which did so much to document and publicize the atrocities of the Soviet Union, was forced to close in 2022 after being accused of furthering foreign interests, and no public criticism of Stalin is heard these days.
Russia works hard to portray the Stalin-era Soviet Union as deserving nearly all the credit for defeating Hitler and Nazism. That contention is debatable to say the least, but what is not is that the rich dark soil of Ukraine was, less than 100 years ago, fertilized by the bones of millions of rural men, women and children, all courtesy of a ruthless Russian imperial mindset that persists to this day.
Ukrainian’s don’t recall the Holodomor out of nihilism or ghoulishness. Nor is it some Slavic version of Mexico’s often lighthearted, celebratory Day of the Dead. Instead it is a stark reminder that being Russia’s neighbor means living in a state of permanent danger, that the beast to the east cannot be trusted.
So as we sit down to dinner with friends and family on Nov. 27, let’s include the Ukrainian people in our thoughts. And maybe we can go a step further and consider what we might do to help them fight to reverse the Russian invasion of their homeland. With some luck and the support of their friends, Ukrainians might too celebrate their own Thanksgiving next year, free from the brutality of Stalin’s heirs.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.