Millions of candles were lit on Saturday in Ukraine to commemorate at least 3.9 million compatriots who died in the artificial famineorchestrated by the Soviet Union in 1932-1933 in what was considered the barn of europe.
At least 75 kamikaze drones They attacked the capital, kyiv, on the same day and another winter of massive attacks on the country’s infrastructure is expected. Strange parallels are therefore drawn between the call Holdomor and the ongoing defense against invasion, underscoring how much is at stake.
“Just like 90 years ago, the Russians have a simple goal. They want destroy ukraineto the Ukrainians and everything related to Ukraine,” he emphasizes to EFE Igor Kulykdirector of National Archive of Memory of Ukraine.
Ukrainian accounts of the Holodomor speak of entire towns who died of hunger and multiple cases of cannibalism. Bodies piled up as trains carrying Ukrainian grain headed west for export, with the revenue needed to finance the Soviet industrialization program.
Armed soldiers and communists carried out extensive home searches to meet the oversized targets of forced grain collection from individual farmers set by the Soviet authorities.
However, not only grain was confiscated but all food, as well as seeds that farmers could use to plant the next crop. “There was Five sons in the family. “Only I survived,” he says. Lubov Lishitafrom the town of KovtunivkaChernihiv region, in a testimony collected by the NGO “Hvylia’91”.
She remembers how the “communists“they came to take away a cow, the only property of the family. Although five small children tried to hold on to her the armed men finally took it from her. The family’s fate was then decided.
Volodymyr Kozachenkofrom the Odessa region, remembers how the communists overturned the cauldron where a borscht, ending all hope for his family. Everything inside the house was turned upside down, because they took all the food, even “the last bean“.
Meanwhile, under the law of “five spikelets“, the death penalty was applied to anyone who collected the slightest amount of grain from the fields owned by collective farms favored by the Soviets.
Some tried to leave and look for food in more urbanized areas, but the Ukrainians were deliberately prohibited leave their villagesemphasizes Kulyk, which points out the artificial nature of the famine.
“The Soviet totalitarian regime simply couldn’t think of any other way to break Ukrainians’ love of freedom,” he explains.
Although Ukraine’s attempt at independence was crushed in 1921 and the political and intellectual elites were exterminated or co-opted, the main mass of Ukrainians, who lived in the countryside, resisted the Soviet policy of collectivization, explains Kulyk.
Various insurgencies were on the rise and Stalin and his clique chose physical destruction on an industrial scale as the solution.
All mentions of the Holodomor They were later banned during Soviet rule, while Russia never acknowledged its responsibility. In the occupied Ukrainian territories, they have recently been dismantled multiple monuments in memory of his victims.
In the rest of Ukraine the commemoration of the Holodomor became an opportunity more to express the determination to prevent something similar from happening again.
Related news
President Volodymyr Zelensky attended the remembrance mass along with his wife, Olena Zelenska, on Saturday and noted that Ukraine will never forget the millions of murdered compatriots. In the speech to the Ukrainians, he also stressed the continuity between the Moscow-organized famine and the ongoing Russian invasion. “The evil was not stopped, it was not expiated. Now we are stopping it,” he stressed.
The Ukrainian president thanked all states that officially recognized the Holodomor as a crime against the people. “The world must unite and condemn the crimes of the past. “The world must unite and stop today’s crimes,” Zelensky said.