Candle of hope

The death of any person is an extinguished candle, an irreparable loss for the nation and the world. In the accursed years of 1932-33, millions of indestructible candles representing our compatriots were extinguished in Ukraine in keeping with the Kremlin’s criminal, meticulously planned, and diabolical scheme.

Scholars are still arguing over the number of victims — 4, 7, or 12 million. But is this simply a question of precise figures? (Even so, this information is unquestionably vital for comprehending the horrible truth.) Millions of future Ukrainian farmers, workers, poets (perhaps great poets of genius), engineers, and doctors were wiped out in an inhuman and utterly cruel way — by means of a terrible famine. It was a deliberately engineered famine, not the result of a disastrous crop failure, drought, or other disaster. No one will ever resurrect those millions.

The world would have shuddered had it learned about this at the time. But it did not find out because, before he masterminded the Holodomor, the 20 th century’s most ferocious and sinister tyrant made strenuous efforts to erect an impregnable “Iron Curtain” that reliably isolated Ukraine from the rest of the world. Perhaps, just like in the Apocalypse, he ordered millions of Ukrainian peasants to be isolated from the surrounding world, thus condemning them to an excruciating death by starvation.

Yes, Western Ukrainians knew about the Holodomor and were doing their utmost to help their brothers beyond the Zbruch River. Yes, honest and well-informed diplomats reported to their governments about what was going on in Ukraine. For example, Sergio Gradenigo, a consul at the Italian Embassy in Moscow, wrote the following in a dispatch to Rome on May 31, 1933: “The Moscow government has in fact knowingly caused this [famine] by means of harsh requisitions.” The Italian diplomat went on to say that the goal of this crime is “undoubtedly the solution of the Ukrainian problem within a few months, with a toll of 10 to 15 million human lives. Do not think this figure is exaggerated: I think it has already been reached if not exceeded.”

On the whole, however, the European public, especially left-wingers, dismissed the very idea of the Holodomor.

The “Iron Curtain” was working smoothly, which may be why the “successful” American journalist Walter Duranty, who cynically denied the Holodomor, was awarded the most prestigious prize in the US, the Pulitzer, in 1933. It was James Mace, the Holodomor scholar, political writer, and contributor to The Day, who had the idea of lighting candles in memory of the Holodomor victims. The one who actually started this tradition is Viktor Yushchenko: he did it when he was still in the opposition. Now this tradition is a national policy, which is very important. The fact that society supports this policy and that each November more and more candles burn in our windows shows that we are becoming more human.

But in lighting a candle of mourning today in memory of the millions of innocent victims of Stalinist terrorism, we must recognize one harsh fact: the consequences of this spiritual and ideological “Iron Curtain” are even more terrible and lasting in the consciousness of many of our compatriots than it was believed earlier. The problem lies in a warped public mentality, especially of part of the political class — a striking example is the refusal of our parliament to discuss the question of recognizing the 1932-33 Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian nation — and in the deformation of human values, for the Holodomor would have been impossible if the hysterical atmosphere of an all-out class struggle had not been persistently imposed on society. Was it purely by chance that Pravda published Maxim Gorky’s words: “If the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed” precisely in 1933?

In November 1933 that same Pravda published on Stalin’s diabolical order the original Ukrainian version of a poem by the great Pavlo Tychyna, in which he lauded our “beautiful and inimitable times.” In the early 1920s the same Tychyna had written the strikingly powerful poem, “Mother Was Peeling Potatoes,” (about the famine of 1921) in which he recounts a heartrending example of a mother’s cannibalism. These shifts in societal values, more than anything else, must have made it possible for this Stalinist genocide to occur.

This 20th-century genocide (this classification is irrefutable, despite all objections, because there is clearly a cardinal element — deliberate intent) would have been impossible had it not been for Ukraine’s colonial status, which Stalin wished to strengthen and perpetuate once and for all: this is another motive of the crime.

It would also have been impossible without the voluntary and involuntary assistance of our Ukrainian poor peasants and a small number of middle peasants, who gave in to the calls “to fight the kulak exploiter” during 1929-30 collectivization in the hopes of benefiting somewhat from this “struggle,” and who eventually paid a terrible price for this. The Holodomor was organized by “outsiders” of non-Ukrainian ethnic descent. It was organized by the Kremlin’s criminal Stalinist clique that strove for a new, “red,” colonization of the Soviet republics — above all, Ukraine.

Our task is to discover the reason why all this was possible. In all probability, this happened because Stalin managed to divide and demoralize society along class and ethnic lines. (This applies to all the republics, not just Ukraine.) In the former category there were “wealthy people” and “working” people, and in the latter, there were “nationalists” and “Soviet people.” What is more, in Ukraine the “nationalist” label was attached to the vast majority of those who considered themselves Ukrainian and behaved accordingly both in the city and the countryside. They were all destroyed later. Is this not ample proof of the genocidal nature of the Holodomor?

The Leader’s violence went hand in hand with the Great Lie. In his autobiography the unforgettable Mace, who collected oral testimonies of Holodomor victims in the 1980s, recounts an episode that stunned him: “On the Zbruch River, the old Soviet-Polish border, starving peasants were taken out at night and forced to dance in order to show their relatives on the other side how good life in Soviet Ukraine was.” This was a macabre dance of death, Stalin-style.

To prevent a repetition of such things, I think every Ukrainian should realize that each of us has a set of inalienable civil and socioeconomic rights (to life, freedom, aspiration to happiness, true information, decent wages, etc.) on which neither the state as such nor a president or a prime minister can encroach. Any attempt to strip us of even one of these rights is tantamount to a banal theft of property (personal property, if you like). Once all Ukrainians come to share this point of view, we will be lighting candles in memory of the Holodomor victims with the feeling of a complete and irreversible victory over the evil of Stalinism.