“We felt the Ukrainian Holodomor as our own tragedy”

Several days before the begining of the Memorial Week in Ukraine the Yerevan-based publishing house Ayir published Stanislav Kulchytsky’s book Why Did He Destroy Us? in Armenian translation. Ukraine’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador in Armenia Oleksandr Bozhko informed The Day about this. In his words, the idea to translate this book, which is part of The Day’s Library, was Larysa Ivshyna’s brainchild — she expressed it two years prior to the publication of the book in Armenian.

The book published in Yerevan was yet another foreign publication of Kulchytsky’s work. It has already been translated into Romanian, with the assistance of Ukraine’s Embassy in Romania. The idea to translate the book specifically into Armenian was the idea of the Ukrainian translator Feliks Bakhchynian. The Ukrainian tragedy is close to the Armenian community, as this nation also has a tragic page in its history: in the period between 1915 and 1918 the Turks of the Ottoman Empire killed around 1.5 million Armenians.

“We can draw parallels between the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33 and the Armenian genocide of 1915,” Bakhchynian asserts. “As dozens of countries have recognized the Armenian genocide, they should also recognize the Ukrainian Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people. Certainly, other peoples have also suffered from the terrors of Stalinism and famines, but the Holodomor in Ukraine was a specific phenomenon on the territory of the Soviet empire. At the same time, Ukrainians should not forget those Europeans who in their time stood up for them, such as the Nobel Prize winner and the greatest humanist of the 20th century, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who donated his prize money to Ukrainians during the famine in 1921-23.”

Kulchytsky’s book, translated by Bakhchynian, is one more step towards the understanding of the Ukrainian tragedy in the world, particularly in the post-Soviet space. The translator justly noted that “in the Soviet Union we studied not the history of the USSR peoples, though the text-book was titled this way, but the history of Russia. Therefore the populations of the former Soviet republics know very little about each other. But then the Ukrainians started to reveal these tragic pages of their history, and last November Armenia also paid tribute to the victims of the Holodomor. We felt it like our own tragedy.” The publishing of the book Why Did He Destroy Us? in Armenian was funded by the head of the MikMetal Company Vagan Garutiunian. The preface was written by the book’s author. In his opinion, Ukrainians, Armenians and Jews are three nations that have suffered colossal damages in a short period of time. The tragedies of these people vary, yet their comparison helps us to understand each other better. And the translation of the book Why did He Destroy Us? is a step in this particular direction. 

The book Why Did He Destroy Us? by renowned historian Stanislav Kulchytsky was published in 2007 within the framework of the project “The Day’s Library.” Currently this edition, as well as the book Day and Eternity of James Mace, needs to be republished in Ukrainian. If you want to become involved in the republishing of these books, send an email to chedit@day.kiev.ua