“When talking about Holodomor, we are in fact talking about the totalitarian danger”

The actors engaged in an emotional pantomime as archival documents, newsreel shots, terrible living testimonies and eloquent paintings by Malevich were being shown in the background. The Arabesques held a pre-premiere showing of its documentary performance We Must Live – We Have No Right To Die... or Letters from Kharkiv in the city on November 10, depicting the horrors of the Holodomor that engulfed Ukraine in 1932-33. The theater’s artistic director Svitlana Oleshko said it had taken her years to create the script as she collected evidence, read the documents, and met with eyewitnesses of the tragedy.

On screen, elderly women and men cry as they remember the terrible deaths of their family members including young children, atrocious incidents of cannibalism, hopelessness and despair, and fury of Red commissars who took the last crumbs of food from them. Their hands and faces are crisscrossed with wrinkles, while eyes are full of unspeakable horror and undying pain, for the Holodomor has remained an unhealed wound on Ukraine’s body. The performance is a new artistic and documentary relation of the terrible events, with Kharkiv region’s ordeal receiving most attention. The tragedy serves as the background for reflections on heroic behavior of the British journalist Garrett Jones, who risked his own life and disregarded every restriction to reveal the truth about starvation reigning in the Soviet Union and take shocking pictures that went on to become historical evidence. His actions contrast sharply with the cynicism of journalist collaborators, especially Walter Duranty who whitewashed Stalin’s crimes and achieved great fame and recognition in his lifetime, crowned with a prestigious Pulitzer Prize. “It was The Day that started the campaign to restore justice and revoke his prize by appealing to the international community and the Pulitzer Prize Board. However, the board rejected the appeal,” the director recalled. The performance reflected the silence of the international community at a time when Ukrainians died amid inhuman suffering. “The world knew everything but said nothing. All governments of the day wanted to avoid conflict with Stalin, and there was no response at the highest political level. In addition, informational flows were blocked, too,” Oleshko said. Under such circumstances, she considered Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s message to Ukrainians all over the world to be very important. “For the first time in history, all Ukrainian communities joined forces to save Ukraine and raised funds for the purpose. Although no help reached the dying people, we must remember that they prayed for us...”

In the discussion which took place immediately after the pre-premiere, audience members emphasized its special relevance in today’s Ukraine. Consul General of Poland Jan Granat noted while commenting on his thoughts about the performance: “This is a terrible illustration of Stalin’s crime against the Ukrainian people. After the first attempt at collectivization failed in Ukraine, he resolved to deal a mortal blow to the entire nation. It shows the true face of inhuman Communism.” The consul added that he found it incredible that demonstrators could be marching with a portrait of Stalin through the central square of Kharkiv these days, exactly where people were dying from artificial famine in the 1930s, and, strikingly, neither the authorities nor the public intervened to stop these demarches.

“When talking about the Holodomor, we are in fact talking about the totalitarian danger, and of course, we feel this danger here in Kharkiv to be perhaps even more acute than in other regions of Ukraine,” the performance’s creator Oleshko agreed. She also told us that the theater’s audience included young people who never heard or read about the Holodomor, so the performance was quite timely. We Must Live… is an opportunity to think and talk about the consequences of the totalitarian regime and our actions to overcome them and prevent a repeat of the horrors. The performance about the Holodomor will premiere in Kharkiv on November 30, while next year, the Arabesques plan to tour Ukraine with it. The director awaits audience’s impressions and observations, and promises to take them into account, for work on the show is going on. According to her, it may be supplemented with a theme of resisting state violence, as suggested by the performance’s first viewers.