“The memory of manmade famines unites all Ukrainians”

“MORE THAN 77 PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE CONSIDER THE HOLODOMOR AN ACT OF GENOCIDE”

Volodymyr VIATROVYCH, historian:

“We are cherishing and handing down to the generations to come the memory which should not be a ‘bargaining chip’ in any political games. This may be a certain test for the Ukrainian public, for we derive no support from the state. It is civic society that has to shoulder this burden. This test will perhaps make us cherish our memory still greatly. It is very important that the mourning procession was held for a second year running and, also for a second year running the leadership honored the memory of manmade famine victims, albeit separately from us, in the morning in their quiet official atmosphere. It is good, but this shows how far the leadership is estranged from society. Even in the minutes like this, the powers-that-be are not prepared to bow their heads together with the Ukrainian grassroots. Although more than 77 percent of the citizens consider the 1932-33 Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people, President Yanukovych publicly rejected this concept in 2010. Stating this, he insulted the memo-ry of the millions of people and publicly violated the Ukrainian law ‘On the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine,’ passed in 2006, and a 2010 court ruling. But the main thing is it is one of the subjects that rally people together. We have a very contradictory past, various subjects are differently interpreted in Ukraine, but the memory of the Holodomor finds a practically unanimous response all over Ukraine. This unites all the Ukrainians.”

“WHAT A TERRIBLE HOLODOMOR WAS IN THE DONETSK REGION…”

Volodymyr YAVORIVSKY, writer, MP:

“We can feel even today that a huge segment of the Ukrainian nation was wiped out during the manmade famines. A researcher found that before the 1932-1933 Holodomor the center of patriotism was in Kyiv, i.e., in Central, or even Eastern, Ukraine. Western Ukraine was suppressed at the time.

“But after the Holodomor this center shifted to and in fact still remains in Western Ukraine. And if you also recall 1937, you can say that the very flower of the Ukrainian nation was exterminated. What was left were just a few clever, conscientious, moral, and educated people. But the Ukrainians are a strong nation. They survived the Holodomor, and then there was a war and stagnation… Clearly, what we have now is not the Ukraine we dreamed of in the late 1980s – the early 1990s. If somebody had whispered me at the time that, 20 years on, we would have so anti-Ukrainian, so immoral, and so unpatriotic authorities, I would have thought these words were coming out of a demon embittered with everything on earth.

“The current leadership’s unwillingness to recognize the Holodomor as genocide is nothing but playing up to Russia. Once, in my now defunct radio program ‘Twenty Minutes with Volodymyr Yavorivsky,’ I cited the example of a young Japanese historian, Hiroaki Kuromiya, who wrote, after living for a year in the Donbas, a unique book, Freedom and Terror in Donbass. He proves absolutely unmistakably in it how terrible was the Holodomor in the Donetsk region. And when many of the current officials have the cheek to say that ‘nothing happened,’ it is an act of unlimited kowtowing to official Russia. Our neighbor is afraid that we may raise some claims on it. But the question is not this: we would never stoop to demanding anything from them; let them just recognize the fact. Russia is making full use of its worldwide clout to dissuade others from supporting us as far as genocide of the Ukrainian people is concerned. They are just trying to preserve their imperial status: ‘Well, khokhly, you’ve cut loose long enough, come back home.’ I can see no other reason, even though some of their grandfathers and grandmothers also died of famine. The abovementioned Kuromiya cites a horrible piece of anecdotal evidence in the archive: a cart loaded with corpses and drawn by a gaunt horse came up to a dying child who lay beside his dead mother. This child was still alive and looking for his dead mother’s breast to have some milk. Then somebody threw both of them onto the corpse-laden cart.

“That there was so warm an atmosphere today during the memorial events (it is clearly a trifle for a three-million-strong Kyiv, but nobody forced these people to come here) means that nobody will ever erase the Holodomor from our memory.”