THIS DAY - November 28 - Holodomor Remembrance Day

29.11.2020

«The tip of the Soviet attack was aimed at farmers - a large number of individual peasants, custodians of traditions, folklore and music, national language and literature, the national spirit of Ukraine. The weapons used against them are probably the most terrible - starvation».

From the speech "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine" by Rafael Lemkin, author of the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide»

At the end of November, the memory of the victims of the Holodomor - the genocide of the Ukrainian people, which was organized by the leadership of the CPSU (b) and the USSR government by creating an artificial mass famine in 1932 - 1933.

The Holodomor became the last link in the elimination of the achievements of the policy of Ukrainization. First, the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia was destroyed (the IED process, 1929), and a year later the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was liquidated. At the same time, in the countryside in 1929 - 1930, the policy of collectivization and destruction of the wealthiest and economically independent part of the peasantry, which was considered potentially hostile to the Soviet government, was actively pursued.

The Holodomor of 1932 - 1933, the physical destruction of the bearers of traditional Ukrainian agrarian life, the peasantry, completed these processes. According to various estimates, between 4 and 7-10 million people died of starvation in two years. The vast majority of them were Ukrainians. At the same time, representatives of other nationalities became victims of famine: Bulgarians, Jews, Germans, Poles…

The Holodomor largely destroyed the Ukrainian village, which preserved traditional Ukrainian cultural values.

For decades, the mass murder of people by artificial starvation was not only deliberately silenced by the Soviet authorities, but the mention of this event was banned in every possible way.

Disclosure of information about the crimes of the Soviet regime and commemoration of Holodomor victims began only during the times of independent Ukraine. In 2006, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine recognized the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

The process of recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide is also underway in the international arena.

Today, the Holodomor is recognized as genocide in the following countries:

Estonia (Statement by the Riigikogu (Parliament) of 20 October 1993)

Australia (Senate Resolution of 28.10.1993, Senate Resolution of 31.10.2003)

Canada (Senate Resolution of 20.06.2003), (Act of the House of Commons of 28.05.2008)

Hungary (Resolution of the National Assembly of November 26, 2003)

Vatican (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church of April 2, 2004)

Lithuania (Statement of the Seimas dated 24.11.2005)

Georgia (Parliamentary document dated 20.12.2005)

Poland (Resolution of the Senate of March 16, 2006), (Law of the Sejm of December 4, 2006)

Peru (Congress resolution of 19.06.2007)

Paraguay (Senate Declaration of 25.10.2007)

Ecuador (Resolution of the National Congress of 30.10.2007)

Colombia (Resolution of the House of Representatives of 21.12.2007)

Mexico (Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies of the National Congress of 19.02.2008)

Latvia (Declaration of the Seimas of March 13, 2008)

Portugal (Resolution of the Assembly of the Republic of Portugal (Parliament) of 03.03.2017)

USA (Bipartisan US Senate Resolution of October 4, 2018)

During the 2000s, leading international institutions adopted a number of legal acts recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

In Ukraine, the day of commemoration of the victims of this terrible tragedy falls on the fourth Saturday of November. Among the number of memorial events held on this day both in our country and abroad, in particular, the all-Ukrainian action "Light a Candle".

Library of Museum "Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" offers to read about the Holodomor:

Valentyn Rybalka