Ukraine: Remembering the Great Famine

Holodomor - based on two Ukrainian words:
holod - "hunger, starvation, famine" and
moryty - "to induce suffering, to kill

From 1932 to 1933, in the very heart of Eastern Europe's breadbasket, the Soviet regime suppressed Ukrainians' threats of uprising against communism. As a result, history's only man-made famine nearly decimated a country.
Josef Stalin's genocide policy included confiscation of grain and all other food in the rural districts, often down to a farmer's last seed. Even whatever was in the families' homes was taken.
An exact number of those who succumbed to the Holodomor will never be known, but best estimates say around 10 million people were victims of the genocide committed by the Soviet regime.


Children comprised one third of all Holodomor victims. Along with their parents, brothers and sisters,
friends and neighbours, orphans perished, literally lying in the streets, dead from hunger.
The Soviet government refused to acknowledge to the international community the starvation in Ukraine, and repeatedly turned down relief aid. It was virtually impossible for outsiders to enter the famine-stricken areas.
Enforced isolation of the borders of the Soviet Ukraine and the Ukrainian Kuban meant people
weren't allowed to leave to look for food - or faced the punishment of death. Many chose to be shot and killed, rather than suffer the inhumane genocide their people were being subjected to.
It was reported by the secret police that the mortality rate was so high that numerous village councils had stopped recording deaths.
On Stalin's orders, those who conducted the 1937 population census, which revealed a dramatic decrease in the Ukraine because of the Holodomor, were shot.
With this horrific chain of events, the people's customs and traditions also almost perished. It would
be generations before the country would begin to recover, and decades before the full story would be told and understood.

 

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