The Holodomor and Ukraine

By Danylo Bilak, Kyiv

November was an emotionally trying time in Kyiv and throughout Ukraine. For the first time, the country marked the Holodomor or Famine of 1932-33 on a national level. President Yushchenko spoke eloquently before the monument to the victims of the Holodomor in front of the Mykhailivskyj Church of the Golden Domes, noting that this catastrophic event was planned and executed as a deliberate policy of Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian people as an ethnic and national reality.

This message is important because Russia, the Soviet Union’s legal successor, denies the Holodomor was a genocide directed at a particular race, ethnic group or nation, maintaining it was an aspect of Stalinist repression. Also, both Ukraine's Communist Party and the Party of Regions refused to vote for the law to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide and to make its denial a punishable offence.

The President recited facts about the Famine, many of which were detailed in a documentary shown on national television.  The documentary evidenced that in 1933, in Soviet Ukraine, 17 Ukrainians died every minute or almost 10 million in one year. Yet, throughout 1932-33, the Soviet Union recorded massive grain exports. As a result, in 1957, Ukraine’s population was 70 per cent less than it should have been based on the rising birth rates in the country from 1900 -1926. The documentary also showed shocking footage and survivors’ testimonies. Viewers learned that the army cordoned off oblasts to prevent starving villagers from fleeing. Starving children were carted off to die.  Soviet commissars confiscated peasants’ grain, animals and farm implements. In 1933, because so many villagers were dying in the streets of towns and cities, the internal passport system was designed to ensure they would remain and die at home. Mothers kept children indoors for fear of neighbours who, mad from hunger, kidnapped children to eat them.  “Starvation is slowly turning people into brutal, savage, dehumanized beings capable of the worst crimes...,” a village teacher wrote in her diary. 

Many Russians were sympathetic, but were prevented by the Soviet Army from delivering food. This insanity took place only in Soviet Ukraine and in the predominantly Ukrainian area of the Kuban in Soviet Russia bordering Ukraine. There was a famine in the Volga region, but in most of the regions of Russia and Belorus bordering Ukraine, the villagers were relatively well fed.

Finally, in Ukraine, there is an open discussion of this period and a rising appreciation of its affect on the Ukrainian psyche. In Soviet times, the mere mention of the Holodomor meant immediate arrest and deportation to a Siberian labour camp. The teacher quoted above was sentenced to 10 years hard labour and 5 years internal exile upon discovery of her diaries in 1945. Her words have been brought to light by Ihor Drizhchaniy, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU (the former KGB). He ordered over 5,000 documents from that era to be declassified. They are now on display in an exhibition at Ukrainskiy Dim and on the SBU website.

Ihor has performed a tremendous service for the Ukrainian people. The plans to exterminate Ukrainians are as clinical as the Nazi documents regarding the Final Solution for the Jews. Stalin feared the Bolsheviks were losing control of Ukraine, especially the villages, and that this could lead to the party’s loss of power.  He saw as threats Ukrainians’ rising national identity and Ukraine’s quickly increasing population. Ukraine’s burgeoning national consciousness was obstructing Stalin’s plans to create a new “Soviet Man” and the peasantry’s rejection of collectivization was beginning to erode Party discipline and Stalin’s grip on Ukraine. He wanted to eliminate these obstacles by starving Ukrainian villagers and then re-populating Ukraine with Russians and others from various parts of the Soviet Union. To a large extent, Stalin succeeded. In the 1920s ethnic Russians made up 7 per cent of Ukraine’s population, by 1957, 20 per cent.

The Holodomor abated in late 1933 when Stalin felt he had broken the spirit of the Ukrainian people and reasserted the Party’s control over the countryside. When he realized that Ukraine could not be re-populated quickly enough to produce sufficient supplies of food for the Soviet Union, with the looming war, collective farms started distributing food to those still able to work. Thus, most Ukrainian villagers were starved into submitting to collectivization. Stalin then, in 1934, began a reign of terror to “cleanse” the Soviet Union of “counter-revolutionary” elements in the Communist Party; millions were killed.

In this horrific context, the Holodomor offers Ukrainians an opportunity to discover common truths about themselves by asking what it was about being “Ukrainian” that resulted in the perpetration of this heinous crime. It is generating intense interest and discussions across the country. Scholarship on the subject is widely published, even in the popular press. The interest cuts across generations. Many families with small children, some standing near weeping survivors, were at the candle-lit squares as the nation marked the Holodomor with a moment of silence. People across the country put candles in their windows to mark the occasion.

A Hungarian friend of mine noted that the most remarkable aspect about the Orange Revolution was that it was peaceful. The people stood up to demand respect for their dignity, and won.  They believed in the righteousness of their actions. That spirit has not dissipated in the cynicism of the post-Maidan era. Perhaps the halo effect of the Maidan and the facts of the Holodomor will stimulate Ukrainians to come to terms with their common identity and their broader place in the world.