At the entrance to the memorial park in Kiev, there is a sculpture of a very thin girl with an extremely sad look holding several ears of grain in her hands. Behind her is the Candle of Remembrance, a monument with details reminiscent of authentic embroidery that can be found on traditional Ukrainian costumes. This is a monument that marks a historical event known as the Holodomor.
The Holodomor monument in Ukraine
But what is the Holodomor and what crime does this monument mark in general? After the end of the First World War, Ukraine was an independent state, but in 1919 the Soviet Union “sucked” it into the community of Soviet states. The Ukrainians, who even then considered themselves a Central European people like the Poles and not an Eastern European like the Russians, tried to restore Ukraine’s independence.
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Not wanting to lose control of Europe’s main granary, Stalin resorted to one of the most heinous forms of terror against one nation in 1932. In the process of nationalization, he took away the grain-producing land from the Ukrainian peasants, but also all its offerings, thus creating an artificial famine.
The goal was to “teach Ukrainians to be smart” so that they would no longer oppose official Moscow. Thus, the people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread. The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. At that time, 17 people in Ukraine were dying of hunger every minute, over 1,000 every hour, and almost 24,500 every day! People were literally starving to death in the streets.
Stalin settled the Russian population in the emptied Ukrainian villages. During the next census, there was a large shortage of population. Therefore, the Soviet government annulled the census, destroyed the census documentation, and the enumerators were shot or sent to the gulag, in order to completely hide the truth.
He was in the Holodomor during 1932-1933. Between seven and ten million people were killed by famine, more than Jews in World War II. Their poison gas was hunger and their Hitler was Stalin. Their Holocaust was the Holodomor. For them, fascist Berlin was Soviet Moscow, and their concentration camp was the Soviet Union.
Today 28 countries around the world classify the Holodomor as genocide, and you could not learn about it in school because almost all the evidence was destroyed, and the victim was silenced for decades and until recently did not have the right to vote. The Holodomor may have temporarily broken the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine’s independence from Russia eternal.
Cc: Odehe Kojo
