At a memorial ceremony in Kiev, the Ukrainian government remembered the victims of the Holodomor 90 years ago. Back then, Soviet dictator Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians.
A group of chickens scurries through Aunt Lilia’s snowy yard – that’s what the villagers call the old lady. She is 96 years old and asks to come in. Aunt Lilia experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist dictatorship, and the Second World War. But a humanitarian catastrophe shapes her life to this day: “I barely survived the Holodomor. I was thin, and I still am. I ate almost nothing back then, I chewed acorns. Even now I don’t eat much. The People ask me why I live so long. Because I eat little. I eat little so as not to overload my stomach. Just a little bit.”
The people in Ukraine call the famine of 1932 and 1933, which the German Bundestag has now recognized as genocide, Holodomor – meaning “death by hunger”. It’s been 90 years since Lilia’s neighbors and classmates starved to death because the communists took away the farmers’ grain. Lilia survived because she was able to collect acorns in the forest, she says: “The dead lay in the forest. They collapsed there and died. The corpses lay there for a long time. Nobody buried them because the people had no strength left. The crows picked them apart – and the dogs. I’m still afraid to go to those places in the forest.”
Commemoration in Kyiv
A central memorial ceremony for the victims of the Holodomor took place in Kiev today. President Zelensky, along with other politicians and military leaders, placed candles at the memorial to those who died. Every year on November 25th, Ukraine remembers the mass murder – this year for the 90th time.
A taboo in Soviet times
Antonina Natoka trudges through the cemetery of the small village. She points to the memorial to the starved. It was built here just four years ago. Natoka is too young to have experienced the Holodomor. She studied history in the Soviet Union. But there she didn’t learn that Stalin had deliberately starved the farmers. “Neither in school nor in university was this tragedy mentioned. Only with the beginning of independence, when the archives were opened and publications on the subject appeared, work on it intensified. People began to remember what happened in the families .”
Natoka’s father told her about man-made hunger, about the relatives who died. It was a shock, she says today.
Russia’s archives remain closed
The state-imposed silence still makes it difficult to come to terms with the history of the Holodomor, says Lesja Hasydschak, director of the Holodomor Museum in Kiev. “From 1991 onwards, the truth about the Holodomor became more and more known in Ukrainian society. Scientists began to work in the archives, but only in the Ukrainian ones. Unfortunately, the Russian archives are secret. And we know that the most important documents above all there are.”
It is a small museum with thick books. Each of these black tomes enumerates the deaths of a Ukrainian oblast. However, many victims could not be identified. Ukrainian sources estimate more than four million deaths. Today people come here to research their family history.
More relevant than ever
The story of the Holodomor is more relevant than ever, says Hasydschak. “The first lesson we draw from this history is that it is very important to protect and strengthen your state. And it is very important to have your own army that will not allow this genocide to be repeated in the future .” Another lesson is that if evil is not punished, it will always rise up and rise up.
In the current war against Ukraine, Russia is again using food as a weapon. Research shows that the occupying power steals and sells grain and other products from Ukrainian farmers. According to Ukrainian media reports, Holodomor monuments are being destroyed by Russian occupiers in some parts of the occupied Ukrainian territories.
Rebecca Barth, ARD Kiev, tagesschau, November 25, 2023 2:23 p.m