Stardate: 11/25/2007 Great Hunger (Holodomor) Memorial March

Yesterday, Patrick, A, and I went up to Youth park near the University Athletic building just off Pushkinskaya at about 3pm. We jumped off the tram directly across the street and were some of the last stragglers to enter the march in honor of the victims of the USSR’s and Stalin’s manufactured famine (Holodomor in Ukrainian). I use the term “manufactured famine” specifically. There were many droughts and famines in the late 20’s and throughout the 30s in Russia and Ukraine, but these droughts could have been lessened and not resulted in millions of deaths in a forward thinking country.

Youth Park was once a cemetery and is built on the bones of famine victims. V told me that some of the people buried there weren’t even dead yet. They were starving and helpless on the sidewalks and streets, but the “body removal people” just picked them up, brought them to the mass graves, and told them to close their eyes because they were going to be buried now. Chilling and cruel, isn’t it?

From Anna Reid’s book, “Borderland”, I learned the following. First, Stalin instituted a policy of collectivization that moved mom and pop farms to collectivized, or group, farms. The Communists seized anything that distinguished richer farmers from others. This included even a cow. A farmer with a cow was considered a “rich” landowner and his family were subject to harsh treatment: confiscation of said cow, any food, physical property (dishes, etc), and possibly their lives. Many of the richer farmers, kulaks, were killed or deported to camps in Siberia or elsewhere east. This was particularly true if the farmer stood up against them.

Second, Stalin was angered by the nationalist movement in Ukraine. Since the Czars of Russia had usurped Ukraine into then Russia, there had been a fitful nationalist movement for an independent Ukraine. Stalin detested Ukrainians and wanted to crush this movement forever. So, he elicited policies like an edict to kill anyone speaking Ukrainian, and in this case, starve the Ukrainians to death in order to crush the resistance to Communism and the USSR. He elicited orders to starve the Ukrainians to death. The meaning of holodomor, the Ukrainian word for “Great Hunger” is to cause someone to die of starvation or to kill by starvation. Stalin essential said, “I’ll show those Ukrainians…” He even admitted it to Winston Churchill (Check out this InfoUkes article by Andrew Gregorovich). Roman Serbin photographed the horror. You can see the images also at InfoUkes and Wikipedia website have some powerful images of the victims-starving, emaciated adults, children...I can only think of the desperation that any parent would feel. I'd kill, or be killed, for my daughter if need be. That was the case for many, too. One of the women who work as a pool attendant where I swim on Saturdays recently told A and I that she was too young to remember the Holodomor, but that she lost a younger sister to hunger, which caused her mother to go into the fields to collect anything she could find. She was caught by soldiers and shot dead. I asked A how this woman and her last remaining sister survived, and she said probably they were allowed to travel outside of the area to relatives (possibly her father who was in the military).

So, the droughts hit; the worst years were 1932-1933. Communist soldiers, acting upon orders and anonymous tips, would violently enter dwellings, seize all the food and livestock, and kill anyone who resisted. They said they were collecting food for distribution, but the distribution only went toward Russia. There was technically enough food for people to live during these droughts, if they could have eaten the food they raised. They weren’t allowed. A’s father, a famous historical scholar, told us that children would enter the fields and try to eat the sprouting new blades of wheat, and soldiers would mow them down with bullets. Warehouses of food were guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot to kill anyone who tried to take food. All the while people were starving to death around them. The people ate anything they could find roots, grubs, grass, bark…We’ve seen horrible photos of dying people on the streets of Kharkiv. The Kharkiv region was one of the hardest hit areas.

Ukrainians were not allowed to travel from the area in which they lived, according to Communist laws, so they would beg, scavenge and die. They tried to cross the borders into Russia but were pushed back by soldiers. They could see across the border where people were clearly not starving to death.

Furthermore, Stalin denied that there was a famine. No relief was provided by the USSR or allowed from outsiders. Later, Communists claimed that the entire area suffered from droughts. There is no comparison, because the numbers of deaths in Ukraine have been estimated, by the former USSR officials, at approximately 10 million Ukrainians according to Professor Badan (a former Soviet scholar on international relations). There are certainly debates about the numbers killed, check out Rummel's article that estimates the death rates as about 11 million or http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1983/138322.shtml for an interesting, scholarly comparison. If you visit UkraineMatters, there is an excellent interview with Dr. Timothy Snyder from Yale University about this topic.

In Kharkiv Ukraine, today, there are 3 distinct camps of people when it comes to this historical event. Why would there be different perspectives? Well, this event was covered up by the USSR and denied categorically. The few survivors would have been killed if they disagreed. International journalists weren’t allowed into this area and few on the outside knew what was going on. There are very few records from the outside of the USSR. The USSR had some locked up in secret archives. The archives were only opened recently (not even around the time of Ukraine’s declaration of independence). Even those records are damning. Group 1: Many pro-Russian folks or Communists in Kharkiv today will outright deny this event happened. If you ask them about it, they say that it was grossly exaggerated or faked by the “evil” west. Basically, they say that it’s not true. Group 2: Ukrainians, Ukrainian nationalists, etc…say that it was a horror on the scale of the holocaust in Germany (6 million died in the concentration camps there). They want more people to know about it and recognize the horrors perpetrated on them. It’s like a rape victim that is told that he/she is lying. It makes it even more important that people know. They also consider it genocide since it was the intentional murder of a large group of people because of their ethnicity. It has been recognized as genocide by the US and many other countries in the world. Group 3: The apathetic. There are many here who think it is ancient history. They say, “Why bring up the past? The past is the past. It won’t help anyone.” I think that these folks are just as culpable as the first group, because they don’t care that it happened and don’t care the degree that it changed Ukraine.

Pat, A and I listened to some speeches at the Kharkiv monument to the Great Hunger. The Governor of the Kharkiv region spoke very clearly about the outrages perpetrated on the Ukrainian people. He said that those present were the lucky ones, the descendants of those fortunate enough to live. He put words on it and called it genocide. The Major (pro Russian) mumbled some noncommittal words. Eastern Orthodox priests chanted and circled the monument (a tall, but simple, wooden cross) clanging a golden incense canister on a chain, while the crowd was utterly silent. Many people cried. Some were dressed traditionally, but most looked like they could have been Russian. Many people brought flowers, bread, salt, wheat bouquets, and candles. Others carried Ukrainian flags with a black ribbon on top to show mourning. Several carried images of religious icons.

After the speeches, people silently filed past the monument and the march began. The mourners left their flowers, candles, etc at the monument. For me, that was the most moving moment. We marched about 2 miles, I guess, from the athletic building down a connecting street to Sumskaya where we took a left and marched to Independence Square. As we marched, I was surprised that there were people on the sidewalks who didn’t seem to care at all. Also, there were police guards at intersections and occasionally drivers would lay on the horn for minutes on end. It just showed me that there were definitely people who think it is either a waste of time or a myth.

At Independence Square, we listened to President Yushchenko give a speech about the horrors of the Great Hunger (The Kiev Ukraine News Blog has excerpts of the speech). A said that all around us you could hear Ukrainian being spoken and not Russian (Russian is used in Kharkiv almost all the time). Also during this time, we met some others including several young Ukrainian nationalists and a couple of English speakers who were interested in the motivation for our participation. Our rationale: it was a grave tragedy that could have been averted. It was out of respect for the dead and the living Ukrainians to recognize this event for what it was. I’m so glad that I did. It was super intense and moving. It was the right thing to do.

The topic of the Holodomor has become of great interest to Patrick and me. He has been gathering research data and speaking to as many people as possible about the topic. He has been able to interview, through interpretors, one of the leading scholars here. He hopes to investigate this topic further as a thesis project.