WE REMEMBER!
Source: Museum of History, Kyiv.
Ukraine remembers - the world acknowledges! The 85th Anniversary of Ukraine's Holodomor - Genocide by famine,1932/1933. A few years after Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, the Communist regime of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin embarked on a campaign to break the resistance of the Ukrainian people, especially its fiercely independent farmers. Its plan: engineer and brutally enforce a man-made famine, and starve Ukrainians into submission. The result: in the land called the breadbasket of Europe, millions of men, women and children starved to death. This horrendous act of genocide against the Ukrainian people is known as the Holodomor –murder by starvation. Raphael Lemkin – the attorney who coined the word ‘genocide’ and authored the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – cited the Ukrainian Holodomor as a prime example of this crime against humanity. The Holodomor, he said, is “the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment of Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation…” “But famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats. Anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had existed for a few months from June 1917, anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language, or Ukrainian history, any9ne with an independent literary or artistic career, was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to a labour camp or executed.” (Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine).
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