CHRISTIANS in Ukraine have commemorated victims of the Soviet-engineered Holodomor, or Great Famine, despite efforts to suppress references to the mass atrocity in Russian-occupied parts of the country.
“Defying fear of death, terror, and repression, Ukrainians continue to resist — they refuse to forget their history, their dignity and their struggle,” a statement on the Kyiv government’s website said. “Candles of memory, lit in the darkness of occupation, are not only an act commemorating the dead, but also a symbol of living resistance.”
The statement was published as church and government leaders gathered in Kyiv and other cities to remember the 1932-33 Holodomor, in which millions died, when the Soviet regime attempted to impose Communist collectivisation by seizing food crops.
It said that candles had been placed in the Russian-occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherso, and Zaporizhzhia regions, despite “brutal pressure and intimidation”, highlighting both “the depth of the tragedy and the indomitability of the Ukrainian spirit”.
The National Resistance Centre of Ukraine said that Russian forces had “immediately destroyed any reminders” of the famine, dismantling monuments and seizing museum exhibits, in a bid to “impose strict ideological control” and “create the illusion of support for the occupation authorities. . . The Russians are trying to erase any mention of their crime — through such intimidation, the enemy wants to erase the national memory of Ukrainians.
“Yet these efforts are useless, since the life of a compatriot means much more for Ukrainians than the life of a Russian does for Russians, whom no one values.”
About four million people perished, according to official Ukrainian data, in the two-year Holodomor, which followed Soviet confiscation of crops and humanitarian aid from areas resisting its agricultural plans.
The outrage, acknowledged by Moscow only in 1990, was accompanied by the closure of most Ukrainian churches, and the number of deaths far exceeded those in the famines of 1921-23 and 1946-47.
A service of prayer in the Cathedral of the Dormition, Kyiv, for victims of the famine, which has been recognised as genocide by 34 UN member-countries, as well as by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, was attended by President Volodymyr Zelensky and other state and government officials, as well as ambassadors and representatives from at least 50 countries.
In an anniversary message, the Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said that the then Stalinist regime had used the Holodomor to take away the “freedom and statehood” of Ukrainians, who were again faced by a “genocidal ideology” and the “murderous breath of red Moscow”.
The Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), said that the “full terrible truth” of the famine, a “hell artificially arranged by enemies”, would never be known.
“Millions of Ukrainians, from newborn babies to old men, died a terrible, slow death by hunger, in an unbearable torment that clouded consciousness and erased all moral and human limits,” Metropolitan Epiphany said.
“Though painful for us, this memory must live on, conveying to our descendants an understanding of what to expect from their comrade-neighbours in the Kremlin.”
Commemorations of the Holodomor were also staged in cities around the world, including London, where a minute’s silence was observed during a memorial service in the Ukrainian Cathedral of the Transfiguration, in Acton.
In Greece, the Ukrainian Embassy protested and demanded an investigation when a Ukrainian commemoration was violently disrupted by communist youth group members at Mandra, northwest of Athens.
No mention was made of the anniversary on the website of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, which published messages congratulating Patriarch Kirill on his 78th birthday from President Putin and other public figures, as well as a news report on the blessing of nuclear submarines by Archbishop Feodor (Malakhanov) of Petropavlovsk & Kamchatka.