This month, as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his aggression against Ukraine, Ukrainians around the world commemorate the Terror-Famine of 1932-1933. The murder of upwards of 5 million people in Ukraine by Joseph Stalin’s Communist regime, known as the Holodomor, came about from forced collectivization of agriculture when starving peasants were denied the food that was exported for hard currency.
The Holodomor targeted the Ukrainian national identity that had flowered during the 1920s and sought to crush widespread anti-Soviet feelings in Ukraine. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev recalled during his famous 1956 speech that Stalin had wanted to deport all Ukrainians after World War II, but there were too many of them – a fate that befell the fewer in number Crimean Tatars who were deported in 1944 and today are living under Russian occupation.
The Holodomor set the stage for mass repression, the Great Terror, the Katyn massacre and the construction of the world’s largest concentration camp system, which came to be known as the Gulag Archipelago. These crimes were followed by Nazi occupation and further genocide resulting in the deaths of 15 million to 20 million people in Ukraine in 1933-1945, a demographic disaster from which Ukraine has yet to recover. Entire regions of depopulated eastern and southern Ukraine were repopulated by Russian immigrants changing the ethnic and linguistic identity of the region that had consequences similar to the Irish Famine in the 1840s and the 1850s which destroyed the Irish language.
Over the last three decades, Ukrainians in Canada and Ukraine have honored the millions of people in Ukraine who were murdered by Stalin and his henchmen criminals. Beginning with the publication of historian Robert Conquest’s acclaimed book “The Harvest of Sorrow” and the documentary “Harvest of Despair” produced by Ukrainian-Canadians, we have seen trailblazing research, a wide variety of publications, and the education of their Canadian citizens and the world about Stalinism and the evils of the Soviet Communist system.
This month’s commemoration began with the annual Holodomor lecture given by well-known and acclaimed Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, who is the author of five award-winning books, including “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” and “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” The first chapter of “Bloodlands” is devoted to the Holodomor as an act of genocide committed by Stalin against Ukrainians. There, Prof. Snyder writes: “No European country was subject to such intense colonization as Ukraine, and no European country suffered more.”
In contrast to Ukraine, in Russia Vladimir Putin has set a process of re-Stalinization in motion whereby the murder of millions of innocent victims is ignored and Stalin is praised as an economic “modernizer,” a great wartime leader who transformed the USSR into a nuclear superpower. Russia’s camps no longer commemorate the millions who perished there, but in a grotesque manner glorify the camp guards themselves.
Decent human beings would be shocked at Russia’s re-Stalinization and would strive to ensure their country remained outside Mr. Putin’s grip, as millions of Ukrainians demonstrated during the Euro-Maidan. In militarily attacking Ukraine to keep the country within Russia’s sphere of influence, President Putin is seeking to impose his country’s vision of Stalin and the concealment of his crimes. Russian leaders have on many occasions vehemently opposed Ukraine’s de-Stalinization and demanded that it follow Russian portrayals of the Soviet Union as a great country. Little wonder that large portraits of Stalin hang in Donetsk, capital of Mr. Putin’s proxy separatist enclaves in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Among the many commemorative events of the Holodomor in Canada is a mobile classroom RV constructed for the Holodomor National Awareness Tour intended for high schools in Ontario and throughout Canada (http://www.holodomortour.ca ) – a project generously funded by grants from the federal and Ontario governments, as well as donations by Ukrainian Canadian philanthropists.
The national histories about which we choose to educate our children, the leaders that we praise and whether we denounce or hide their crimes against humanity reflect our political instincts. Stalin and Adolf Hitler are the antithesis of the European democracy that Ukraine is seeking to build, while Stalin is central to Mr. Putin’s mythology of the “Great Patriotic War” and his vision of a resurgent Russian great power. The biggest Nazi collaborator in World War II, let us recall, was Stalin, who aligned with Hitler in 1939-1941.
Ukraine commemorates the millions of innocent victims of the Holodomor and Stalin’s crimes while Russia seeks to deny their existence. Today, 16 Western countries recognize the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, while Russia continues its re-Stalinization and many Russians see Stalin as a positive historical figure. Canada and Europe stand in solidarity with Ukraine this month as it commemorates the Holodomor genocide.
Taras Kuzio is a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta and his recently published book is called “Ukraine. Democratization and the New Russian Imperialism” (Praeger).