Following is the text of President Petro Poroshenko’s speech at the November 28 ceremony held in Kyiv in remembrance of Holodomor victims in Ukraine. The fourth Saturday of November is commemorated each year in Ukraine as Holodomor Remembrance Day. The English text here was released by the Ukraine Crisis Media Center and edited by The Ukrainian Weekly.
Presidential Administration of Ukraine
President Petro Poroshenko and First Lady Maryna Poroshenko place symbolic bouquets of wheat before the statue named “The Sad Memory of Childhood,” which is part of the national museum complex dedicated to the memory of Holodomor victims.
“Spring has come, but a black cloud is hanging over a village. Children do not run, they do not play, but sit on the roads. Their feet are so skinny, drawn up, and there is a big belly between them. The head is large and the face is bowed to the ground. And there is almost no face, only teeth. A child is sitting and rocking with its whole body … An infinite moaning song… And it demands – neither from a mother or a father – and pleads into the empty space and the world for only one thing: ‘Eat, eat, eat.’ ”
“At the market in a village of Verbivka, a woman was carrying a bottle of oil. The bottle slipped out of her hands and broke. Women came running from everywhere; they fell on the place where the oil was spilled and started to chew the earth.”
“Every day the dead were taken to the cemetery by dozens… Some of those in the carts were still alive, moaning on their way to the grave…”
My dear Ukrainians, these are not the worst memories of witnesses like Mykola, the survivors of the Holodomor. They are from the very first Memorial Book published in 1991, when Ukraine gained independence. After 60 years of taboo imposed by Soviet authorities on this tragic subject, the Ukrainian journalists Lidia Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak collected and arranged testimonies from all over Ukraine.
According to the authors of the book, the survivors had reached their final stages in life and they “hastened to tell the terrible truth that haunted them for all their lives… In the villages, old people led to the outskirts, to the wormwood-covered wasteland, and said: ‘Here.’ The men took off their hats, women held white handkerchiefs to their eyes…” It was rare to see a memorial cross or even a burial site. The totalitarian regime tried to trample the very memory of the terrible famine into the ground.
There are graves in yards and gardens in some villages even today. The living had no strength to take the dead to the cemetery, burying them where they lived.
Fear and persecution failed to erase the memory.
In the multi-volume “History of the Ukrainian SSR” published in 1984, it is written shamelessly that 1933 – a year of carefully planned mass murder of Ukrainians by famine – was a joyful period when the welfare of farmers had improved.
But in the mid-1980s, the famous work of historian Robert Conquest, “The Harvest of Sorrow,” was released. Since we have gathered at this place last year, Robert Conquest has passed away in the 99th year of his life. We, as grateful Ukrainians, shall never forget his unique contribution to spreading the truth about the Holodomor.
Neither shall we forget the invaluable contribution of the American-Ukrainian writer and historian James Mace, who worked with the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. We call Robert Conquest and James Mace, Lydia Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, as well as dozens of others of renowned individuals, “people of the truth.” They broke through the tight blockade of deception and disinformation in which Moscow held Ukraine and the whole world for decades.
The truth pierced its way to the people. See how Ukraine has changed over the last two, three, four years. According to today’s sociological research, 80 percent of Ukrainians consider the Holodomor an act of genocide. Such an assessment prevails throughout Ukraine without any exception – in the east and in the west.
But for those who are still undecided, I shall refer to the world-famous lawyer Raphael Lemkin. He coined and explained what the term “genocide” means both de facto and de jure. In 1953, Lemkin proved that Ukrainians were subjected to nothing but genocide. First, there was a mass elimination of the Ukrainian peasantry, the keeper of Ukrainian culture, language and traditions. Secondly, there was annihilation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the brain and the mind of the nation.
This week, Lemkin was officially declared an extremist in Moscow. His article, which I have just mentioned, is included on the list of banned literature. Nothing hurts like the truth. What else could one say about this?
Lemkin was absolutely right! Social and national motives of hatred crossed in Stalin’s mind. The social hatred was for the Ukrainian peasantry, and the national one – for rural Ukrainians who constituted the vast majority of the Soviet Ukraine. According to Yevhen Sverstiuk, a great dissident intellectual of the 1960s, the whole nation was “selected for dismantlement” under the slogans of internationalism.
Special units, regular troops and militia turned Ukraine into a huge concentration camp and a testing ground for weapons of mass destruction – the slaughter of Ukrainians by famine. Today this would be called ethnic cleansing.
Ukrainian peasants were banned from leaving their hometowns and villages for regions of the USSR where famine was not as all-encompassing or did not happen at all. Soviet troops detained hundreds of thousands of farmers, 90 percent of whom were forcibly returned back to their hungry villages to die. The routes to salvation were intentionally blocked.
Many countries and international organizations have officially recognized the Holodomor as genocide. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the government and I, as president, will persist in expanding the geography of such recognition. Russia has not only denied the such recognition, but has been exerting pressure on foreign governments.
It was a long time before some of us could understand why modern Russia persistently protects the Kremlin’s old crimes, allegedly committed by a different regime. Why do they take other people’s sins on their souls? Now, when Ukraine has been fighting against Russia’s aggression for 21 months, the answer is clear.
Let us give this some thought. Only over the last hundred years, the Russian Empire twice collapsed or its size decreased. It existed under five names. At least seven different flags fluttered over it. Its subjects are singing its seventh national anthem. Four different political regimes ruled it from two capitals; one of those was renamed three times.
Only hatred of Ukraine and the uncontrollable desire to destroy us, Ukrainians, as a separate nation, has remained unchanged. This obsession united the Whites, the Reds and even the Red-Browns.
In this historical continuity, the Holodomor is nothing but a manifestation of a centuries-old hybrid war against Ukraine waged by Russia.
Whether they take our grain or fire Grad rockets at our land, their goal remains the same and it is clear. It hurts the same way when all the children died of hunger in the Starobilsk orphanage, Luhansk region, in 1933, and when children died in the shelling of Mariupol by Russia-backed militants last winter.
The role of the Communist Party is also terrible and criminal. However, history puts everything in place. The Communist Party did not win a single seat in the Verkhovna Rada during the parliamentary elections last year. This was a true verdict of the Ukrainian people.
This party did not participate in local elections last month at all because of the Law on De-Communization. As president, I require full and unconditional adherence to this law, as well as further disclosure of the KGB archives.
Dear Ukrainians: Today we traditionally light candles in memory of the Holodomor’s victims. We pray for a several-million-strong heavenly legion of the Ukrainian people. The pure souls of innocent Ukrainian victims are here, invisibly among us.
History knows no “ifs,” but it is my strong belief that the Holodomor would not have happened if we had not lost our statehood in the early 1920s. The Moscow Bolsheviks would not have gained victory in Ukraine if independence supporters had united their forces rather than killed each other to the pleasure of Moscow.
We must remember our past and draw conclusions from it. As the great thinker Ortega y Gasset put it, nations are born and live as long as they have a program for tomorrow. That is why we should finally get rid of the nation-victim sentiment and be proud that we have defended our place on the political map of Europe and the world in such a fierce struggle.
The dream of our enemies was stated back in the Valuyev Circular: Ukraine “did not exist, does not exist and cannot exist.”
In response to that we say: Ukraine “existed, exists and will exist.”
Now is the time for us to assert to the world and to ourselves: We will not forget the crimes of the Holodomor-Genocide and their perpetrators. We will not betray the ideals of the Revolution of Dignity. We will do everything for the national, political and economic rebirth of Ukraine, and for its entry into the European family of free nations.
The key to our victory can be, as Holodomor survivor Mykola said, only the unshakable unity of the Ukrainian people. These words are not the pathos of books, but an objective necessity. This is the imperative without which we cannot survive.
The rebirth of Ukraine continues. This is an unstoppable process of reinvigoration, the purification of our lives, the building of a renewed country and the arrival on the forefront of new people – the patriots and heroes who stopped the empire’s advance.
Glory to our new heroes! Glory to Ukraine!