On Sunday, October 21, Toronto’s Holodomor Memorial was unveiled at the Princess Gate entrance to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. What is significant about the date of the opening of the Holodomor Memorial in Toronto is that it was unveiled almost 35 years to the day that the very first such monument – not only in Canada – but in the world – was unveiled to mark the 50th anniversary of the Famine-Genocide.
The date was Sunday, October 23, 1983. And the place was Edmonton’s City Hall and its grounds. Why Edmonton? For one thing, the Edmonton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) has the highest number of people of Ukrainian ethnic (as opposed to geographic) origin in Canada – 159,940 compared to 144,330 in the Toronto CMA, according to the 2016 census. It’s a very close second in North American terms. The New York Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) listed 160,000 people of Ukrainian ethnic origin, according to the most recent census which included that category – the 2000 one. But in proportionate terms, people of Ukrainian ethnic origin make up 12.32 percent of the Edmonton CMA, 2.46 percent of the Toronto CMA and 0.90 percent of the New York MSA.
With such a high proportion of the population, Ukrainian Canadians in Edmonton and Alberta (as well as Saskatchewan and Manitoba) have been able to wield considerable political clout. And during the 1970s and early 1980s the Ukrainian community had several high-profile ministers in the government of then-Premier Peter Lougheed and was able to bring to reality several critical initiatives, such as bilingual schools and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, just to mention a few. Such was the case with the Holodomor monument.
The Soviet Union exerted considerable diplomatic pressure on the Lougheed government to prevent this unveiling. But not only did Premier Lougheed ignore them, he personally lifted the black drape covering the sculpture of a large broken circle of cold grey metal emblazoned with skeletal hands memorializing the anonymous victims of the Soviet-engineered genocide. The monument was sculpted by Ludmilla Temertey, sister of Toronto philanthropist James Temerty (they spell their surnames differently), head of the Temerty Family Foundation that donated $500,000 towards the construction of the Toronto monument.
At the opening of the Edmonton monument, which was attended by 8,000 people, Premier Lougheed, who was flanked by University of Alberta Chancellor Dr. Peter Savaryn, declared; “We, in Alberta, will never allow this tragic event, committed by a totalitarian regime, to ever be forgotten.”
Other speakers included federal Defense Minister Jean Jacques Blais, newly elected Edmonton Mayor Laurence Decore, Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now Congress) President Ivan Nowosad, UCC Edmonton President Dr. Meletiy Snihurowycz and University of Alberta professor Dr. Bohdan Krawchenko.
Later that day, at a special “Hungry Dinner,” sponsored by UCC Edmonton and attended by 2,000 people, University of Alberta President Myer Horowitz drew comparisons between the Holodomor and the Holocaust suffered by his own people.
“Last month, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is the holiest day of those of us who are Jewish, I read silently, while in our synagogue… That service of atonement, which was added following the second world war when millions of my cousins – my Eastern European blood cousins – perished. Never will I read those words again without my thinking as well of the millions of my other blood cousins – your blood cousins, who died of hunger, who died because of a cruel, barbarous, inhuman and programmed famine,” he said.
The unveiling of the Edmonton monument was just the beginning of a long and arduous campaign to bring the truth about this horrendous genocide to light. In fact, the monument itself was defaced with “Nazi lies” graffiti on two occasions. It wasn’t until the publication of Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine” in 1986 that the Holodomor began to be treated seriously by the academic world. And it wasn’t until the fall of the USSR that the Holodomor was officially acknowledged in Ukraine itself.
Even today, a new brand of Holodomor denial has come to the fore. The crux of this new disinformation campaign is the myth that the Holodomor was not a genocide — merely a tragedy, because other nationalities suffered deaths as well. Well, that’s the equivalent of saying the Holocaust wasn’t a genocide of Jews because other ethnic groups were also killed. Even though both Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin committed mass murder on a gargantuan scale that involved people of all kinds of backgrounds, Jews were specifically targeted in the Holocaust and Ukrainians were specifically targeted in the Holodomor. That’s what makes both actions genocide.
Those millions of Ukrainians who were starved to death were replaced by ethnic Russians. And those millions of Ukrainians who survived, but were forbidden even to speak about it, became so traumatized they buried their culture and their national will deep in the ground strewn with the bones of their relatives, friends and ancestors. Many of their descendants became Russified. They became “Russian speakers.”
And it is the “defense” of “Russian speakers” that Stalin’s successor in mind, spirit and deed – Vladimir Putin – claims as an excuse to justify his brutal aggression against Ukraine. The genocide of the 1930s has led to the invasion of today.
International recognition of the Holodomor as a very real and horrendous genocide has come a long way since the unveiling of that first monument 35 years ago. But there still is a long way to go before it becomes firmly entrenched in the annals of history and channels of memory, so that such atrocities will never again be repeated.
Marco Levytsky may be contacted at [email protected].