This famine organized by Soviet power to quell the nationalist spirit of the agricultural regions of the USSR caused between two and five million deaths, according to historians.
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In the family of 24-year-old Petrov, the Holodomor has a face: that of his grandfather, who survived and told his descendants about it. “In 1933 there started to be cannibalism, people went crazy and started eating each other, even stealing childrensays Petrov, who relates the words of his ancestor. My grandfather witnessed it. He saw mass graves dug and corpses thrown into them, half alive, as he said, covered with edema.”
It is 90 years this year since this famine, orchestrated by Moscow, ended in the agricultural regions of the USSR. According to historians, between two and five million Ukrainians died between 1932 and 1933. Stalin wanted to silence the nationalism expressed in what was then only a region of the Soviet Union.
“There were no cats, no dogs, no birds, no animals, nothing left in the village.”
Petrov, 24, reports his grandfather’s wordsat franceinfo
Downplayed during the Soviet era, then by the country’s pro-Russian powers, the Holodomor is today a marker of Ukrainian identity, for which memorial monuments are erected in the country. ”The Soviet government had no national identity. It did not belong to the Russians, nor the Georgians, nor anyone else. It was an ethnically unrelated entityexplains Rostyslav Karandieiev, the Minister of Culture of Ukraine. However, the Ukrainians wanted to be a nation. So the Soviets sought to destroy the Ukrainians as such.”
Indifference to “this mass extermination”
Ukrainian diplomacy is therefore working to have the Holodomor recognized as a genocide. In 2023, the French Parliament, first the Assembly then the Senate, recognized this organized famine as a genocide. “Recognizing the Holodomor today is above all a question of historical responsibility”estimated Yanna Renkoz, Director of the Holodomor Department of the National Museum of Ukraine. Europeans, at the time, “remained indifferent to this mass extermination, to this genocide.”
“The Europeans did nothing to stop Stalin. And today they face the challenge of stopping Putin.”
Yanna Renkoz, Director of the Holodomor Department of the National Museum of Ukraineat franceinfo
“In the 1930s, European countries did not help Ukraine”, recalls Yanna Renkoz. Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, for his part, judged in a press release on Saturday, November 25, “impossible” to forgive “the horrible crimes of genocide” committed by the Soviets during the Stalin era.