Holodomor: The Roots of Ukrainian Rage Against Russia

As I marvel at the courage and resourcefulness of the Ukrainian people in resisting Russia's invasion of their country, I've also wondered where it comes from. That led me to be curious about their history. Ali Rogan from the PBS NewsHour provided this brief overview, which I found very helpful.

Rogan notes that in 1932 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deliberately imposed a famine in Ukraine, killing at least 3 million people in just one year. It became known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death.”

In 1929, as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed collectivization, which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives. Ukraine’s small, mostly subsistence farmers resisted giving up their land and livelihoods.

In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as kulaks—well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state. Soviet officials drove these peasants off their farms by force and Stalin’s secret police further made plans to deport 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia...

Collectivization in Ukraine didn’t go very well. By the fall of 1932...it became apparent that Ukraine’s grain harvest was going to miss Soviet planners’ target by 60 percent. There still might have been enough food for Ukrainian peasants to get by, but...Stalin then ordered what little they had be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas.

As millions of Ukrainians were starving to death, Stalin also launched a "Russification program."

The famine was accompanied by a broader assault on Ukrainian identity. While peasants were dying by the millions, agents of the Soviet secret police were targeting the Ukrainian political establishment and intelligentsia. The famine provided cover for a campaign of repression and persecution that was carried out against Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian religious leaders....All those targeted by this campaign were liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to the Gulag (a system of Soviet prisons and forced-labour camps), or executed.

The Soviets stifled any mention of the Holdomor for more than half a century, but it has obviously played a large role in Ukrainian public memory. In 2006 (just a year after Ukraine's Orange Revolution) a law was passed that officially recognized it as genocide and provided for the construction of the Holodomors’ victims Memorial in Ukraine. Holodomor Remembrance Day is now observed on the fourth Saturday of November.

The statue in the picture up above was created by Ukrainian sculptor Petro Drozdowsky and is titled "Bitter Memory of Childhood," dedicated to the most vulnerable victims of the Holodomor - children. It stands at the entrance to the memorial.

One only needs to see her mournful gaze to get an inkling of the rage Ukrainians must feel at the thought of being subjected to the rule of a tyrant who idolizes Joseph Stalin.