From Newswire:
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) condemns the recent and blatant abuse of human rights by the Russian government which has banned events planned in Russia to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor – famine genocide in Ukraine of 1932-33.
Prior to the arrival of the International Remembrance Flame in Russia, the Ukrainian Embassy received notice on October 6 from Russia’s Foreign Ministry that ommemorative events must fall in line with the Russian position on the famine or be cancelled. Russia continues to claim that the Holodomor was not a genocide and that Ukraine’s effort to secure such recognition is “a political matter that is aimed against Russian interests.”
It has been confirmed by the Ukrainian World Congress that Ukrainian community activists in Orenburg, Tumen, Ufa, St. Petersburg and Krasnodar have been subjected to undue pressure and scare tactics by government officials in the region resulting in the cancellation of planned events.
That’s a shame. I think there is a lot to be gained from an open discussion on what happened and why.
Of course, it doesn’t help the Ukrainian side if they keep using unsubstantiated figures on the death toll. Not that Russia would be more likely to let the commemorative flame through if the more credible death toll were to be used, but at least then there would be a moral high ground.
The UCC urges every Canadian to join in this protest. The international
community stood idly by in the thirties as 10 million Ukrainians were brutally murdered for simply being Ukrainian.
Unfortunately Vitaliy history should not be defined through collaboration with its perpetrators, as they only recently stopped denying the event altogether since the archives began opening. Since most regimes have learned a thing or two since the Nazis defeat in WW2 they are most concerned with denying any genocide charge to avoid paying due reparations. The only difference between the two is that the Soviets won the war and continued their plight killing 4 times as many people.
Now regarding the figures, understand that many of these archives still have locked away a lot of information about these events that is if these papers still even exist. Since Holodomor denial is no longer in style, the urgency is to now limit the event’s death toll by technicalities.
The Holodomor is the genocide of the Ukrainian people, and to help make sense of these “high” numbers we need to breakdown the population of the USSR during the 1930’s. The turn of the 20th century was very turbulent and many countries changed and their borders re-drawn. There were many Ukrainians living just outside of the borders of the Ukrainian SSR in other SSR’s sometimes constituting a *significant majority* of the population – the Kuban, North Caucasus, Russia and Kazakhstan. The populations that perished here in the famine adds the extra millions (yes, millions) to the death toll.
While I appreciate your determination on the subject, please be careful that the sources you are getting your information from may be a bit biased, limiting the scope of a disaster in order to take away its significance. Likewise, we don’t measure the Holocaust by which country suffered a drop in population but rather by the people lost which is the heart of the matter. Keep on reading though, if you want more information please let me know I would be more than thrilled to inform!
I am sure that Ukraine should look not in a past, but in future. We – all Ukrainians – have to build new democracy in Ukraine, fight crisis and corruption, defend human rights and the rule of law. I am sure it is much more effective to try to build up a circle of friends of Ukraine, than to dig history for enemies…
The future points to a Russian conflict in the Crimea – all warning flags were raised this summer with the invasion of Georgia. With the number of Russian passports being handed out there and the expiration of the Naval Fleet lease, history is bound to repeat itself.
The Holodomor isn’t about digging up history, it’s about recognizing a long hidden injustice that deserves to see the light of the day. And why shouldn’t it be recongized in Russia? After Germany lost the war, the country went through the process of De-Nazification, but no such thing occurred in USSR and many more people suffered.