Every fourth Saturday of November, Ukraine celebrates the Holodomor Memorial Day, during which Ukrainians commemorate the victims of the Great Famine orchestrated by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.  

 Earlier this week, the parliaments of Ireland, Romania, and Moldova recognised the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people. 

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So far, only 17 countries have recognised the Holodomor as such, according to Ukraine’s Museum of Holodomor. These countries are Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the USA, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, the Vatican, and the Baltic States. 

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On Friday, 25 November, German lawmakers also proposed a resolution to raise awareness about the Great Famine. The resolution is set to be discussed and passed in the lower house of parliament (Bundestag) on Wednesday, 30 November. 

The Holodomor was a man-made famine ordered by Stalin which took place in the first half of the 1930s in Soviet Ukraine. Although historians disagree on the exact number of victims, it’s safe to say that they amount to several million, of which the vast majority were ethnically Ukrainian. The Soviet Union denied this atrocious crime until 1987.

In 2003, a joint statement to the UN signed by 25 countries declared that from 7 to 10 million people died as a result of this Soviet-forced grain collectivisation.

Image: IPN

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen