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May 06
2008
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Memorials are underway to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, and a political debate is raging.
Ukraine wants the 1932-33 famine recognized as "genocide." Russia, while acknowledging that millions died as a result of Soviet agricultural policies, insists the Ukrainian people were not directly targeted. Soviet citizens of numerous ethnicities and nationalities died during those years from starvation and related illnesses.
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Apr 22
2008
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As a child, my grandmother's stories of the Ukrainian Holodomor - "death by hunger" - had a profound effect on me. Decades after coming to the United States as a refugee, she could still recount, in vivid detail, the horrors she witnessed during the great famine of 1932-33.
Joseph Stalin had launched an aggressive program of collectivization against a resistant peasantry, and the death toll mounted. Some scholars today describe the "man-made" famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people; others believe it was a miscalculation on the part of the Soviet government. Either way, millions of Ukrainians died.
A teenager at the time, my grandmother said she saw "corpses that were still breathing, walking, crawling," streaming into Kiev from the barren countryside.
