Kyiv, 26 November 2022 (TDI): Ukraine together with the world commemorates the victims of Holodomor of 1932-33. The day is remembered every year on the fourth Saturday of November.
This year, Ukrainians honored the millions of victims on 26th November. This time, the day is observed during a full-scale war with Russia. For years, Ukraine has fought for the Holodomor to be recognized as a genocide.
Holodomor Genocide
Holodomor is a famine that devastated the Ukrainian Soviet Republic from 1932 to 1933. It was a component of a larger Soviet famine (1931–34). The famine led to widespread starvation in Kazakhstan and Soviet Russia’s grain-growing regions as well.
However, several governmental laws and policies primarily directed against Ukraine rendered the Ukrainian famine deadlier. The name is derived from the Ukrainian terms for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).
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According to some historians, Stalin planned the famine on purpose to destroy the Ukrainian independence movement. Others claim that it was due to his disastrous collectivization of agricultural land policy.
Russia strongly refutes the Holodomor’s designation as a genocide. It states that in addition to killing Ukrainians, the great famine that ravaged the Soviet Union in the early 1930s also killed Russians, Kazakhs, Volga Germans, and a variety of other ethnic groups.
Today twenty-one states observe memorials to the Holodomor victims. While nine states recognize it as a genocide of the Ukrainian people on a regional level.
Sociologists have noted a 1.5 times increase in responders who agree that the Holodomor of 1932–1933 counts as genocide over the past ten years.
The majority of people in the country’s western, central, and southeast areas agree that the Holodomor in 1932–1933 was a genocide. Additionally, there were no noticeable differences in age distributions on this topic.
The parliaments of Romania and Belarus acknowledged the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine as genocide on November 24.
The upper house of the parliaments of Moldova and Ireland also reached the same conclusion. In April 2022, the Czech Parliament’s Chamber of Deputies unanimously declared the Holodomor to be a genocide of Ukrainians.
