Holodomor exhibit at Lock 3 museum
The 85th anniversary of a human-caused mass death which cost millions of Ukrainian lives is being recognized this year at a local museum.
“Holodomor – A Ukrainian Genocide” is a commemorative exhibit on display at St. Catharines Museum at Lock 3 until Nov. 30.
“April is genocide awareness month, and the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide,” said Natalie Diduch, one of the organizers and a member of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
“We stand shoulder to shoulder now, with our friends, the Jewish community who suffered during the Holocaust, the Armenian community who suffered the Turkish genocide and a lot of other countries who have gone through their own genocide.”
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide, was a man-made famine in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933 which affected the major grainproducing areas of the country and killed an officially estimated seven million to 10 million people.
The starvation deaths are considered by many to be the worst peacetime catastrophe in the history of Ukraine.
“We tried to portray this whole history here, in our exhibit so that people understand that this was something in the works for quite a while,” said Diduch. “The Holodomor was a Soviet attempt to bring Ukrainian people under their control.”
She explained that the Soviet’s “collectivization movement” was preceded by the Holodomor. Collectivization was a forced consolidation of individual peasant households into collective farms called “kolkhozes,” organized by the Soviet government in 1920-1930. According to thenSoviet president Joseph Stalin, it was a way to overcome the food crisis and to increase peasant labour productivity.
“Proud Ukrainian farmers were told, ‘Well now we are communists, so what is yours is ours.’ Naturally, it didn’t go well with some very independent farmers and they refused to join the collectives,” said Diduch.
Diduch’s mother, Ewdokia Opariek, and grandmother, Paraska Myronenko, who were originally form Kotylva village, Poltava region, survived the Holodomor.
Diduch’s grandfather, Troshym Myronenko, was a blacksmith.
“As a blacksmith, he was considered to be one of the most influential villagers,” said Diduch. “Before the Holodomor started, one of the first things the Soviets had to do in order to dampen nationalistic movements in Ukraine, was to murder, imprison or send to Siberia all the intellectuals — the priests the teachers and so on.”
Myronenko, “knowing that he was going to be arrested,” escaped from the village.
“My mother and grandmother survived because he would creep in at night with a handful of grain or potato that he could carry,” said Diduch.
“Soon it became impossible for him to come in; and he never came back in fact.”
Paraska Myronenko was forced to join the collectivized farms. As a punishment for not turning in her husband, she was forced to collect the corpses of people who died of hunger on a wagon with another male villager who was also being punished.
“She couldn’t do it, she cried,” said Diduch. “She was beside herself. The man helped her, ‘Babushka (grandmother), I’ll do it for you,’” he said.
“My mom was told not to go outside, not to go down certain streets because there were lyudoyidy (cannibals),” said Diduch. “This was the reality of
Ukraine.”
On Nov. 28, 2006, the Ukrainian government adopted a law “On the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine,” which recognized the event as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
In 2010, the Court of Appeal of Kyiv studied what occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933 and ruled the final number of human losses was 10 million people, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.
The Holodomor has been recognized by 16 countries, including Canada, as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
“Canada was on board the whole way and was one of the first countries that actually acknowledged that it did happen, it did exist,” said Irene Schumylo Newton, President of Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Niagara chapter.
The materials being presented at the exhibit were put together by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) based in Toronto.
The causes of the Holodomor are still a subject of academic debate, and some historians dispute its characterization as a genocide or, according to Stephen Wheatcroft, professor of the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia, it was the “Soviet regime’s re-direction of already droughtreduced grain supplies to attain economic and political goals.”
The Holodomor, unlike the Holocaust, was not aimed at exterminating a whole nation but was planned and implemented based on political motivations, not racial or ethnic beliefs.
However, due to the number of victims and the circumstances, the Holodomor is the only event of the 20th century comparable to the other two, most researched cases, of genocide: the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.
“Every year I would find somebody that would say to me, ‘I didn’t know that. I was never aware of that,’” said Newton. “And every year we are trying to educate as many people as much as we can.”