Ukraine marks Great Famine that killed millions 85 years ago
KYIV, UKRAINE — His frail hand covering his heart, Mykhailo Matvienko, 92, peered at the yellow flame of a candle on his kitchen table Saturday and recounted his childhood during the Great Famine.
A searing event seen as one of the great atrocities of 20th-century Europe, the Ukrainian famine of 1933 killed more than three million people and has become a touchstone in post-Soviet Ukrainian society.
“It is very important to remember the famine,” Matvienko said. He lit his first candle in the morning, and kept them burning through the day.
On Saturday, Ukrainians lit candles on their tables or windowsills to commemorate the famine, called the Holodomor, which means death by hunger in Ukrainian. The atrocity is marked annually on the fourth Saturday of November.
But every year, fewer survivors remain alive to offer their firsthand accounts of the famine, a brutal narrative that for many Ukrainians helps make the case against Russian influence in the country today.
Ukrainian historians argue that the famine was a genocide orchestrated by then Soviet leader Josef Stalin to crush Ukrainian aspirations for independence. While the famine of 1932 and 1933, brought on by the forced collectivization of farms, undeniably affected other parts of the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, entire villages were cut off and their inhabitants left to starve.
“The specific policies implemented in Ukraine were known to be lethal,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and the author of a book about the period, “Bloodlands,” said in an interview. “Soviet documents make it clear that Ukrainians were to be blamed for the disaster of collectivization and that death was to be deliberately concentrated in Ukraine.”
At a solemn ceremony at the Museum of the Holodomor on Saturday, Ukrainian politicians lit votive candles in memory of the lives lost.