HOLODOMOR NATIONAL AWARENESS TOUR LAUNCHED AT QUEEN’S PARK COMMEMORATION CEREMONY
Holodomor Mobile Classroom to Promote Awareness of Genocide,
Civility, Tolerance and Global Citizenship
Toronto – November 24, 2015 - At a Queen’s Park ceremony commemorating the victims of the genocidal famine known as the Holodomor, Ontario Minister of Education Liz Sandals and MPP Yvan Baker participated in the ribbon cutting of the Holodomor Mobile Classroom. The 40-foot RV is the centerpiece of the Holodomor National Awareness Tour. The Holodomor Mobile Classroom will tour the province and the country teaching about the manmade famine of 1932-1933 that starved to death millions of Ukrainians.
QUOTE FROM Liz Sandals, Minister of Education:
“The Holodomor Mobile Classroom will provide students with an innovative learning experience about social justice, human rights and democratic values in relation to the genocide by famine which killed millions of Ukrainians. This supports the goals of our Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy which encourages students to learn about diverse histories, perspectives and cultures.”
The Holodomor was carried out by Soviet communist authorities led by Joseph Stalin aimed at repressing the people of Ukraine for resisting collectivization and Soviet rule. Two Canadians who lived through the Holodomor, Stefan Horlatch and Mykola Latyshko, participated in the commemoration, as well as approximately one hundred Ukrainian Canadians.
According to Bob Onyschuk of the Canada Ukraine Foundation, which heads the Holodomor National Awareness Tour project, ”The Holodomor National Awareness Tour will encourage Canadians to examine the consequences of hate, oppression and discrimination while promoting the values of human dignity, tolerance and truth as fundamental to a democratic society.”
The Holodomor National Awareness Tour is a project of four organizations: the Canada-Ukraine Foundation (the lead on the project), the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre (UCRDC), and the Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.
LEARN MORE:
• Website of the Holodomor National Awareness Tour: www.holodomortour.ca
• Holodomor Research and Education Consortium: www.holodomor.ca
For more information, contact the Holodomor National Awareness Tour at:
416-966-9800
holodomor.tour@cufoundation.ca
Facts About The Holodomor
What is the Holodomor?
Holodomor is a Ukrainian word that translates as “murder by starvation.” It refers to the genocide that Soviet authorities, led by Joseph Stalin, carried out against Ukrainians in the early 1930s. In what was known as the breadbasket of Europe, millions of Ukrainians were subjected to agonizing deaths by starvation. The fourth Saturday in November is the international day of remembrance for the Ukrainians who perished. It is also National Holodomor Memorial Day as legislated by the Government of Canada.
Why did the Soviet authorities starve Ukrainians?
Ukraine was forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921 after a brief period of independence. To gain popular support, Soviet officials allowed some cultural autonomy, but by the end of the 1920s, Stalin decreed that "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” had gone too far and set in motion the arrest, deportation and execution of Ukrainian cultural, religious and political leaders in order to decapitate the Ukrainian nation.
The Communist authorities of the USSR were determined to eliminate Ukrainian aspirations for independence and the sense of a unique Ukrainian identity that stood in the way of creating “Homus Sovieticus.”
In the early 1930s, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. When Ukrainian farmers resisted the seizure of their property, they were forced into government collective farms; and when that did not work, Stalin and his cadres carried out the Holodomor to punish the Ukrainian farmers and to eradicate opposition to collectivization and Soviet rule.
How was the Holodomor carried out?
Stalin and his cohorts set exorbitant grain quotas that it claimed Ukrainian farmers, the majority of Ukrainians at the time, owed the state. Soviet authorities confiscated the grain from the countryside, even seed grain for planting. Communist activists and troops were sent to search house to house, seizing not only grain but basics such as potatoes, leaving the people to starve. The Soviet Union sold millions of tons of wheat in Western markets at the height of the Holodomor.
The Soviet authorities sealed the borders of Ukraine (then a republic of the USSR), so the starving could not leave, and villagers were forbidden from entering cities in search of food.
What was the impact of the Holodomor?
Ukrainians were dying at the rate of 28,000 per day in June 1933. One in six Ukrainians perished in the Ukrainian countryside. Demographers estimate that over four million Ukrainians died of hunger in the Ukrainian SSR and still more in territory inhabited by Ukrainians outside of the republic. When the 1937 Soviet census revealed a sharp decrease in the Ukrainian population, those who conducted the census were shot and the results were suppressed.
The Soviet Union denied the Holodomor for more than 50 years until its demise, and despite its acknowledgement in the Yeltsin years, the Russian government today engages in disinformation campaigns to deny the truth again.
For more information please see www.holodomor.ca and www.sharethestory.ca
