Why did this happen? What drives a government to orchestrate an atrocity of such magnitude? The goal of the famine was to break the spirit of the Ukrainian peasantry, and force them into collective farms. During the 1920s, Ukrainians experienced a rebirth of their cultural identity, a renaissance of the national consciousness. Calls for independence and sovereignty were going up around the country, and this threatened the political and social order imposed by the Bolsheviks. The Imperial Russian Tsars had believed that without Ukraine, Russia would cease to be an empire. This belief echoed throughout the decades of the Soviet Union, and unfortunately today, still lingers in some quarters.
Having proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1917, the Ukrainian National Republic was immediately besieged by enemies on all sides. Unfortunately, after 4 years of valiant struggle, the war for independence was lost, and the fledgling republic was partitioned between the newly-formed Soviet Union and Poland. Upon seizing control of the USSR, Stalin realized that his consolidation of power, and by extension, the strength of the Soviet Empire, would be threatened by any break-away republics. A final solution to the problem of Ukrainian Nationalism had to be implemented; to once and for all eradicate any vestiges of Ukraine’s will for liberty.
Holodomor commemorations strikes a somber note, more so than in recent years. A growing number of people in certain quarters are questioning whether the Holodomor was a genocide, or whether it even ever happened. The question of occurrence is incontrovertible – We have the eye-witness testimony of Survivors, bolstered by recently unclassified documents emerging from the archives of the former KGB & SBU. By any rational analysis, the Holodomor was obviously a genocide. It was premeditated and targeted against a particular, identifiable ethnic group. To make matters worse, it was covered up by the Soviet authorities, with the help of their sycophants in the West, such as Walter Duranty and others. Gullible leftists played into the hands of Soviet propagandists, and for over half a century the truth was scarce. When pressed for an answer in later years, Soviet authorities grudgingly admitted that some deaths may have taken place, that some people may have been hungry, but for vague and unknowable reasons. Today, neo-Soviet apologists in Russia realize that it is impossible to continue the charade. So rather than besmirch the reputation of Great Uncle Joe, they echo the old Communist party-line, that the Holodomor was in fact a natural disaster, affecting numerous regions of the USSR.
When arguments over occurrence and causation fail, the last refuge of critics and Holodomor deniers is to debate the magnitude of the crime. When all else fails, they think, all that is left is to minimize the scope of their guilt. As recently as 5 years ago, the agreed-upon figure was 7 million deaths. Since then, wildly varying claims have been published under the guise of scholarly inquiry. Quibbles over statistical methodologies and externalities are made to appear larger than life, and of seemingly greater importance than they really are. Discussing casualty figures – some as low as 1.5 million, others as high as 11 million – legitimizes critics and serves only a single purpose: to cloud the issue, diverting attention from the genocide’s motivating forces. What difference does it make if there were 10 deaths or 10 million, when the motivating hatred is the same? Even one death was too many!
And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, in the ultimate analysis, the question of scale shrinks in comparison to the question of motivation. Why did the Bolsheviks of Stalinist Russia, and by extension, the Communist Party, hate the Ukrainian nation? Russian Imperialism, coupled with the Marxist ideology itself, was at the root of this evil. By its very nature, it is anti-human. Freedom cannot be tolerated, because free individuals will make decisions opposite to the will of the state. The success of the Communist state requires the individual be subsumed into the larger collective whole, the individual’s will to be inferior to that of the State. Left-wing ideologies in all their varieties function upon the debasement of the human spirit and the curtailment of freedom, assigning value to each human life through grisly cost-benefit calculus. The great machine of state is oiled by the blood of innocents. We must remember that the highest ideal humanity can strive for is freedom – freedom for people and freedom for nations everywhere.
The 20th century was marked by warfare and turmoil. Divisions pitted brother against brother and the Ukrainian Diaspora was not immune to this. But, lest we forget, it was the Communists who attacked our faith; the Soviets who divided our people and the Russians who tried to destroy our identity. For over 70 years, while our brothers and sisters in Ukraine lived under oppression and tyranny, we kept the flame of truth alive. In the face of Godless totalitarianism, it was our sacred duty to defend the honor of knyaz’ Volodymyr’s Tryzub, protect the rights of the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, commemorate our fallen and remember the sacrifices made for the cause of a Sovereign and Free Ukraine. Today, Ukraine may be independent, but she is not free!
Homo Sovieticus rises from his grave, in a grisly parody of life, like the zombie-ideologue that he is. We in the Diaspora are called upon once again to take up the burden, to keep the memories alive, to make sure that the victims of the Holodomor are never forgotten and that a crime against humanity, such as this, can never happen again! Events such as the Black Flag Installations, held at city halls and legislatures across Canada, pay tribute to the millions of men, women and children who perished in the genocide. The Holodomor Remembrance Candle, organized by the Ukrainian World Congress, travels around the world, raising awareness about the Holodomor and signaling our defiance as a community, in the face of renewed opposition. It is our responsibility to make sure that as we remember, the world acknowledges.
