On 22nd of November we honor the sad date, which inflicted a deep wound in every Ukrainian – the 81st anniversary of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. With every passing year, this tragedy becomes more remote in time, but the pain does not become lesser.
After all, it is impossible to forget about 8 million of human lives victimized by hunger in peacetime in the land universally called the Breadbasket of Europe. Deaths of millions of Ukrainians in early 30’s were not caused by natural cataclysms or epidemics. They resulted from inhuman cruelty of totalitarian Stalinist regime that committed its horrible crime deliberately.
In such a horrible way, the Stalinist political system attempted to destroy the very foundations of freedom-loving Ukrainian nation, undermine our spiritual culture and unique ethnic identity.
The hunger was an attempt to bring Ukrainians to their knees, deprive them of any hope of the right to chart their own destiny in their own home, forget, even in dreams, about possibility of ever having their own state.
Having massacred by hunger millions of innocent people, the Bolshevik regime for many years strived to kill the very memory about them. However, despite the decades of attempts to conceal the fact of the Holodomor, the world knows and remembers it today.
The Holodomor is not only our pain and our tragedy. This crime against the Ukrainian people should become a warning for the whole humankind so that it would never repeat again.
Nowadays more people are aware of the tragedy of the Holodomor than ever before.
The past cannot be changed, but we are confident that restoring the dignity of the Holodomor victims through acknowledgement of their suffering will guide future generations to come and help to avoid similar catastrophes in the future.
Today, as we commemorate the 81st anniversary of the Holodomor-Genocide, we can look back on the progress that was made in educating people around the world about that horrible tragedy.
The Ukrainian state adopted a legislation defining the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
There are Holodomor Memorial Complexes in Kyiv, Kharkiv and in many other cities of Ukraine, as well as in numerous foreign countries. It has become a tradition to bring symbolic pots with grain and candles there and to plant bushes of guelder rose near the National Holodomor Memorial Complex in Kyiv by official foreign delegations while visiting Ukraine.
Many countries have agreed the Famine 1932-1933 was Genocide against the Ukrainian people and condemned it.
We are thankful to everyone who stands by our side today. We express our gratitude for all nationals which give us their support. It is an expression of solidarity that Ukraine will never forget.
Having survived the horrible tragedy, Ukrainians genetically strive to be masters in their own house, to make sure that such tragedies never occur again. We are certain that the establishment of a strong, democratic and prosperous Ukraine, which will form an inalienable part of united Europe, will be the best guarantee of that.
Such Ukraine will be also the best monument to the memory of those who perished because of the Holodomor.