After the division of the territory of Ukraine in the middle of the 17th century between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Moscow Kingdom, for the next two centuries the Ukrainian nation did not have its own statehood, which is why it was subjected to political, economic, national, and cultural oppression. Russia carried out a harsh colonization of Left-Bank Ukraine. Powerful Russification, chauvinism, and the policy of identifying Ukrainians with the Russian people (identification of Ukraine as part of Russia — Little Russia) did not destroy the Ukrainian national consciousness. Ukrainians very keenly felt their difference from the Russians and for centuries waged a permanent liberation struggle. But only in 1918 did it succeed in creating the Ukrainian State — the Ukrainian People's Republic and uniting the Ukrainian territories.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the independent Ukrainian State lasted only a few years, struggling with constant encroachments and interference in the country's internal affairs from outside. It never managed to constructively lay and strengthen the foundation of its independence in the world. After the third occupation of the Ukrainian lands that were part of the Russian Empire, the Russian Bolsheviks established a communist totalitarian regime using force and puppet governments.
On July 6, 1923, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed, which also included the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. The union treaty provided for full equality of the republics, but Ukraine was actually ruled by the Kremlin.
Despite the short periods of state formation, the Ukrainian state tradition still existed and had deep historical roots, dating back to the period of Kievan Rus. It united the nation, strengthened Ukrainian nationalism, and contradicted Lenin's theory of socialism, which envisaged the fusion of nations. Having occupied the territory of Ukraine, the Russian Bolsheviks felt this very acutely. Lenin defined the national movement and the problems of national sovereignty as a phenomenon of a bourgeois nature, with which the Bolsheviks fought. The Ukrainian essence was an obstacle to the existence of the USSR in the format determined by the Soviet leadership.
With the establishment of the communist regime, noticeable changes occurred in the social, socio-political and socio-economic life of Ukraine, which primarily affected the traditional village. The communist totalitarian regime imposed new customs and new rituals on Ukrainians, while at the same time forcing them to renounce the past and forget their origins. Ukrainization was curtailed. An attack on the spiritual life of Ukrainians began.
In 1928, the USSR leadership announced a course for collectivization - the unification of individual private peasant farms into state-owned collective farms. Each peasant was assigned a certain number of workdays, for which they were paid in kind. However, most working days were so meager that they deprived the peasant of the opportunity to feed himself and his family. Given the strong sense of individualism of Ukrainian farmers, the introduction of the collective farm system in Ukraine caused resistance. Therefore, peasants were forcibly driven into collective farms through terror and a propaganda war with dissenters, on whom the regime hung labels of "kulaks", "bourgeois nationalists", "counter-revolutionaries" and destroyed these people.
The policies of the communist totalitarian regime caused resistance among the Ukrainian people. Historians have recorded about 4 thousand mass demonstrations by peasants in the early 1930s against collectivization, the policy of taxation, robbery, terror and violence.
The sense of national identity of the Ukrainian peasant, together with his mental individualism, contradicted the ideology of the Soviet Union. It was the basis of Ukrainian nationalism and posed a threat to the unity and very existence of the USSR. That is why the object of the crime of genocide was the Ukrainian nation, to weaken which the Stalinist totalitarian regime exterminated the Ukrainian peasantry by genocide as a specific part of the nation and the source of its spiritual and material strength.
The danger of riots and uprisings for the existence of the USSR was well understood in the Kremlin. Not wanting to lose Ukraine, the Soviet regime built a plan to exterminate part of the Ukrainian nation, disguised as plans to hand over bread to the state. It was about the complete withdrawal of all grain reserves, and then the confiscation of other food products and property as fines for failure to fulfill the plan. Having turned Ukraine into a territory of mass famine, the regime blocked all paths to salvation. Only the peasants of Ukraine and the Kuban were forbidden to leave for the cities, to Russia and Belarus. 22.4 million people were physically blocked within the Holodomor territory.
Y. Stalin, who considered the peasantry to be the basis of the national movement, struck a blow at the Ukrainian peasants as the bearers of Ukrainian tradition, culture, and language. In 1932, an unrealistic grain procurement plan of 356 million poods of grain was set for Ukraine. To approve this plan, Stalin's closest associates, Kaganovich and Molotov, arrived in Kharkiv, well informed about the outbreak of famine in Ukraine in the first half of 1932. The genocide was organized and committed by legalizing violent actions and mass murder of Ukrainians. About 400 archival documents confirm this.
In the early 1930s, the collectivization policy in Ukraine collapsed. Peasants left the collective farms en masse and took their property: livestock, equipment, and grain. To keep the collective farms and property in the hands of the state, the regime adopted a repressive decree on August 7, 1932, which was popularly known as the "law on five ears of corn."
The resolution of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR "On the Protection of Property of State Enterprises, Collective Farms, and Cooperatives and the Strengthening of Social (Socialist) Property" equated all collective farm property with state property, and severe punishment was established for its theft. According to this law, the state punished hungry peasants for collecting crop residues in the field with 10 years of imprisonment with confiscation of property or execution. Special groups of people were organized to search the population in order to forcibly seize grain. Such searches were accompanied by terror, physical and moral abuse of people.
The next genocidal decision was the establishment of fines in kind - the right of the state to take from the peasants not only grain, but also other food products and property that could be sold or exchanged for food. Such a phenomenon did not exist in any other republic of the USSR. In order to increase the famine in Ukraine, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) under pressure from Molotov on November 18, 1932 adopted a resolution that introduced a specific repressive regime - "black boards". Listing on the "black boards" meant a physical food blockade of collective farms, villages, and districts: total food seizure, a ban on trade and the delivery of goods, a ban on the departure of peasants, and the surrounding of the settlement by military detachments, the GPU, and the police. In 1932–1933, the “blackboard” regime operated in 180 districts of the Ukrainian SSR (25% of districts). Such a repressive regime was applied only in Ukraine and the Kuban, that is, in places where Ukrainians lived in compact numbers.
The Kremlin created living conditions designed to destroy part of the Ukrainian nation by completely removing all food products. The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Soviet People's Commissariat of the USSR of January 22, 1933, signed by Stalin and Molotov, blocked Ukrainians within the starving territory, prohibiting them from leaving the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban for bread. No other administrative region of the USSR or republic was subject to such a decision.
The Stalinist regime declared the famine in Ukraine to be a non-existent phenomenon and on this basis refused assistance offered by numerous non-governmental organizations, including Ukrainian communities abroad and the International Red Cross.
In the spring of 1933, mortality in Ukraine reached catastrophic proportions. The peak of the Holodomor was in June. Then 28,000 people were dying of martyrdom every day, 1,168 people every hour, and 20 every minute. At this time, Moscow provided Ukraine with seed (for the sowing campaign) and food loans. If food did reach the villages, it was provided mainly in the form of public catering and only to those collective farmers who were still able to work and live in the field camps. All this took place with large stocks of grain in centralized state reserve funds and large-scale food exports. The actions of the totalitarian regime confirm the intention to destroy part of the Ukrainian nation within a certain time frame. During the commission of a particularly serious crime of genocide in 1932–1933, the communist totalitarian regime destroyed millions of Ukrainians. Certain historical circumstances complicate calculations, and even more so — establishing the names of the killed. The communist totalitarian regime did everything possible to hide the consequences of its crime. It was forbidden to record the real number of deaths on the ground. Today, secret lists of some village councils with a list of the dead in 1932–1933 have been discovered. These lists are twice as many as the official figures. It is clear that such cases were not uncommon. There was a ban on recording the cause of death as "hunger", so death certificates indicated "from typhus", "exhaustion", "from old age". In 1934, all the books of the Civil Registry Office on the registration of deaths were transferred to a special department of the GPU. Ukrainians died out in families, villages, and the dead were not always recorded. The level of unregistered mortality is unknown, but it is quite obvious that millions died. The Soviet Union convinced the international community "not to see" the mass murder of Ukrainians with the help of propaganda and bribery of individual journalists. However, there were journalists who wrote the truth. Reports of ambassadors and diplomats have been preserved. The regime took measures to erase the memory of the murder of millions of Ukrainians, but the memory of the people is indestructible, and with the establishment of Ukraine's independence, the ban on talking about the Holodomor was lifted.
National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide
