Holodomor

Holodomor. Famine Genocide in Ukraine , National Mall and Memorial Parks , Holodomor Memorial.

"Since January 1, 1932 we collective farm workers have not had a single pound of pread in our collective farm ... Famine is widespread among the common folk ... What will happen next? ... The harvest is still four months away. How can we construct a socialist economy when we are condemned to death by starvation, and to see our children suffer cramps and die?" , Letter sent to Stalin April 28, 1932, from Horby, a village in the Kremenchuck region , Pyrih, Ruslan. Holodomor of 1932-22 in Ukraine: Documents and Material. Kyiv)

, This memorial is dedicated to the millions of innocent men, women, and children of Ukraine, who perished due to the Soviet-engineered famine of 1932-1933, known as Holodomor - death by starvation. As part of the USSR's forced collectivization project, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin aimed to punish Ukrainians for their resistance to political, economic, cultural and social subjugation resulting from Soviet occupation of the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917-1921)., The Soviet regime confiscated grain from Ukrainian farmers but continued to export Ukraine's grain to the rest of the world. The result was that Ukraine's villagers, those that tended the farms in the breadbasked of Europe, were purposefully starved by the Soviet regime. At the height of the Holodomor in June of 1933, 28,000 people were dying every day in Ukraine., For decades, the USSR denied that the Holodomor took place and the regime's role in the famine. An independent Russian Federation has continued that denial. However, hundreds of archival documents from the KGB, the Soviet security agency, document and describe the violence and horror of the Soviet regime's actions to engineer the Holodomor and its attempt to suppress the national identity of Ukrainians, including by deporting and executin Ukraine's religious, intellectual, and cultural leaders who dared to speak of the Holodomor., Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, described the Soviet actions against Ukrainians as "a case of genocide, the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.", Beginning with the invasion and attempted annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Moscow again attempted to impose imperialist designs on Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine. In this violation of Ukraine's sovereignty, Russia once again used grain, and food in general, as a weapon of war, impacting not only millions of people in Ukraine but also millions of others throughout the world.