Holodomor Remembrance Day falls annually on the fourth Saturday in November in Ukraine. On this day, Ukrainians remember the victims of the Holodomor of the twentieth century.
The date was established, according to the decree of the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, on November 26, 1998, as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor. It was later renamed Holodomor Remembrance and Political Repression Day, and on May 21, 2007, President Viktor Yushchenko returned to its former name, Holodomor Remembrance Day.
In the twentieth century, Ukraine survived three Holodomors: 1921-1923, 1932-1933 and 1946-1947.
The Holodomor was a genocide against the Ukrainian people, the result of an artificial famine specially organized by the communist leadership in 1932-1933, which killed millions of people. According to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, genocide is intentional acts aimed at the total or partial destruction of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups by killing members of that group; inflicting severe bodily or mental injuries on them; deliberate creation of living conditions designed for complete or partial destruction of the group; actions designed to prevent the birth of children in the group; forcible transfer of children of this group to another group.
The conquest of famine became an instrument of consolidating the power of the Stalinist regime, liquidating the Ukrainian peasantry and turning them into disenfranchised collective farmers, and at the same time eradicating the social foundations of independence in Ukraine, that is, the social foundations of the Ukrainian nation. This crime was carefully thought out, involved numerous mechanisms for its implementation: through numerous taxes and fees, unrealistic grain procurement plans and searches of Ukrainian peasants were deprived of food, a ban on leaving the village since November 1932 (the so-called “blackboard” regime) and the famine-stricken republic from early 1933 deprived them of their last hopes of salvation.
The Holodomor killed millions of Ukrainians in Ukraine and the Kuban, dealt an irreparable blow to the mentality and culture, and severed generations. Children became the most vulnerable category of Holodomor victims.
Only after the declaration of Ukraine’s independence did an investigation into the scale of the largest Holodomor of 1932-1933 begin. According to various estimates, about 4.5 million Ukrainians died then.
On this day, the staff of the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise will light candles of remembrance for the victims of the Holodomor at 4 p.m. in their homes.
