Ukrainians in Washington dined for the victims of the Holodomor

Ukrainians and sympathizers at the opening ceremony of the memorial to the victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine 1932-33. Photo: Hannah Teller

In Chicago, there is a practice of “hunger” charity dinners - event participants donate the amount of the check for their own average dinner, refusing the evening meal, get together and talk about the event that caused the donation.

However, the format of a dinner in memory of the victims of the Ukrainian Holodomor in Washington was clearly not austerity. At the Washington station, in one of the halls of which they decided to hold it, it smelled strongly of food, to which well-dressed people rushed. They were drawn to grilled, greasy salmon, dumplings with potatoes, sandwiches and salads. The dinner was announced as a charity, and each guest was asked for 250 dollars.

In Ukraine, on the fourth Saturday of November, traditionally, the Day of Remembrance of Holodomor 1932-1933 victims is held, leaving lit candles in squares and windows in memory of those who did not survive the surplus and the law “On the Five Spikelets”.

Washington decided otherwise, setting a day for the opening of the memorial three weeks before the official holiday. The reason for this was voiced by the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States Valery Chaly. According to him, the Ukrainian diaspora for a long time could not decide on the date.

November 7 is the anniversary of the day when the Soviet Union essentially began its formation, I mean the Bolshevik revolution. This turned the course of history, and the consequence, among other things, was the Holodomor of 1932-1933,” the diplomat added.

Also, according to him, it is symbolic that on this very day the myths of the Soviet empire will be destroyed and a true look at the history of Ukraine will be revealed.

Ukrainians in the station square of the American capital. Photo: Hannah Teller

Several thousand Ukrainians from all over the East Coast listened to the ambassador's explanations in Union Square, Washington's train station, in a drizzling rain. Most of them did not understand where the date November 7 came from.

Ukrainians are waiting for the opening of the memorial to the victims of the Holodomor. Photo: Hannah Teller

Khristya Mikhchishin came from Philadelphia.

I am a representative of the second generation of Ukrainians, we came to the opening of the monument with the whole family. My ancestors are from Lviv, this is Western Ukraine, part of Poland during the Holodomor, but even there, through the lies of Soviet newspapers, stories leaked that people in Ukraine went crazy from hunger and ate their own children. I was born here in the USA, but I devoted a lot of time to the history of the issue: I read the works of James Mace, spoke with eyewitnesses - already elderly people who survived those terrible days. But I don’t know why we celebrate the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor on a different date. This is an important event, I would like to be together with the rest of Ukraine,” she says.

Ukrainians arrived in Washington at the opening of the memorial. Photo: Hannah Teller

Michael Kryvytsky, a student from Washington, DC, says:

My grandfather talked a lot about the Holodomor; he was just a boy then. Famine found him in his native village in the Cherkasy region. My grandfather kept a diary, recording the events of every day - how the house was searched, how they were looking for grain, how they beat my mother, my great-grandmother, for grain hidden behind an icon, how potatoes were found and my great-grandfather was arrested for it. My grandfather’s most terrible and vivid memory: when my great-grandmother died of hunger, they put a cast iron pot in the oven and went to look for roots in the ground. And they found nothing, and while they were walking, the cast iron burst - there was no fat left on its walls, and the children had been looking for food for so long.

The author of the idea for the memorial is Larisa Kurilas, an American of Ukrainian origin. She is an architect by training, not a sculptor. Therefore, I laid out a memorial from digital copies of ears of wheat, which, according to legend, are from Ukrainian varieties of grain.

The competition for the best design of the memorial was organized under President Yanukovych in 2011. 2012 was approved by the US National Planning Commission for the Capital. From 2014 onwards the monument began to cast in Pennsylvania, in the family workshop "Laran Bronze".

The kneeling diplomats and the First Lady of Ukraine Marina Poroshenko laying flowers at the memorial to the victims of the Holodomor, Washington. Photo: Hannah Teller

At the opening ceremony of the monument gathered a considerable, even by Washington standards, a company consisting of the American establishment, Ukrainian activists and the first lady of Ukraine, Marina Poroshenko, who had specially flown to the celebration. She presented a video message of her husband, President Poroshenko.

A conversation across the ocean: Petro Poroshenko delivered a video message to the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. Photo: Hannah Teller

Congressman Sander Levin, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, and Special Assistant to the US President Charles Kapchin spoke from the stage about the Holodomor and support for Ukraine. During the ceremony, video messages from Senators Chuck Schumer and Rob Portman were broadcast, and messages from former US President George W. Bush and three presidential candidates - Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio - were read out.

Memorial in memory of the victims of the Holodomor - thousands of Ukrainians came to the station square of the american capital

Marina Poroshenko noted that the tragedy also affected her family: her great-grandmother did not survive the winter of 32. “It [the Holodomor] lasted 500 days, 17 Ukrainians died every minute, 1000 per hour, almost 25 thousand per day. Therefore, I believe that this tragedy has not spared any family,” she said.

The first lady explained why the Holodomor is remembered in the USA on this very day.

For me, the date November 7 is symbolic. Because it was on this day that the Soviet Union celebrated the victory of the revolution in the past. It is symbolic that we have changed this tradition, showing that this is not a Soviet holiday, it is a holiday of truth over lies, a holiday of humanity. The holiday of those who managed to defeat the evil of Soviet power.

Track friends Yanukovych

Within the Ukrainian diaspora on the East Coast, there has been a grueling debate for several years about the ethics of donating to the memorial - money for the monument and the land under it was provided by the controversial Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, co-owner of several Ukrainian television channels and one of the closest associates of fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych.

Since March 2014, he has been under house arrest in Vienna. The detention occurred at the request of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in a criminal case brought against him in the United States. From the point of view of American justice, Firtash is allegedly the leader of an organized crime group that bribed officials in India to obtain a license to mine ilmenite, which would be used in the production of titanium at a Boeing plant.

The oligarch, according to the investigation, decided to pay the authorities of one of the states of India a bribe of $ 18,5 million. In the spring of 2015, the Austrian court refused to give Firtash to the Americans, but the US request for extradition remains valid throughout the rest of the world.

Laundering his not-so-good reputation, Firtash long ago began a campaign to build his own image as a philanthropist and connoisseur of beauty - he hired the best PR people and lobbyists, held days of Ukrainian culture in Britain, and allocated money for a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor. The debate - to take it or not to take it - ended this summer, when a fence appeared near the station, behind which they began to erect a monument.

Background and Pulitzer Prize for Lies

According to official data, during the first wave of artificial famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, carried out by the Soviet government as part of the collectivization policy, seven million people died. The Stalinist regime initiated the “Law of Prodrazverstka”: each collective farm had to hand over an unaffordable quota of grain.

It was taken away from the peasants along with the rest of their winter supplies and accused of “kurkulism”—prosperity that is unacceptable in the communist world. In order to cut off the last escape routes for the peasants, the Soviet government introduced a passport regime and attached villagers to the land, as in serfdom: leaving the villages was possible only with the permission of the collective farm chairman.

The next step was the infamous “Law of Five Spikelets”: theft of grain comparable in volume to the weight of several spikelets was punishable by death. In mitigating circumstances - a term of at least 10 years in prison. In fact, this law prohibited the storage of food: its origin still had to be proven to the relevant authorities - the punitive detachments of the NKVD.

Grain yields were poor in 1932, the grain procurement plan looked like part of a fantastic horror film: Ukraine was supposed to deliver 85 million poods of grain, while the North Caucasus - no more than three, and the Volga region - 51.2. The numbers are overwhelming and scary.

Bread was taken away, but the annual plan was only fulfilled by 38%. In the fall, special food detachments were sent to Ukrainian and Kuban villages - they were sometimes formed from yesterday’s peasants, who were promised a piece of bread, and therefore a chance to survive hunger. True, at the cost of other people's lives. To compensate for the shortage of bread, lard and potatoes were taken away from the peasants and their livestock was taken away.

By the end of the winter of 1933, cases of cannibalism became more frequent in Ukraine - people mad with hunger ate their own children. The authorities responded by producing posters: “Eating your own children is barbaric.”

The famine lasted almost two years, it came to the Volga region, the Southern Urals and Kuban, to Belarus, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan - the places of residence of the Ukrainian diaspora.

In Ukraine, the hardest hit regions were Kharkov, Kiev, Poltava, Sumy, Cherkassy, ​​Dnepropetrovsk, Vinnitsa, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv and Odessa regions and Moldova - then part of Ukraine. 81% of the dead were Ukrainians, 4,5% Russians and 1,5% Jews.

The Holodomor as a term first appeared in the American and Canadian periodicals in the 70-s. Soviet historians often replaced this term with the phrase "food difficulties." For the first time, the fact of the famine of the 30s was already recognized at the time of perestroika, several years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Moscow, in 30, a pool of Western journalists worked, and they could not help but notice the tragedy. The British correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Malcolm Meggridge, came to the USSR hoping to build socialism. He was the first Western journalist to write about the horrors of surplus.

The next was a journalist Garrett Jones, who made the 60-kilometer-long hike through the Ukrainian villages: there were horror stories in his report about cannibals, starved people, empty children's eyes and empty barns. He took out his records in diplomatic baggage, under the threat of execution and espionage charges.

However, these two were rather an exception to the rule - many Western journalists, for the sake of friendship with Soviet commissars and access to information, agreed to distort the truth.

Walter Duranty, the New York Times special correspondent in Russia, famous for his interview with Stalin, tried the hardest. Duranty paid for his friendship with the Soviet regime and, as a consequence, his rapid career with loyalty to his words - sometimes distorting and embellishing the facts.

But in the story of the Holodomor, he surpassed himself. The New York Times published his article “Russians want to eat, but do not go hungry.” The facts of hunger, cannibalism, numerous executions for the “five spikelets” were denied, the work of Jones was called deceitful, the planned economy was presented as one of the most ingenious know-how.

Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for this work. She was about to be recalled at the beginning of 2000, but in the New York Times editorial, on the wall of honor of the winners of the most prestigious award in the world of journalism, a portrait of Duranty is still hanging with a short postscript: the facts presented in the article were controversial and caused a large public resonance.