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The Day WEEKLY DIGEST of Ukrainian News in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, December 2, 2003
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The Holodomor of 1932-1933 was among major topics The Day has been
constantly addressing during the last year. We made our contribution in
rebuilding the horrible truth about those dreadful years by reaching many
hearts: evidence of this was the Candle in the Window action supported by
many Ukrainians in response to The Day's call.
The work has not yet been completed. The world has not finally recognized
the Holodomor genocide of the Ukrainian people. However, November 22
commemorating Holodomor victims became a step toward realizing ourselves
as a nation, a community.
"The memory about the events of the Manmade Famine is a nation building
element, stressing fundamental values that unite our society and bind us
with our past. Without it, it is impossible to form a single state organism
either at present or in the future," head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic
Church Cardinal Lubomyr Huzar wrote in his open letter to Ukraine's Prime
Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
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Poster by Olga Kaczmar
(Click on image to enlarge it)
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The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics also expressed his confidence that
on the day of the seventieth anniversary of the 1932-1933 Famine "everybody
should meet [near the Memorial Sign to Holodomor Victims at Mykhailovska
Ploshcha -Ed.] even if for a short while, even if only to look at each other
and feel that, taken together, we are a great single whole, united by common
values of extraordinary character not of this world."
However, not everybody in Ukraine is striving to rally around extraordinary
values. We believe it impossible to pass over in silence other quotations,
those from an article titled " The Day on 'Genocide' and National Rebirth of
the Ukrainian Society" (Komunist [Communist], November 19, 2003).
The article is no eye-opener, since CPU leader Petro Symonenko himself
claimed before journalists that there were no famine, calling all talks
about it political technology used by those in power. When in the heat of
the Tuzla scandal the Crimean Republic CPU Committee organized a pro-Russian
rally in Simferopol, The Day wrote that Ukrainian communists have not yet
chosen a country, whose interests they wish to defend.
In fact, the courts should analyze the article's author vocabulary, and
people whose names are mentioned there have every right to turn to the court
with a request to protect their dignity. We have nothing much to add to what
have already been said and written by The Day 's journalists on this topic.
Our reader, whose letter is published beneath, is right: we are not afraid
of being accused of anti-Communism. We are proud of our cooperation with
Professor James Mace.
We believe that Communist deputies leaving Verkhovna Rada hall during the
parliamentary hearings on the Holodomor was an immoral act and outrageous
condemnation of their own people's history. There are, of course, people in
Communist party with high moral principles, like, for instance, poet,
publicist, head of the Ukrainian Cultural Fund Borys Oliynyk who spoke about
Holodomor as early as at the Nineteenth Party Conference in 1989.
Unfortunately, this seems to be quite he exception. However, there are no
doubts that Ukraine needs a modern leftist party that professes national
ideas, like the Left does in other countries, post-Soviet ones included.
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