Yushchenko’s government is also leading a drive to have the United Nations declare the famine an act of genocide, seeing it as part of Stalin’s continuing effort to destroy any trace of Ukrainian national feeling.
By Peter Duffy
Published: December 19, 2007
NEW YORK: Daria Schulha Kira recalls huddling, 75 years ago in a small village in eastern Ukraine, with her three siblings as Communist Party officials ransacked their home looking for grain.
“Your government needs your food,” she remembers the armed men shouting. “Then they took iron bars and poked in the walls and the floors, looking for anything they could find.”
But they didn’t have any food. Kira, now 85 and living in an apartment in Manhattan, was living through one of the worst periods of Stalin’s brutal reign in the Soviet Union.
It is widely recognized that the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which killed three million to six million people, resulted from the Soviet government’s policies, said Alexander Motyl, a political science professor at Rutgers University who has written extensively on 20th-century Ukraine. Without the government’s requisitioning grain at levels far beyond the capacity of the Ukrainian peasantry to fulfill, Motyl said, there would have been no famine.Even when the scale of the suffering became apparent, Soviet officials continued to insist that unattainable grain quotas be met, refused to open up grain reserves or ask for international aid and prohibited starving peasants from moving into cities or other Soviet republics.
The New York Ukrainian community, long centered in the East Village, has begun commemorating the 75th anniversary of what it calls the Holodomor, or death by hunger. For the start of a year of activities, scores of Ukrainian-Americans marched in November from St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for a requiem Mass.
Few famine survivors with clear memories of the tragedy remain, so the bright-eyed Kira has necessarily become an object of much attention. On Nov. 27, she was the only survivor who appeared at a conference of scholars and diplomats at the United Nations.
Kira said she relished her role. “I want the world to know what happened,” she said.
This is also a pressing mission of the Ukrainian government, which is dedicating 2008 to compiling testimonies, supporting scholarly research, restoring burial places and planning a national museum. President Viktor Yushchenko has spoken of the importance of recovering memories of an event that had long been denied by the Soviet Union.
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