The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine handed over a thousand archival criminal cases from the times of the artificial famine to the National Museum of the Holodomor-genocide. Most of them relate to cannibalism in March-June 1933, which coincides with the peak of mortality among Ukrainians.
Archive files of the Holodomor
The testimonies of people who survived the genocide were digitized. In the memoirs, it is said, in particular, that "in the village of Kyrnichka, 34 people, most of them children and the elderly, died due to "great difficulties with food". There is also a fragment in which the unnamed girl was left a complete orphan due to starvation — her father, mother, two brothers and sister died when she was only 18.
These 1,022 cases give historians the opportunity to examine the impact of the communist regime, which created an artificial famine that drove Ukrainians to a state of despair and beyond the limits of human morality. The motivations for cannibalism were dictated by the doom of people.
What is the Holodomor?
The Holodomor of 1932-1933 was an artificial mass famine that led to millions of human casualties in the countryside on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Then 7 million people died of hunger. In Ukraine and the world, the Holodomor is perceived as an act of genocide of the Ukrainian people, inspired by the government of the USSR. In 1928, the Soviet authorities introduced forced grain harvesting, when all or most of the grain was taken from farmers at significantly reduced prices. At the same time, the "liquidation" of the wealthiest farms and collectivization took place. Due to inefficient collective farm management and the onset of famine in Ukraine, opposition to the totalitarian regime grew. In the seven months of 1932, 56% of all anti-government demonstrations in the USSR took place in the country. Then the Soviet authorities decided to organize an artificial famine in order to reduce the resistance of the population by destroying part of it.
- In Ukraine, every year on the fourth Saturday of November, the victims of the Holodomor-genocide of 1932-1933 and mass artificial famines of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947 are commemorated. This year, the commemoration will be held on November 25.
- In 2006, Ukraine recognized the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people.
- In 2016, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine appealed to democratic states to recognize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people.