"Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5:10)
A statue of a frightened starving girl as the "protective face" of a memorial parkhy does Ukraine desperately want to remain independent of Russia? Aren't Ukrainians and Russians the same !? Many acquaintances ask me this as a person who has visited both Russia and Ukraine in recent years. During my travels, I come across many happy, but also sad stories, which are witnessed by various monuments. One of the saddest with an even more tragic background I have encountered is in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, a country that has experienced tragedies in the last hundred years that are enough for all of humanity.
At the entrance to the memorial park, a historical event called "Holodomor" by Ukrainians, is a sculpture of a very thin girl with an extremely sad look, holding several ears of grain in her hands. Behind her is the Candle of Remembrance, a monument with details reminiscent of authentic embroidery that can be found on traditional Ukrainian costumes. But what is the Holodomor and what crime does this monument mark in general?
After the end of the First World War, Ukraine was an independent state, but in 1922 the Soviet Union "sucked" it into the community of Soviet states. The Ukrainians, who even then considered themselves a Central European people like the Poles and not an Eastern European like the Russians, tried to restore Ukraine's independence. Not wanting to lose control of Europe's main granary, in 1932 Stalin resorted to one of the most heinous forms of terror against one nation. In the process of nationalization, he took away the grain-producing land from the Ukrainian peasants, as well as all its offerings, thus creating an artificial famine. The goal was to "teach Ukrainians to be smart" so that they would no longer oppose official Moscow. Thus, the people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread. The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. At that time, 17 people in Ukraine were dying of hunger every minute, over 1,000 every hour, and almost 24,500 every day! People were literally starving to death in the streets, roads between towns and villages were under the strict control of secret police forces, and the whole of Ukraine was under blockade, as a result of which news of the evil its people were exposed to could not spread.
Stalin later settled the Russian population in the emptied Ukrainian villages. During the next census, there was a great shortage of population, and some villages completely disappeared. Therefore, the Soviet government annulled the census, destroyed the census documentation, and the enumerators were shot or sent to the gulag, in order to hide the truth. But some data remained undisclosed and later served as evidence in elucidating the truth. For example, the death rate in the Kiev region in 1933 was 179 people per 1,000 inhabitants, and in the years after the Holodomor it was "only" 7 people per 1,000 inhabitants, clearly pointing to the terrible effects of Soviet policy on the lives of Ukrainians.
He was in the Holodomor during 1932-1933. between seven and ten million people were killed by famine, more than Jews in World War II. Their poison gas was hunger. Their Hitler was Stalin. Their Holocaust was the Holodomor. For them, fascist Berlin was Soviet Moscow, and their concentration camp was the Soviet Union. Today, 28 countries of the world classify the Holodomor as genocide, and you could not learn about it in school because almost all the evidence was destroyed, and the victim was silenced for decades and until recently did not have the right to vote.
The Holodomor may have temporarily broken the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine's independence from Russia eternal. And that is only one reason why Ukrainians and Russians are not the same. The road to freedom and independence can be very long and difficult, seemingly endless. People in Ukraine know that, we in Bosnia and Herzegovina know that too. The most important thing is not to give up on that path, because living in a golden cage is slavery if you don't have freedom.