Despite the European Union’s acknowledgment of the Stalinist Holodomor as a genocide against Ukrainians, Ukraine is paradoxically shutting down the Holodomor Research Institute. Top scholars face persecution over their claims of the “incorrect” victim count, as per officials, of this tragic event.
The Genocide They Strived to Erase
On December 15, 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution identifying the Holodomor, the mass man-made famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, as genocide of the Ukrainian populace. The EU’s legislative body denounced the premeditated actions of the Soviet totalitarian regime that resulted in the loss of millions of Ukrainian lives and undermined the foundations of Ukrainian society. They urged the Russian Federation, and other post-USSR nations, to disclose facts pertaining to the Holodomor, and to make relevant archives public. The EU further called upon member states and third countries to increase awareness of such events and other atrocities committed by the communist totalitarian regime.
90 years had passed since this horrific crime against humanity was committed before the historic document was approved. Orchestrated by Joseph Stalin and his cronies, the catastrophic famine was designed to quash the wave of uprisings that swept through Ukraine between 1929 and 1931, a nation that fell under Russian occupation in 1920. These rebellions were fueled by resistance against forced collectivization and the pursuit of national autonomy. The scale and frequency of these uprisings were significant enough to equate them with a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war. Currently, Russia is claiming to “denazify and demilitarize” Ukrainians through missile and bombing campaigns, but 90 years prior, their tool of suppression was famine. Entire villages, towns, and districts were blacklisted, surrounded, stripped of food supplies, and isolated from the world. The Holodomor wasn’t limited to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic; it also affected other Soviet republics where Ukrainians resided in concentrated populations, like the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and Northern Kazakhstan. Scholars and publicists posit that the death toll could be as high as 15 million.
This was a grave chapter in Moscow’s history of efforts to annihilate the Ukrainian nation. It was bookended by the manufactured famines of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947, the violent repression of the national movement in Western Ukraine, and a history that spans centuries. Russia’s full-blown military assault in 2022 was merely an extension of the Kremlin’s long-standing policy towards Ukraine.
Despite the staggering magnitude of the tragedy, the reality of the Holodomor remained shrouded from the world for decades. During 1932-1933, most Western governments conveniently ignored the Ukrainians’ plight, maintaining trade relations with the USSR for cheap grain. Misinformation was further aided by left-wing journalists like the American correspondent Walter Duranty. Although reporters like British journalist Gareth Jones documented the famine, their voices were largely unheard. Until the mid-1980s, only the Ukrainian diaspora in the West dared to expose the truth about the Holodomor. In Ukraine, under Russian occupation, such discussions were strictly prohibited.
Gareth Jones. Photo: National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide
On October 30, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5273—Commemoration of the Great Famine in the Ukraine, attributing the deaths of over seven million Ukrainians to the Stalinist regime’s actions. In 1985, the U.S. Congress established the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, chaired by scholar James Mace. This commission scrutinized the events in Ukraine during 1932-1933, presenting their findings to Congress on April 22, 1988. They identified the large-scale man-made famine as an act of genocide, with the death toll calculated at 7 million Ukrainians. In response, Moscow, for the first time, acknowledged the famine’s occurrence. This official admission came from Professor Stanislav Kulchytsky, a chosen representative of Soviet historians. His 1989 brochure, 1933: The Tragedy of the Famine, conveyed this acknowledgment. The Soviet scholar was entrusted with the task for which others in the USSR were prosecuted—he publicly announced the mass famine in Ukraine and estimated a death toll of approximately 3.5 million. However, Kulchytsky was no dissident—he denied that the Holodomor was engineered, framing its recognition as genocide as an attempt to vilify the USSR. He argued the famine resulted from “miscalculations” in Stalin’s policy. This standpoint on the 1932-1933 events is still maintained by Moscow today.
Professor Stanislav Kulchytsky. Photo: day.kyiv.ua
After gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine officially upheld the Soviet interpretation of this crime for another 15 years. It wasn’t until 2006, following the Orange Revolution’s victory and the UN’s Joint Statement issuance on the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2003—endorsed by 64 nations, including Russia, where it was claimed that the ‘Great Famine killed between 7 and 10 million’—that the Ukrainian parliament acknowledged the genocide of Ukrainians. In January 2010, the Kyiv Court of Appeal indicted Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and other Soviet leaders for the crime of genocide against the Ukrainian people. This verdict was the result of an investigation led by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU). The court decision also noted the tragedy’s death toll at 3.94 million Ukrainians, a number determined by a researcher from Ukraine’s Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies. The figure was based on a comparison of Soviet census data from 1926 and 1937-1939. Even then, this figure sparked controversy, as Holodomor observers estimated a death toll of at least 7-10 million. The Ukrainian diaspora commonly echoed these estimates. Presidents Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma, and Viktor Yushchenko officially cited 10 million figure. President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, in his turn, on November 29, 2020, stated that ‘the losses of Ukrainians are comparable to those suffered by Ukraine in the Second World War’. According to official data and scientists’ calculations, 9 to 10 million died in this war. Moreover, it is well-documented that the 1937 and 1939 censuses were falsified, with the demographers involved persecuted by Stalin’s regime. This raises questions: how much can we trust the reliability of reconstructing Ukraine’s population data from the 1930s?
The General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine also disagreed with the conclusion and instructed SSU investigators to conduct a complex forensic examination with the involvement of various specialists – criminologists, lawyers, doctors, historians, economists and others.
“Wrong Figure”: Government Officials Clash with Scientists
In October 2019, Olesia Stasiuk, the director of the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide, launched a new investigation, this time targeting the crime’s perpetrators. The investigation entailed numerous comprehensive forensic examinations involving government agencies and 25 experts. These experts concluded that 10.5 million Ukrainians were victims of the 1932-1933 genocide, including 9.1 million in the Ukrainian SSR and an additional 1.4 million in the North Caucasus, a region where Ukrainians comprised the majority of the populace. This new data was disclosed on September 7, 2021, at the International Forum “Mass Man-Made Famines: Remembering and Commemorating.” A month later, a major controversy erupted. Anton Drobovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory—a state institution tasked with preserving national memory—vehemently denounced the examination. In an interview published on December 17, he publicly threatened to ruin the reputation of the scientists involved in the study and branded the released data as fraudulent.
Anton Drobovych. Photo: prm.ua
It is important to note that the Institute of National Memory is not a research organization. Its primary function is to promote history. However, individual scholars of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine also criticized the 10.5 million victims study. The “Open Letter on Falsification of the Number of Victims of the Holodomor-Genocide of 1932-1933,” dated December 1, 2021, bears the first signature of the acting chief researcher of the Institute, Stanislav Kulchytsky. This is the same Professor Kulchytsky who was commissioned by the Soviet leadership in 1989 to acknowledge the mass famine in Ukraine. Until recently, he served as the deputy director of the Institute of History of Ukraine for research, meaning he was not just a historian but a person who shaped the trajectory of Ukrainian historical science throughout the years of independence. The professor’s viewpoint remains consistent with his views from over 30 years ago.
Strikingly, just a few months before the commencement of the full-scale Russian invasion—when Putin was already mobilizing troops at Ukraine’s border—leading Holodomor scholars, studying the greatest crime committed against Ukrainians by Moscow, began to face persecution within their own state. In December 2021, conflicts erupted around the defense of a doctoral dissertation on the genocide by Olesia Stasiuk, the Director-General of the Holodomor Museum. Stasiuk is a renowned researcher of the Stalinist genocide, having examined the topic for over two decades. Among other accomplishments, she authored the exhibition “Executed by Starvation: The Unknown Genocide of Ukrainians,” which was displayed in 50 countries. The scholar was denied the opportunity to defend her dissertation at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, so she defended it at Hryhorii Skovoroda University in Pereiaslav on December 24.
Dr. Olesia Stasiuk. Photo: umoloda.kyiv.ua
Stasiuk was awarded a doctorate in history, however, the campaign against her started a month before the defense itself. In November of the previous year, it was revealed that the National Agency of Ukraine for Higher Education Quality Assurance was considering a complaint against Stasiuk’s dissertation. The main signatory of the complaint was Hennadiy Boryak, deputy director of the Institute of History of Ukraine. Boryak is known, among other things, for his connections to pro-Russian politician Dmytro Tabachnyk, who was Ukraine’s Minister of Education during Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency and fled the country following the Euromaidan revolution. Presently, Tabachnyk serves as an official of the Russian occupation administration in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In 2004, when Boryak headed the State Committee on Archives of Ukraine, he was implicated in a scandal involving the theft of documents from the Lviv archive. At that time, Tabachnyk, then Vice Prime Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, presented then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych with letters from Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, which turned out to be stolen from the state archive. The regional authorities directly accused Boryak of covering up the thefts. In 2010, Gennadiy Boryak and Stanislav Kulchytsky collaborated with Russian historians to create a joint “Ukrainian-Russian history textbook” at the behest of Education Minister Tabachnyk.
Dr. Genadiy Boryak. Photo: vaadua.org
On June 24, 2022, Olesia Stasiuk was dismissed from her position as head of the Holodomor Museum by Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. This decision was deemed illegal by a court of first instance in April 2023, and the case is now under consideration by the Court of Appeal. During the court proceedings, representatives of the Ministry of Culture overtly stated that Stasiuk’s dismissal was due to the “more than 10 million victims” figure identified by her colleagues.
Other historians, who are leading experts on the Holodomor, have also faced persecution. For instance, on January 1, 2023, the acting director of the Holodomor Genocide Museum, Lesia Hasydzhak, dissolved the Holodomor Research Institute, a division of the Museum that employed 23 specialists, including seven doctors and 11 candidates of science. This action was labeled a “reorganization,” but as a result, renowned Ukrainian scholars such as historians Volodymyr Serhiichuk and Vasyl Marochko, lawyer Volodymyr Vasylenko, and psychiatrist, human rights activist, and political prisoner Semen Hluzman lost their jobs.
Volodymyr Serhiichuk, a professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and chairman of the International Association of Holodomor Genocide Researchers, provided the calculations that led to the finding of 10.5 million victims of the Holodomor. Instead of using questionable Soviet census data, Serhiichuk turned to primary archival sources for his research. School records from the 1930s, for instance, revealed a steep decline in the number of children attending school, thereby indicating that over 4 million children alone were lost due to the mass, man-made famine. Presently, the Department of World Ukrainian History at Shevchenko University, which is led by Professor Serhiichuk, faces closure. The initiative for this closure was taken by the Dean of the Faculty of History, Ivan Patryliak, who also signed a complaint against Olesia Stasiuk’s dissertation and an appeal to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory expressing disagreement with the figure of 10.5 million, despite having never studied the Holodomor himself. In contrast to Patryliak, his deputy, Taras Pshenychnyi, acknowledged the number of over 10 million Ukrainian victims during a criminal case investigation.
Dr. Ivan Patryliak. Photo: ukurrier.gov.ua
It is indeed paradoxical that the open persecution of scholars by leaders of certain state institutions and academic ones coincides with Ukrainian President and Parliament’s regular requests to foreign partners for legislative recognition of the Ukrainian tragedy. On instance, on April 24, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Ruslan Stefanchuk stated at the conference of the European Union Presidents of Parliament: ‘As a result of the famine artificially organized by the Stalinist regime in 1932-1933, Ukraine lost up to 10 million of its sons and daughters’. On May 17, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked the French Senate for supporting a resolution that recognized the Holodomor as genocide. Zelenskyy observed that this marked “an important step towards restoring historical justice and preserving the memory of millions of Ukrainians who were starved to death.” Since February 24, 2022, 11 countries have made similar declarations. This year, Bulgaria, Belgium, France, Iceland, and Belgium have joined in recognizing the tragedy. These recognitions have been facilitated by Russia’s overt display of its attitudes towards Ukraine and Ukrainians, including explicit declarations of its intent to erase Ukrainian identity. However, the question arises as to whether Ukrainian authorities are doing enough to encourage other nations to finally acknowledge the genocide of 1932-1933. The persecution of leading scholars is clearly counterproductive to such efforts.
Ukrainian National Museum Certifies Russian Propaganda
The question of why the number of Holodomor victims has sparked such fierce conflict among officials from various agencies is a pertinent one. This seems to be a matter more suitable for scientific debate, rather than becoming a tool for political speculation. Both sides of the argument underscore that the specific number of victims does not alter the core fact: the Holodomor was a genocide of Ukrainians perpetrated by the Soviet totalitarian regime.
The figure of 3.9 million victims, as proposed by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, is indeed staggering. It suffices to categorize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as one of the gravest tragedies humanity faced in the 20th century. Interestingly, however, the estimated death toll of 3 to 3.5 million Ukrainians is also accepted by official Russian historical scholarship.
This official Russian stance on the Holodomor was articulated in November 2021, by the Russian Ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, in an article he wrote for the German newspaper Junge Welt. The article was published just prior to a vote in the Bundestag, in which the majority of deputies voted in favor of a resolution that recognized the Holodomor as genocide. Intriguingly, this document, unlike most similar resolutions, provides an estimate of the number of victims: 3 to 3.5 million in just the three winter months of 1932-1933, while the crime actually spanned two years.
The Holodomor Memorial in Mariupol, destroyed by Russian occupiers in October 2022. Photo: unian.ua
The central argument of Nechayev’s article is that the mass famine of 1932-1933 supposedly occurred not just in Ukraine but also in other regions of the Soviet Union. He claims that around 7 million “Soviet people” fell victim to this tragedy. According to the Russian interpretation, less than half of these were Ukrainians—over three million—and the remainder were inhabitants of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. Thus, the tragedy is depicted as an “all-Union” catastrophe, and its causes are attributed to “drought and crop failure,” “miscalculations of the Soviet government,” and “local excesses.”
Indeed, it is a striking coincidence that the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and the Russian Foreign Ministry almost unanimously cite a similar number of Ukrainian casualties as a result of Stalin’s genocide. The figure of 3.9 million victims of the Holodomor is also regularly referenced by Russian propaganda outlets, citing the Ukrainian Institute of Demography. It is astonishing that there seems to be an alignment on this issue with a nation that does not recognize Ukrainians as a separate people and consistently distorts the entire history of Ukraine. This peculiar alignment between Russian propagandists and advocates of “balanced figures” was also evident during the trial concerning Olesia Stasiuk’s dismissal. The interim head of the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide, Lesia Gasydzhak, submitted as evidence publications from Russian sources Vesti.ru and Vzglyad.ru: “SSU Historians Came Up with Millions of Fake Holodomor Victims” and “Fraud in Creating the Main Ukrainian Myth Revealed”. Both propaganda materials were validated by the seal of the National Museum and the acting director general’s signature on August 26, 2022, a day when Russian forces were shelling the territory of five regions of Ukraine, resulting in civilian deaths in Bakhmut, Sloviansk, and Kharkiv.
Russian Propagandist Publications, sealed by the National Museum of Holodomor-Genocide and signed by its acting director general Lesia Gasydzhak. Materials of the Kolomyia City and Raion Court
Why have the results of a forensic examination of events that occurred 90 years ago proven so inconvenient for certain Ukrainian officials that they are willing to utilize Russian propaganda to combat their adversaries? The reason is difficult to discern. Factors such as personal ambitions, grudges, jealousy, or, most disconcertingly, potential pro-Russian biases might play a part. Regardless of the reasons, such a scenario is unacceptable, particularly at a time when the Ukrainian nation is battling for its physical existence against an adversary that, not for the first time in history, is trying to annihilate it. It has never been more crucial for Ukrainians to remember their past. This memory is also important for the world at large, as indicated by the increasing number of countries recognizing and commemorating the crime of the Holodomor genocide against Ukrainians.
