When the evening of Nov. 22 came, I lit a candle to commemorate the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-33 and put it on my window. Then I looked around as I was expecting more candles in the neighborhood, but saw less than a dozen in more than a couple thousand empty windows.
Later that evening, I went to Mykhailivska Ploshcha, where people were supposed to light candles next to the small Holodomor memorial. There were more candles, but still not enough – not the number I expected on the 75th anniversary of a mass murder which probably touched every family in contemporary Ukraine. It was really cold at the square and a girl walking by said to her boyfriend: “What the hell are we doing here? It is damn cold, so let’s get a beer in a warmer place.” They both laughed and left. At that moment, I felt like someone started dancing at my grandmother’s funeral.
I came back home and opened my blog. My friend’s page was full of complaints from people who were stuck in traffic jams during the opening of the new Holodomor memorial at the Park of Eternal Glory (Park Vichnoi Slavy). Most of them were blaming President Victor Yushchenko for thinking too much about the dead and not enough about the living. And those were people with cars. And the Internet. As I have already noticed, wealthier people are usually the ones less satisfied. My favorite word – irony – comes to mind.
The funniest (or the saddest) thing is that all these people spent hours standing under the rain at Paul McCartney’s concert. And these people are OK with the jams during New Year’s celebrations. But when it comes to giving at least a little respect to those innocents brutally murdered by the Stalin regime, no one cares. And then I ask myself – what is wrong with us, people? Why do we forget our past so fast? And not only forget, but also disrespect it with our ignorance.
Many people say Holodomor happened a long time ago, so why remember it? Well, I answer: the Holocaust also happened a long time ago. But why are Jews so much more respectful about their dead? Why do so many books and movies based on this topic come out every year? Think also about the Armenian genocide question, which arose not such a long time ago and which basically cost Turkey a place in the European Union. Ukrainians watch “Shindler’s List” or read “Orphan Pamuk” and cry, pitying Jewish and Armenian people, find their own tragedy not worth mentioning.
I don’t want to talk about politics and political speculations on this day. I don’t know what Yushchenko’s intentions are when he raises the Holodomor question. I just think that, for what it’s worth, he is doing the right thing. Maybe it’s the only good thing he has done in his political career and yet, even here, people blame him, ignoring millions of dead who stand beside the beautiful words and theatrical show of the anniversary.
The only thing I want to understand here is “why?” Why are Ukrainian people so ignorant? Why don’t they have national pride? I’m not a historian and I cannot tell for sure whether Holodomor should be defined as genocide. (It’s an interesting but understated fact that the actual word genocide, which was invented by Jewish-Polish lawyer Rafael Lemkin, referred to the Holodomor as well. As far back as the 1950s, Lemkin wrote a book titled the “History of Genocide,” in which he specifically included a chapter on “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.”
Whatever we call it officially, isn’t the mass murder of millions of people in less than two years (according to different sources, the number of victims varies from 2.2 million to 14 million), something we should talk and talk and talk about?
I believe that people who don’t respect their past don’t respect themselves. And if we don’t respect ourselves, why are we expecting others to do that? Some people are so busy blaming the president and current government for all their troubles. They fail to understand that economic issues are not the only ones that help a nation unite and rise up.
Alina Rudya is a staff photographer and writer for the Kyiv Post.
