EDMONTON, Canada – Hundreds of people gathered for a solemn ceremony at Edmonton City Hall on Nov. 24 to commemorate the victims of the Holodomor, a man-made famine which took place in 1932-33 under Soviet totalitarian Josef Stalin.
The commemoration began with a memorial organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’s Edmonton branch and joined by the Slavic Chamber Choir Kappella Kyrie, students of St. Teresa and St. Matthew’s Catholic Schools, representatives of Ukrainian Youth Association Plast and the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex as well as dignitaries and honorary guests.
Earlier this week, Alberta’s Prime Minister Rachel Notley encouraged everyone to honor millions of people who starved to death: “On the fourth Saturday of every November, Alberta joins Holodomor survivors and all people of Ukrainian heritage in remembrance. We do more than remember. We stand vigilant against racism, violence, hatred and persecution. And we promote the acceptance of all people and cultures, so everyone can live in peace and safety.”
Misleading propaganda
When addressing the audience, city councellor John Dzyadyk said: “Today we share the pain of the one of the world’s most horrific events.” While Jars Balan, a historian and professor from the University of Alberta highlighted the danger of misleading propaganda about Ukraine’s famine. Balan spoke of two Canadian journalists reporting on Ukraine in the 1930s. One of them was Irish-born Frederick Griffin who toured the Soviet Union for eight weeks in the summer of 1932, covering life in the other hemisphere for the Toronto Star.
According to Kevin Plummer who writes a weekly history column called Historicist on Torontoist.com, Griffin read everything about Russia he could get his hands on over a period of months, and was keen to discover “the real facts” for himself. “His difficulty, however, was in getting into the virtually closed country. On five separate occasions Griffin’s requests were denied by Soviet authorities, though it’s not clear why.”
He was finally granted a visa in early 1932. By the time he left the USSR, Griffin had filed around fifty stories from within the country – all of which appeared on the Star‘s front page. Critics, including Balan, argue that Griffin, however, parroted the narratives spread by the Soviet regime and was being shown only what the Soviets wanted him to see.
Another reporter mentioned by Balan was Dutch-Canadian-American Pierre van Paassen. He witnesed the situation in Ukraine in his 1932 article published in The Globe as follows: “The truth is that conditions in rural regions of Ukraine are frightful. There is want here, bitter want. I would not say there is actual famine; nevertheless this much is certain and undeniable: people here are hungry.
“Farms are being modernized, excellent machinery is being introduced, endless streams of tractors, reapers, binders are pouring in from the new factories. And yet people are clamouring for bread this summer,” he wrote in his article called “Ukraine Starves for Five-Year Plan.”
As for the reasons, van Paassen argued that what happened was the following: “Comrade Stalin has gone too fast. Everything in the vast Union, from Vladivostok to Minsk, has for the last few years been subjected to the execution of the Five-Year Plan of heavy industry.” He also mentioned that “…it may be that Moscow did not realize in the least what is going on until the harm had been done; that it was not fully known of what excessive zeal the collectors were capable of in the Ukraine.” According to Balan, van Paassen had little to no mention of the role of the leadership in the USSR in regards to starving farmers of Ukraine. He also didn’t mention famine in his other stories.
Survivors
The world now acknowledges what happened to Ukrainian peasants and millions of people in other agricultural regions of the Soviet Union 85 years ago. Today some of those genocide survivors spoke to the crowd.
Leonid Korownyk was born two years before the Holodomor in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Korownyk, now 88, recalled the years of starvation and despair with a poem he wrote. He describes how millions of tons of grain were seized from Ukrainian farmers in an effort to force agricultural collectivization and people had to eat grass and sparrows to stay alive.
During World War II, Korownyk and his parents ended up in Germany where he studied in a Ukrainian school. In 1949, he arrived in Canada. Today he works as a translator of theological literature and has documented his memories in a number of poems he recites at the commemoration events.
The event ended with a wreath-laying ceremony near the Monument to the Victims of the Ukrainian Famine. The assembled crowd sang the Ukrainian and Canadian national anthems before lighting candles in honor of those who perished. Edmonton’s Holodomor memorial was the first monument erected anywhere in the world honoring the famine.
