The ghost of the Holodomor – World – is waking up in Ukraine

“I think hunger will return”: Maria Goncharova, a survivor of the famine of the 1930s, fears experiencing that horror again when Kyiv accuses Moscow of using food as a weapon again, writes Blaise Goklen of AFP. BTA reported.

The 93-year-old woman is accumulating at home for fear of a shortage,

marked to life by Stalin, who caused the deaths of millions with the collectivization of Ukrainian lands during the Soviet era.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, an elderly lady with a red headscarf has heard missiles fly over

above her beautiful sky-blue wooden house in the village of Cheremushna in the eastern Kharkiv region.

And many bad memories come to her mind.

“We survived with only one baked potato and flour a day,” said Goncharova, who looks after three chickens in her tiny garden.

The disability pension of 2,000 hryvnias – nearly 65 euros a month, is enough for her to exist; she splits every penny in two and still cooks on a wood stove.

Birch twigs are scattered on the floor of the living room – the air is fresh and clean.

The Russians “have already stolen a lot of grain from us and are able to take everything from us,” she told AFP and was baptized.

Genocide

This is the fear of the return of “Gladiator” – a Ukrainian term meaning “starvation” of local peasants by the Soviet regime in 1932-1933, when, according to historians, many millions died.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army is bombarding their grain reserves, and Ukrainians are outraged.

Because for Kyiv, this word is synonymous with genocide, as it was organized in the past to crush its timid drive for independence.

“The Soviet government used food to achieve its goals,

killing en masse those who oppose it, “said Ludmila Grinevich, director of the Holodomor Research and Education Center.

Russia and other historians, by the way, reject such conclusions

– according to them, these events fit into the context of the famine that then also hit Central Asia and the Russian lands.

However, now that the world is threatened by a global food crisis, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accused Russian President Vladimir Putin in late May of “using food as a weapon”.

Andriy Ermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration, said recently that Russia was trying to “repeat the Holodomor.”

“The 1930s are too good to draw parallels,

because even then there was an attempt to destroy what today we can call a Ukrainian political nation, “commented Ludmila Grinevich.

“The grain of the Ukrainians has been confiscated and they are starving,

then the Soviet government returned a part to them, but only to those who were inclined to join the collective farms “- the huge Soviet cooperative farms, she added.

Erased memory

Kharkiv, located more than 450 kilometers east of Kyiv, was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1919 to 1934, and the region ranked among the 23 most fertile in the USSR.

In the vicinity of Maria Goncharova’s village, “a third of the locals have died,” recalls Tamara Polishchuk, curator of a museum dedicated to the subject.

“During the Holodomor, authorities stopped registering deaths“,

notes the specialist who studied the issue in depth.

According to her, every family here is still marked by the memory of that time, which the USSR tried to erase for decades and which Ukraine managed to revive only as an independent country after 1991.

In any case, the old woman from Cheremushna, who shows us her supplies, is glad that “there is still a little of everything.”

“A whole bunch of countries are helping us. They are supplying us with various goods, distributing aid among the people. But God knows how long,” she sighed and went out to sit in the reeds, under the shade of a walnut tree.

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