I would like to voice my gratitude to Prof. James Mace through your newspaper, as his articles on the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine have attracted public attention with their serious and unbiased approach. But for his writings, many in this country would have had no idea about how much has been done in America to collect documents and eyewitness accounts.
As a Ukrainian national whose family has firsthand knowledge about the Holodomor, I am grateful to US Congress and personally to Dr. Mace for their tremendous and dedicated efforts in shedding light on these dark and hair-raising pages in our history.
Even as a small girl, I heard stories about a terrible famine in Ukraine. My mother was 10 in 1933. She told me about her younger brother swollen with hunger. Whenever mother’s elder sisters visited, they would remember childhood and I would hear dialogs I would never forget. Mother would ask, “Which Kniazhytskys?” and one of her sisters would say, “The ones who died in the famine.” Hearing this I would feel horrified and never forget it. One of my mother’s fellow countrywomen (she was born and grew up in Novy Buh, a small town in Mykolayiv oblast) told how she, then 12, would be left at home and not allowed outside. I did not understand and asked why. So no one would catch her, kill her, and then eat her, I was told.
My father’s family survived because my grandfather had realized what awaited them and somehow managed to take the family to a place not far from Leningrad after receiving a job at a local grain procurement office. How they made it there from Ukraine is another story. When my uncle and I visited our relatives’ graves (at the village of Sorokotiahy, Bila Tserkva district, Kyiv oblast), I asked why some of the graves were without crosses and was told that one-third of the village had died in the 1932-1933 famine and those people lay buried there.
Reading about the genocidal famine of 1932-1933 (genocidal, considering the number of victims of those horrible events), I ask myself why — and I think that many others ask themselves the same question. I don’t mean that Moscow ordered it, but those supreme forces that ruled our lives. Why did God punish those living in southeast and central Ukraine? (Western Ukraine was spared that punishment. Why? Because they deserved a better lot?) The only reason I can think of is because those people had forgotten God, because they had become accursed atheists. In other words, they were punished for godlessness and for venality.
When churches started being destroyed, icons burned, and priests tortured in the 1920s, it was a great tragedy for all Christians, of course. But how did the bulk of the people respond? “An idea has conquered the masses and become a driving force.” If so, those masses later paid a horribly highprice.
From publications over the past several years I know that, when Polish Communists (after all, every nation proves to have timeservers and turncoats) tried to follow in Moscow’s footsteps, they were met with such popular resistance they abandoned all attempts to encroach on houses of God. What did we Ukrainians do? How did our fathers and grandfathers respond? Was there any resistance? If so, to what extent? No publications on the subject — or too few if any.
I remember a story told by Dobrovolsky, a noted architect. In that difficult period before World War II, he was a student. He came to attend a lecture on architecture. The professor was late and when he entered the auditorium he sat at his desk and suddenly burst into tears. After a while he explained to the stunned students that he had just signed a document reading that St. Michael’s Cathedral had no architectural value. If he had not sign it he would have been sent to Solovki.
Now, standing at St. Michael’s Cathedral [after reconstruction], I think how could all those people bring themselves to destroy a house of God in which people had prayed for thousand years. What could a nation allowing its temples to be demolished count on? What made all those people that had only recently joined in marriage, baptized their children, and celebrated the Mass for the dead in church suddenly turn into heathens and proceed to ruin their temples, their roots, their homes? What caused all this to happen in the Orthodox part of Ukraine? We are all in the hands of God. Why was Orthodox Byzantium finally destroyed? Why did atheism reign supreme in Moscow and then reached its deadly godless tentacles to other territories?
I believe that the Holodomor was visited on the Christian people of Ukraine as a punishment, because that people had received the Faith from St. Andrew and then carried it further to the east and to the north; they had remained Christian but then became apostates and were meted out a terrible punishment for disowning the religion bestowed upon them by the Lord, their language, their homeland. I wonder what those eyewitnesses interviewed by Dr. Mace had to say on the subject. At least some of them must have asked themselves some of these questions.
I realize that I am broaching a subject addressing extremely complicated and deep-reaching historical, geographic, religious, and other aspects of national development. I look forward to a reply, an article written by a very clever, sincere, and understanding author.
Liudmyla KRYVENKO, Kyiv.
