Family Album (2024)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Holodomor (the etymology of the word - "extermination by starvation") is the name of the genocide committed by the top political leadership of the USSR against the Ukrainian nation in 1932-1933. The instrument of extermination was a man-made organised famine in the territory of Ukraine. The main ideologist of the Holodomor was the dictator Stalin, who had absolute power concentrated in his hands. The genocide was committed in order to prevent the restoration of Ukraine's state independence and suppress Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet occupation. It is known that the least losses from the Holodomor are 4 million people.Having used the centralised state apparatus, punitive authorities, and the judicial system, Moscow managed to organise a large-scale famine. With the help of the system of state grain procurements and the establishment of notoriously inflated plans for such procurements for Ukraine, food was confiscated from the village population. Fines, additional taxes, imprisonment, and deportations enforced grain confiscations. In the early 1930s, Ukraine was agrarian and mostly Ukrainians, an average of 85%, lived in the village areas. Ukrainians did not want to join the state collective farms, so they resisted this policy and the punitive operation of dekulakization - mass deportations of the most ardent farmers with confiscation of property. Gradually, the resistance to collectivisation grew into a national liberation movement for the restoration of state independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic. It frightened Moscow, which, in response to Ukrainian resistance, staged a genocide. In addition to mass starvation, Ukrainians were imprisoned, deported to the North of the USSR, and shot. This makes it difficult to establish demographic losses. It is known that the least losses from the Holodomor are 4 million people.