Reverend Fathers, Honoured Guests Ladies and Gentlemen.

It is an honour to stand before you to day, and in the first instance, to welcome you all here today for the Commemoration of the Ukrainian Holodomor – Ukrainian of 1932- 1933.

I am here also to represent the Governing Council of the Association of in Great Britain, our Chairman and General Secretary.

I would have preferred not to have stood here before you today, because in reality we should not have had the need to remember the Holodomor “because it need not have happened in the first place.”

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Holodomor Ukrainians are commemorating the 77th anniversary of the Stalin regime's forced farm-collectivization program -- a process that culminated in a man-made in one of the world's most fertile regions. An estimated 7 million people died of in The memories of those who survived the famine may soon fade away as they will no longer be alive to bear witness to those dark days, and I ask why even today is so little known about the tragedy.

An artificial famine of devastating proportions was the culmination of a savage piece of human engineering designed to eliminate an economic class that the Communists viewed as their fierce opponents. It was also intended to break the will of Ukrainians who clung to their national identity.

The tsarist-era owners of sweeping plots of land had already been killed or driven out by the 1917 Communist revolution. But the Soviet leadership also despised the millions of peasant farmers who took their place, maintaining small farms and growing mostly grain. To the Communists, such farmers were a threatening example of self-reliance and capitalism.

Stalin, in particular, saw Ukrainian peasants as forming the front line of the Ukrainian nationalist movement which he so intensely disliked. He resented the compromises Moscow had been forced to make with Ukrainian Communists -- compromises that gave them a degree of autonomy and that saw a revival of and language.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/2 The authorities worked vigorously to extract the unrealistically high grain yields demanded by Moscow, leaving pitifully little with which the farmers could feed themselves and their families.

The collective farms were notoriously inefficient. Even so -- and against the pleas of even senior Ukrainian Communist leaders -- Stalin in 1932 increased grain quotas in Ukraine. The demand made famine inevitable.

Communist loyalists during the Soviet era -- and some even today -- have blamed the famine on a poor harvest in 1932. But even Soviet records show the year's harvest as satisfactory.

"The collectivization of wheat had begun in 1932. In 1932 there was a big harvest. People said the grain had grown so high that the heads of people walking in the fields couldn't be seen. The stalks were so heavy with grain that they snapped. Nobody foresaw such a good harvest in 1932. When the Soviet authorities said [the famine] was the fault of a poor harvest, they were lying.

As begun to take a firmer grip on the peasant population, the communist authorities used force and terror to fulfil the grain quotas which left peasants and collective farms with little or nothing to sustain themselves with. Thousands of peasants who tried to hide grain or other food to feed their families were executed, as were many local Communist officials who objected to a policy that brought starvation to many areas as 1932 approached its end.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/3 Seventy seven years ago, the month of May saw the climax of a horrific artificial famine that reduced millions of people to living skeletons in some of the world's most fertile farm land, while stocks of grain and other foods rotted by the ton, often within the sight of families dying from starvation.

Desperate hunger drove people to sell off all of their possessions for any food they could find. At night, an eerie silence fell over the village, where all the livestock and chickens had long since been killed for food and exhausted villagers went to bed early.

But Communist requisition brigades looking to fulfil the impossibly high grain quotas continued to search even those villages where inhabitants were already dying from starvation. They used metal to probe the ground and potential hiding places where they suspected grain could be hidden.

Some of the brigade members, fuelled by Soviet hate campaigns against the peasants, acted without mercy, taking away the last crumbs of food from starving families knowing they were condemning even small children to death. Any peasant who resisted was shot.

They took everything they could find to eat. As food ran out in the villages, thousands of desperate people trekked to beg for food in towns and cities. Food was available in cities, although strictly controlled through ration coupons. But residents were forbidden to help the starving peasants and doctors were not allowed to aid the skeletal villagers, who were left to die on the streets.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/4 Grain and potatoes continued to be harvested in Ukraine, driven by the demand of Stalin's quotas. But the inefficiency of the Soviet transportation system meant that tons of food literally rotted uneaten -- sometimes in the open and within the view of those dying of starvation.

Most peasant families had five or six children, and some mothers killed their weakest children in order to feed the others.

There are reports that people avoided buying meat from a vendor because he suspected it was human flesh. 'Thank you to Father Stalin for depriving us of food. Our mother died of hunger and we ate her, our own dead mother. And after our mother we did not take pity on anyone. We would not have spared Stalin himself.'"

As the tragedy developed, people became swollen, they died by the tens each day. The collective farm authorities appointed men to collect and bury the dead.

"What do you do if there's nothing to eat? We collected birch leaves and toasted them and ate them. What else could we do?" witnesses have said

One witness said that she worked at a collective farm and received a small piece of bread every day for all four of her family. But it was not enough to keep them all alive.

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"My brother died from starvation. He was small and there was nothing to eat. What could our mother give us to eat when there was nothing? My sister brought us a little piece of bread once a day and we gulped it down and waited until the next day. But you wanted food all the time. My brother was younger than I and he died because he needed to eat. And our mother could give nothing."

Many people met their deaths with quiet resignation, praying and comforting their starving children with fairy tales.

Not all authorities were untouched by the tragedy. Some of the Communist activists and officials supervising the grain expropriation were horrified at what they saw and protested to their superiors or tried to provide food for the starving villagers. For their efforts, they were executed.

For scores of senior Ukrainian Communists, the famine and Stalin's attack on the Ukrainian cultural revival were cause for their final disillusionment with the ideology they had served. Many of them committed suicide rather than face torture and show trials.

Until the fall of communism, most of the villager eyewitnesses who survived the famine were wary of telling their stories. Even now, many are reluctant to talk about that period because they see many Soviet-era holdovers still in positions of power.

The memories that seem to haunt them most are those of watching their loved ones die. One witness, who lost nearly every member of her family to the famine, says such memories can never be erased. Nor does she want to forget them.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/6 A famine deliberately engineered by the regime of Josef Stalin 77 years ago claimed millions of lives in Ukraine. It is today considered one of the worst atrocities of the Soviet regime and a terrifying act of genocide. Even so, the famine of 1933 is relatively unknown

Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as . One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial.

"The Nazis were so completely and utterly defeated and had no apologists other than a few nuts after the Second World War. The , in contrast, imploded," "There was no military conquest. Ideologically, perhaps, it was defeated. But in a sense, the regime of yesteryear -- many of its functionaries, administrators, and bureaucrats -- simply changed their shirts and became nationalists or patriots overnight. The archival record is still not entirely available. There has been no Nuremberg trial, if you like, to bring the many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who served the Soviet regime to justice."

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/7 Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do; Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

"In the first place, the Germans were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record.

Hitler did many horrible things but he didn't torture his friends to tell lies. Most historians now accept that a devastating famine took place, some sceptics remain that try to find a justification for Stalin's behaviour.

Since the disintegration of the USSR there is greater access to Soviet archives.

There is no doubt that the famine was aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated the Ukrainian peasants.

"Stalin was trying to break the Ukrainians and had this distrust of everybody, but particularly Ukraine."

There were a number of Western journalists who knew of the famine at the time and chose write about it.

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Malcolm Muggeridge. In the spring of 1933 Muggeridge did an audacious thing; he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine. What witnessed, he never forgot. In a series of articles smuggled out in the diplomatic bag, he described the man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, millions, dying like famished cattle, within sight of full granaries, guarded by the army and police. "At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet." At a co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread. In his Diary, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: "Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."

But few believed him. His dispatches were cut. He was sacked by the Guardian and forced to leave . Muggeridge was vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where sympathy to what was called "the great Soviet experiment" was de rigour. 's voice led the chorus of denunciation and denial. Privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that “at least 10 million people had been starved to death adding that they are only Ukrainians."

Holodomor was a horrific Genocidal catastrophe that befell Ukraine.

Ukraine, meanwhile, will do more to educate its own population about the famine. Since gaining independence, successive Ukrainian governments have done little to publicize the episode

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/9 for fear of instigating a controversy with the country's still- powerful Communist Party, which continues to deny the famine was deliberately organized. Moreover, some of those who took part in the executions, deportations, and confiscation of food are still alive and receiving state pensions.

Some call it a holocaust. And they're right. Because a holocaust is what it was. We also wonder why so few people share our pain and anger at what happened to our proud, beautiful nation.

The cold, stiff children still cuddled by their mothers long after death. The piles of corpses frozen by the cold into a twilight picture of agony. The seemingly endless suffering, driving a blood-red knife into the weeping heart of an entire nation.

This forced starvation, murder, slaughter and mass destruction of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet Communists in the early , a man-made catastrophe that is remembered at this time of year by Ukrainians the world over. In sorrow. In deep sorrow. It is said that millions died in ditches, like animals.

No. Not like animals. Animals would have received more sympathy and their fate would not have been denied. This genocide of Ukrainians is one of the great horrors of the world. The manner in which it has been forgotten or ignored is almost worse.

“Entire families dead, lying there, with fathers on top of the heap as they tried to protect their children from the bullets of the communists."

The Ukrainian genocide has its deniers. Unlike the madmen who deny the Jewish Holocaust, however, these people are often treated with respect and authority.

Still today there are university teachers, media figures and politicians who will minimize or even dismiss the suffering of the Ukrainian people.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/10 They argue that if the starvation did happen it was a natural occurrence or they somehow imply the Ukrainians brought the whole thing on themselves because of their sense of “national pride” Statements and attitudes that are grotesque and horrible, but for some reason have been allowed and even encouraged.

All is wrong. All denial of human cruelty is wrong. All feelings of racial superiority are wrong. A dead baby is a dead baby. White, black, Jewish, gentile, Ukrainian, British. We now know that Soviet Communism was a hellish ideology that had as little concern for life and love as German National .

Ukrainians have known this for a very long time. They simply want the rest of the world to know it as well.

We recently marked Remembrance Day in memory of those who died in the World Wars. But today we commemorate a day of remembrance for people who died 77 years ago in 1933 in a different kind of war. It was a war of genocide against the Ukrainian people in which food was used as a weapon.

Maybe that is because famine has always been with mankind due to war, natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. But this 1933 "famine" in Ukraine did not take place during a war, there was no natural disaster. How is it possible for a famine to take place without any logical cause?

Ukraine is famous as "the breadbasket of Europe. Ukraine has been described as the "granary of the world."

If Ukraine was the "breadbasket of Europe" how could it become the scene of such a terrible "famine" in 1933?

You and I have heard this story elsewhere. Ukrainian famine denial is the same as Jewish Holocaust denial and is perpetrated by the same kind of misguided individuals or academics.

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/11 How is it possible that two of the world's greatest tragedies in this century could be doubted and denied? In the case of the it is anti-Semitism but in the case of the Ukrainians we now know how it was done.

Stalin told Churchill in 1942 that Collectivization was worse than an entire year of the war against Germany and that there were ten million victims.

In Ukraine it has been called Holodomor meaning Hunger Death or perhaps Hunger Murder. It has been called the Organized Famine, the Engineered Famine, the Man-Made Famine and the Artificial Famine. But it really wasn't artificial since real people died of real hunger. It may be called the 1932-1933 Famine Genocide. But in my opinion it is most accurately labelled simply Genocide in Ukraine 1933 since it was planned in 1932 and intended to kill much of the Ukrainian nation in 1933.

The 1949 Convention on Genocide defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This includes "Killing members of the group" and "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." So the actions of Stalin's government exactly fill the official U.N. definition of genocide.

At the peak of the genocide, which was in Ukrainians were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day, 1,000 per hour or 17 every minute. Estimates of the total deaths vary from 5 to 10 million but 7 million is the accepted figure. This was almost one-quarter of the population of Ukraine.

The children were especially devastated with one estimate stating that "no fewer than three million children born between 1932 and 1933 died of hunger

Holodomor 2010 Lecture/12 My dear friends, I hope that I have touched each and every one of you today, whilst you listened to the facts about the fate of our beloved Nation. An event which if it were to happen today, the whole world would rise in shame and act to prevent such atrocities ever happening again. And I make apologies if these events have brought about a sense of sadness or emotion in your hearts, because so it should. If that is all that we have to endure, imagine what those who suffered during the famine had to go through.

I have, just like many of you here today, raised the awareness of Holodomor amongst not only our own communities, but amongst the wider community. Several Local Authorities have adopted the resolution that we accept the Holodomor, the famine, as an act of Genocide against the Ukrainian Nation. Despite over 16 countries worldwide already recognising the same at Government level, this country has yet to accept it as Genocide.

To not accept it, is no different as to deny it.

We must therefore continue our efforts to have Holodomor recognised as Genocide against the Ukrainian Nation at the highest level. Only in this way will we together work to ensure that such atrocities are never allowed to happen again, anywhere in the world.

We should remember those words very aptly associated with the sacrifice which so many gave for us to be here today, that

“At the going down of the sun, and in the morning –We Shall Remember Them!”

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