Attacks on Ukraine's agricultural infrastructure and starvation of the population are evidently among Russia's tactics in the current war.

This inevitably reminds Ukrainians of the horrors of the Holodomor, the mass “killing by starvation” orchestrated by the Stalinist regime in the early 1930s through the confiscation of crops and the systematic deprivation of food.

In anti-Stalinist literature, this mass murder was sometimes called "Stalin's Holocaust", as in 1988 in the German subtitle of Robert Conquest's book "The Harvest of Sorrow.

Collectivization and the Terror Famine”.

Soon after the end of the Soviet Union, however, the name "Holodomor" prevailed;

the Ukrainian word “holod” means hunger.

The memory of the Holodomor has long been a mainstay of the national Ukrainian commemorative culture, even if it took some time after 1991 until the decade-long taboo on this crime was finally broken.

However, the nationalization of the commemoration of the Holodomor has proved to be a partial obstacle to an in-depth study of the Shoah in Ukraine.

The historian Georgiy Kasianov, author of the book "Memory Crash", supports this thesis in an essay ("Holodomor and the Holocaust in Ukraine as Cultural Memory: Comparison, Competition, Interaction", in: Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 24, 2022 , Issue 2 / Routledge).

thousands of publications

It was not until 1998 that President Leonid Kuchma introduced a national day of remembrance for the victims of the Holodomor.

Under his successor Viktor Yushchenko, the Holodomor was declared a genocide of the Ukrainian people by law in 2006.

After that, the number of publications about the hunger genocide grew rapidly;

13,000 were counted by 2013.

In 2008, the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide was set up in Kyiv, and a visit to it is a must for state guests.

As of 2017, 7000 monuments and memorials to the victims of the Holodomor were erected in Ukraine.

The change in the landscape corresponds to a change in awareness among the population, as surveys show: in 2006, 60 percent of those questioned believed that the Holodomor should be classified as genocide, in 2019 it was already 82 percent.

Around one and a half million Jews were murdered by the Germans and local collaborators in what is now Ukraine.

For a long time, the Ukrainian state was reluctant to commemorate the Holocaust.

In 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre, the government commemorated the “mass extermination of Soviet citizens, especially Jews, by fascist German invaders” in a statement.

But the establishment of Holocaust museums in Kharkiv (1996), Odessa (2009) and Dnepropetrovsk (2012) only came about thanks to private initiatives.

The term Holocaust only became common under President Yushchenko, and the history of the extermination of the Jews gradually found its way into school and university curricula.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was first observed in Ukraine in 2012.

The country has not yet joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, although it began negotiations in 2005.

President Petro Poroshenko apologized to the Knesset in December 2015 for the fact that Ukrainian ultranationalists were involved in the murder of Jews.

But the strengthening of nationalist and right-wing populist tendencies after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was also accompanied by anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine, has complicated the situation, according to Kasianov: The necessary inclusion of the Holocaust in Ukraine's national historical narrative remains a desideratum for the time being.

The juxtaposition of stories about the Holodomor and the Holocaust has at times created friction in Ukrainian historical discourse, which, according to Kasianov, has even led to a certain degree of competition.

The Ukrainian discussion about the number of victims of the starvation genocide continues to this day.

Nationalist circles put them at between 7 and 10 million people.

Historians like Stanislav Kulchytsky accuse them of merely wanting to establish a number that is supposed to exceed that of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

The Ukrainian handling of the Holodomor is also viewed with skepticism in Israel.

There, the Ukrainian ceremonies on the Holodomor memorial day are strikingly reminiscent to those on the Israeli memorial day for the Shoah.

In December 2021, the Israeli historian Shimon Briman, who was born in Kyiv, even spoke to the left-liberal newspaper Haaretz about deliberately adopting the Israeli model.

The newspaper report, which also touched on the Ukrainian debate about the number of victims, noted that Israel is not among the now eighteen states that recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.

Neither does Germany, by the way.