A panel discussion was held to mark the 91st anniversary of the Holodomor

On November 19, a panel discussion on the 91st anniversary of the Holodomor – the genocide of the Ukrainian people, “Holodomor Studies: Theory, History, Memory” was held. The organizers of the event were the  Holodomor Research and Education Centre in Ukraine (HREC in Ukraine), the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide.

The museum’s Director General, Lesia Hasydzhak, and Andriy Kozytskyi, a senior researcher in the museum’s Genocide Research Department, participated in the discussion.

The main topic of the conversation was rethinking the historiographical tradition of covering the history of the Holodomor and modern practices of commemorating it in Ukraine and the world.

Lesia Hasydzhak talked about the traditional campaign “Light a candle of memory” in current conditions: “The campaign with the lighting of a candle is moving to an online format. Today, it is no longer necessary to light a physical candle in the window. A sufficient manifestation of memory is to tell your story about the Holodomor on a social network. The fact that people know the history of their family is crucial because it is about conscious memory and understanding. The children of these people will definitely know about the Holodomor.”

Andriy Kozytskyi talked about the common goal of the Holodomor and the current war (the destruction of Ukrainian identity) and similar methods of denying these crimes. “We are now seeing approximately the same methods of denying the modern stage of Russian aggression and its crimes against Ukraine, which were used by the communist regime concerning the Holodomor. This is both a direct denial and an attempt to drown some event in a whole whirlpool of false versions in order to create a kind of “white noise,” which should give a person the idea of ​​the fundamental unrecognizability of this event. Yes, the phrase “we will never know the whole truth” is a well-known meme in Russia. This, of course, is not true because the vast majority of the events in history cannot be clearly and factually denied,” Andriy Kozytskyi said.

The leitmotif of the discussion was the idea that effective counteraction to modern challenges related to Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine largely depends on understanding the lessons that the history of the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people left us.

You can watch the recording of the event on the agency’s webpage Ukrinform.