"Perhaps the classic example of Soviet Genocide… [was] the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. With the liquidation of Ukraine's political, cultural and religious leadership, the 'Soviet plan' was aimed at the farmers, the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all — starvation."

"Moscow's intention was to kill Ukrainian statehood. … The world has seen many terrible famines, many aggravated by civil war. But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique."

"Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933."

"[The Holodomor] is one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened."

"… For Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people … The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem. Such policy is GENOCIDE in the classic sense of the word."

After WWI, and the fall of the Tsarist Empire, Ukraine declared its independence as a nation for a period of time from 1918 to 1922, but the Red Army quashed this attempt of freedom, recasting the Tsarist Empire into a "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

The foremost non-Russian nation, Ukraine, would remain defiant of Soviet Russian rule. In 1929, Moscow set in motion events designed to break the back of Ukrainian resistance — a full-scale assault against its intelligentsia, its church and clergy, its language and the Ukrainian rural, agricultural population.

It was there that Ukrainian traditions and self-awareness were rooted, and where the overwhelming majority of the population resided. One of the instruments implemented by Stalin was the manufactured famine in 1932–33. Uncounted millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in the "breadbasket of Europe," as well as in the Ukrainian settlements in the Kuban and the North Caucasus of Russia itself. Estimates range from 4 to 7 million or more. The actual number will never be known.

"This is not simply a case of mass murder. It's a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."

The countryside was stripped not simply of grain but of anything remotely edible. Cooking utensils and farming tools were confiscated. The Ukrainian borders were sealed. No food was allowed in. No one was allowed out. And not just in Ukraine. The heavily Ukrainian ethnographic regions previously absorbed by neighboring Russia were also blockaded. Entire villages simply disappeared.

A year later, one of Stalin's sycophants, Pavel Postyshev boasted:

"We have annihilated the nationalist counter-revolution during the past year, we have exposed and destroyed nationalist deviationism."

Holodomor deniers try to claim that the famine was part of the Soviet collectivization policies, an "economic experiment" that went awry. While collectivization was extant throughout the Soviet Union, in Ukraine however, it was markedly different in purpose and result. As Proletarska Pravda wrote in 1930:

"[Collectivization was intended] to destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism."

Indeed, though collectivization in Ukraine was virtually complete by the Spring of 1932, Moscow pressed on. Having eliminated Ukraine's political, cultural, and religious strata, Stalin targeted the rural agricultural population that was the wellspring of Ukrainian traditions, culture, language, and national ethos, as well as the food provider for the nation.

The Global Effect

Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, larger than England, Germany, and Hungary combined, with one of Europe's oldest democratic and civic traditions. In 1710, Ukraine produced Europe's first constitution for a representative democracy, preceding America's constitution by 77 years.

The Holodomor ensured Moscow's control of Ukraine and was thus pivotal to the continuous viability of the USSR, with near calamitous consequences for the world. Ukraine's independence in 1991 ensured the fall of the USSR. Shortly after, Ukraine voluntarily surrendered the world's third largest nuclear arsenal after receiving written guarantees from the U.S., the U.K. and Russia in the infamous Budapest Memorandum.

In 2014, the largest country in the world, Russia, re-invaded Ukraine and annexed and occupied its territory. Europe's largest war since WWII continues. The post-WWII international security order has been shattered. Russia's war against Ukraine is a laboratory for its war against the West, including subversion of the information space.

Instead of following the example of acknowledgment and contrition by post-war Germany, Russia has never recognized, admitted, atoned or apologized for the genocide. To the very contrary. Russia is the proud, self-proclaimed sole legatee of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin celebrates Stalin and glorifies the secret police. He denies the Holodomor and the very existence of Ukraine.

Weaponization of Information and the Hunger for Truth

"Fake news" and media and government complicity as elements of the Holodomor hit the nerve of indignation and resonate today. Even more so, the story behind the story is the success and tenacity of denial of the story.

"The Ukrainian famine of 1933 is one of the most tragic and least understood events of this century. In spite of the fact that reliable information was published at the time, it has disappeared from the public consciousness so completely that it represents the most successful example of the denial of genocide by its perpetrators."

Despite accurate reporting by serious reporters such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Gareth Jones, Rhea Clyman and others, Stalin enlisted world celebrities such as George Bernard Shaw, former French Prime Minister Eduard Herriot, and Jean-Paul Sartre to vilify the truth tellers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, the foremost denier of the Holodomor and apologist for Stalin, "pointed out that 'in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own." — U.S. Embassy (Berlin) to the State Department

Privately, Duranty acknowledged the horror. He conveyed to Eugene Lyons that an estimated 7 million had been killed, characterizing this as a conservative figure.

"He [Duranty] gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from the famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone."

Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter and foreign policy advisor to British Prime Minister Lloyd George, challenged Duranty. He traveled surreptitiously to Ukraine, returning to publish his eye-witness accounts of the genocide. To no avail — Jones was kidnapped and murdered two years later under circumstances pointing to the Soviet NKVD secret police. At Jones's funeral Lloyd George eulogized him as "the man who knew too much."

"Any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic to the USSR — sympathetic, that is in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues… [causing] the fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine."

Diplomats reported information about the Holodomor as "hair-raising" and "horrifying."

"We do not want to make it [information about the famine] public, because the Soviet government would resent it, and our relations with them would be prejudiced. …we cannot give this explanation in public."

Duranty's "fake news" reporting was instrumental in the United States extending diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union during the Holodomor, and the League of Nations admitted it into its ranks. The "Ukrainian question" was deemed inconvenient.

"Russian despotism not only pays little respect to ideas and sentiments, it also denies the facts, wages war against the evidence, and wins."

Holodomor was the original "fake news" and its lessons have not been learned. It is time. It is time for the National Holodomor Museum.

The museum will be the first dedicated Holodomor museum in the world and the place for all people to understand the horrors and barbarity of how food was used as a weapon against innocent people.

The museum will preserve artifacts that offer permanent reminders of this tragic event and its significant impact on the lives of Ukrainians past and present.

The Bitter Memory of Childhood statue stands in Kyiv, Ukraine, and in other locations around the world, commemorating the children who were lost to starvation in Stalin's man-made famine genocide in Ukraine in 1932–33.

The little Ukrainian girl in this statue is picking up wheat left on a farm field at a time when this was considered a punishable crime. She provides a touching reminder of the lives that were taken during the Holodomor-Genocide, the devastating man-made famine that should never have been allowed to happen.

"My Fellow Ukrainians, I hold in my palm an ear of wheat. If only I could only offer it to the little boy who died of starvation in 1933 near a field in the village of Kruty in the Chernihiv region. Or to the little girl from the village of Vilenka in the Zhytomyr region; or to the woman in the village of Teplivka in the Poltava region. I wish, with painful yearning, that I could give this ear of wheat to my grandfather Ivan who died of starvation together with his large family in 1932."

"For decades, the atrocities of the Holodomor were largely only known to its victims and those who orchestrated it. We must make sure the memories of those who suffered during the Holodomor live on, and that such horrors never happen again."

"We, in Canada, are bonded to this dark chapter in human history by more than a million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, many of whom lost loved ones in the Holodomor. And so, all Canadians join us in commemorating the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932–33. Because what was done to the Ukrainian people was a mortal offence against the values we hold dearest; freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law."

You are invited to help gather and preserve archival and documentary materials on the Holodomor in Kyiv. Your contribution to the National Holodomor Museum project will help to create a fitting and powerful remembrance of this event, creating new insight that could help prevent such future atrocities in the world today.

1. Leveraging the $65 million USD investment of the government of Ukraine.
2. Providing the opportunity to build on the investments made in Ukraine and in Ukraine's future, addressing the issues of human dignity and human rights.
3. Preventing future genocides by weaponized food as they relate to food safety, food supply and food security.
4. Ensuring that the stories of the past are told which align with corporate values, personal beliefs and social responsibility through education, social impact and social change.
5. Investing in capital, programming and exhibitions which will fund community, political and corporate goodwill through permanent naming opportunities.
6. Creating an opportunity for a family or individuals who wish to remember their ancestor victims of Holodomor, or simply to write their names in history to commemorate the worst genocides in the 20th Century, and for human rights for future generations.

The National Museum intends to function as an on-going research centre on the Holodomor, and has already formed an affiliate entity — the Holodomor Research Institute, to be housed in the museum, whose mission is to carry out that research.

Because the Soviet governments covered up Stalin's crime, denied it until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and forbade any discussion of it, it has remained as part of the "white pages" of 20th century history, and very little is still known about it today.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the KGB/OGPU archives on the Holodomor were left behind in Kyiv, and became the property of the SBU, Security Service of Ukraine. Those archives have produced a treasure trove of documentation on Stalin's secret genocide, and the millions of lives lost, including tens of thousands of OGPU files on innocent people arrested, tortured or executed by Stalin's terror regime.

A second area of inquiry intends to focus on the other ethno-cultural communities that were impacted by the Holodomor. Although Stalin's 1932–33 famine campaign was carried out primarily against ethnic Ukrainians, other ethno-cultural communities were caught in Stalin's terror as "collateral damage." The Jewish and Mennonite communities are prime examples — they had lived for centuries in the agricultural areas of Ukraine. Unknown hundreds of Jewish shtetls disappeared as a result of Stalin's forced collectivization, dekulakization, and forced famine.

The International Foundation for the Development of the Holodomor Victims Memorial was established in 2018 by three respected entities — the Ukrainian World Congress, Public Committee for the Commemoration of the Victims of Holodomor-Genocide 1932–1933, and the All-Ukrainian Human Rights "Memorial."

The Foundation is responsible for both the collection of private sector funds for this project, as well as the creation of the permanent exhibition. Ivan Vasiunyk, a former First Deputy PM and the Chair of the Supervisory Board, is leading the project. The Canada-Ukraine Foundation has been appointed to run and manage the fundraising campaign outside of Ukraine in the EU, the UK and North America.

Funds donated to The National Holodomor Museum Project capital campaign will be invested into a dedicated North American fund under management by the Canada-Ukraine Foundation (CUF). With CUF as the primary fundraising organization, donors will have security, confidence and clarity with regard to how their funds move through the organization.

The International Foundation has contracted with Haley Sharpe Design, a British and Toronto-based firm (one of the top museum design firms in the world), and award-winning Nizio Design International, Warsaw, Poland, to design and oversee the build-out of the permanent exposition.

The overall fundraising campaign is led by Co-Chairs Ivan Vasiunyk and Bob Onyschuk, and supported by William Petruck and his team from FUNDING matters Inc.

The Canada-Ukraine Foundation

A federally chartered Canadian foundation with 25 years of experience in cultural, educational, medical and charitable giving projects in Ukraine. Tasked by the International Foundation to be the primary North American fundraising organization.

FUNDING MATTERS INC.

A premier philanthropic advisory with over $387 million raised across all campaigns. Chief fundraising firm for the National Holodomor Museum, working alongside the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.

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For donations of appreciated assets such as stocks, mutual funds, options, or registered investments, it is recommended that you contact your professional advisor. For further discussion, please contact:

William Petruck
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333 Dundas Street East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5A 2A2
Phone: 416 249 0788
Email: wpetruck@fundingmatters.com