Ukrainian Holodomor

Debate between Nadia Whittome and Matt Rodda

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) for securing this important debate.

I start with the recent testimonies of Petro Mohalat and Oleksandra Zaharova, two Ukrainians who survived the holodomor as children. They said:

“There was a brigade with pitchforks who came to every house searching for bread. I was five at that time. We locked the door and all the windows but they used crowbars to come inside. I saw people who died. They made a pit and threw all the bodies there. My father went to Western Ukraine, taking everything good from our home to exchange for food, but he got nothing. ”

Some 90 years on, the memories of those dark days live on, as does the campaign for the world to recognise the great famine for what it was: a genocide. It is estimated that the holomodor claimed the lives of at least 4 million people—around one in eight of the Ukrainian population. Entire villages perished as Soviet authorities knowingly set unmeetable grain quotas, raided homes for any hidden food to confiscate and banned internal travel to stop people leaving.

The mass starvation was no accident. Contrary to propaganda, it was not just the result of drought or bureaucratic mismanagement—it was an act of mass murder, a calamity deliberately inflicted on a nation by an imperialist, totalitarian regime. It was engineered to crush Ukraine’s resistance, and it coincided with Stalin’s campaign of Russification of suppressing Ukrainian culture and identity, reversing the earlier Bolshevik policy of encouraging it. The holodomor was a great crime against humanity, and its impact has been felt in Ukraine and by the Ukrainian diaspora for generations.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that for many communities around the country, such as the Ukrainian community in Reading, this is still a very live issue and many people are deeply concerned about this debate?

[Nadia Whittome]

I completely agree with the points made by my hon. Friend. I know he has been working closely with the Ukrainian centre in Reading.

What further deepened that immense trauma was the state-enforced silence that followed. For more than half a century, those who survived the great famine and saw their loved ones die of hunger were not allowed to openly discuss the horrors they had been through. Under Stalin’s rule, even mentioning the famine carried the risk of being sent to a gulag or executed.

Evidence of the scale and true causes of the tragedy were concealed and fabricated. Even the statisticians who conducted the national census, which showed a dramatic population decline, were killed, and the data was manipulated to hide the number of victims. That was a systemic suppression of historical memory—the collective gaslighting of a nation. While the archives have since been opened and the truth is now easier to access, Putin’s regime has continued with a policy of downplaying the seriousness of this atrocity and denying its genocidal nature.

Agnieszka Holland’s film “Mr Jones” tells the real-life story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who risked his life to inform the world about the holodomor, and who was murdered a few years later. In 2021, a screening of the film in Moscow, organised by a human rights non-governmental organisation, was interrupted by a group of masked men who stormed the venue. When the police arrived, they shut down the screening, locked the doors and spent hours interrogating the audience, rather than the mob who came to disrupt it. Last year, in Mariupol, Russian occupiers used a crane to dismantle a holodomor memorial.

It would be impossible to have this debate without mentioning the current context in which Ukraine is fighting yet another attempt to violently subjugate it. Let us send a clear message that we see and understand Ukraine’s struggle against Russian imperialism, not just over the past 15 months or since 2014, but across centuries. While the oldest survivors of the holodomor are still alive, let us honour their decades-long battle for truth and justice. Let us join 28 countries around the world, and the European Parliament, in recognising the holodomor as a genocide.