Much of the world remained unaware as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin orchestrated the killing of 7-10 million Ukrainians through famine in 1932 and 1933. Known to Ukrainians as Holodomor “death by hunger,” the atrocity is not as widely recognized elsewhere as it should be.
Stalin sent his secret police to brutally enforce his goals in Ukraine. Food was removed from houses. Grain and livestock were stolen from farmers. Starving peasants were forbidden from going to the cities, and people couldn’t leave the country.
Through interviews with academics and survivors, the above 15-minute documentary Holodomor: Stalin’s Secret Genocide looks at the human costs of such brutality.
“We never had a youth. Our youth went God knows where,” said Halyna Huba, one famine survivor. “We lived through what we shouldn’t have lived through,” she said. “The communist system made us the worst slaves in the world.”
The country and its people were decimated.
Serhi Plokhy, a professor of history at Harvard University, said in the film, that there are many heartbreaking stories about what occurred during the famine.
“But probably the ones that touch the most was when people were really dying were helping others and helping neighbors and trying to save children and elderly while really starving themselves,” Plokhy said.
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The Soviets always denied what they did, and the tragedy only became widely known after the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s.
Bitter Harvest, the first major English language drama about the famine was released earlier this year, helping raise awareness of what occurred.