The Occupiers’ Memory Policy in Crimea: Denial of Genocide as a Prologue to a New Crime

In temporarily occupied Crimea, the aggressor state is pursuing a policy aimed at destroying Ukrainian civic and ethnic identity, an important component of which is the erasure of historical memory of the Holodomor of 1932–1933.

Ukraine gradually restored the previously repressed memory of the Holodomor and began overcoming the trauma it had inflicted. In 1993, during the first official Days of Mourning and Remembrance for the victims of the 1932–1933 tragedy, President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk classified it as genocide. The Ukrainian parliament defined the crime in the same way in resolutions adopted in 2002 and 2003 and subsequently enshrined recognition of the Holodomor as genocide in the law of 28 November 2006. Following the statements of Ukrainian leaders and parliament, international recognition of the crime also began. Since 1993, when the Estonian parliament became the first to adopt such a decision, more than 30 states worldwide, the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a number of regional authorities and self-government bodies, and church organisations have recognised the Holodomor as genocide. An important prerequisite for overcoming the amnesia imposed upon the world regarding the crime of genocide against the Ukrainian people was the enormous work of scholars. Today, the bibliography on the Holodomor exceeds 25,000 books and articles. Researchers have published thousands of pages of documents and testimonies from victims and witnesses of the crime.

After the collapse of the USSR, Russia declared itself its successor without proper legal procedures and continued the criminal policy of manipulation and concealment of the truth about the Holodomor through modified propaganda narratives. Since it had become impossible to conceal the fact that millions of Ukrainians died from an artificially created famine, the key method of manipulation became the promotion of the falsehood that the famine of 1932–1933 was universal throughout the USSR — a “shared tragedy of the peoples of the Union” — and that the situation in Ukraine and the Kuban region did not differ from that in most other Soviet republics or regions. The essence of the manipulation lies in the fact that the “all-Union famine” — although it was not universal, it did extend beyond the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban — did occur and was caused by the anti-peasant policies of collectivisation, dekulakisation and excessive grain procurements. The independent peasant-owner did not fit into the communist project, which envisaged the destruction of private property. Moreover, the USSR sought to extract resources from the countryside more efficiently for military-industrial modernisation needed for the forceful expansion of the communist regime worldwide.

However, resistance to these violent transformations in the countryside proved strongest in Ukraine and Kuban, where Ukrainians constituted the majority of the population. Thus, in 1930 alone, 4,098 mass protest actions occurred in the Ukrainian SSR, including armed uprisings under the slogans of an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic, involving more than one million people. Some Ukrainian uprisings were drowned in blood by the regime with the help of armoured trains and machine guns. Such resistance became an important factor in halting collectivisation in the USSR and subsequently changing its nature: new collective farms were organised as artels rather than communes, allowing peasants to maintain household plots. The continuation of anti-peasant policies led to famine in the USSR. Already by early 1932, deaths from starvation were being recorded in the Ukrainian SSR. At the same time, a new wave of protest swept the republic: from January to July 1932, more than half of all acts of resistance in the USSR occurred in the Ukrainian SSR. Even earlier, military analysts had warned the leadership in Moscow that, in the event of war, Ukraine and Kuban would prove the least loyal regions. Probably for this reason, in August 1932, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Joseph Stalin wrote to his associate Lazar Kaganovich: 

“We may lose Ukraine,” noting that everything in the Ukrainian SSR was going badly along the lines of the party, state authorities and punitive structures, and set the task of transforming Ukraine into a “fortress of socialism” in the shortest possible time.

Already in autumn 1932, the all-Union famine caused by anti-peasant policies turned in Ukraine and Kuban into the genocide of the Ukrainian people — the Holodomor. Extraordinary Grain Procurement Commissions headed by Soviet Prime Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich began operating in the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban. The unrealistically high grain procurement quotas imposed by the Kremlin were reinforced through the extensive use of brutal coercive and repressive measures. In particular, in the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban, with an intensity not seen in other regions of the USSR, the regime applied the punitive measure known as blacklisting. Hamlets, villages and even entire districts placed on blacklists found themselves under complete trade blockades: residents were prohibited from leaving, food was confiscated, loans were collected ahead of schedule, purges were conducted, and in some cases settlements were surrounded by troops. In effect, blacklisted territories were transformed into “hunger ghettos.” During the winter of 1932–1933, not only grain but all edible products were confiscated in many Ukrainian villages. In January 1933, the communist regime prohibited starving people from leaving Ukraine and Kuban, something that did not occur in other Soviet-controlled territories. Millions of Ukrainians lost their chance to save themselves from horrific death by starvation through exchanging family valuables for food in Russia or Belarus. It is no coincidence that in the grain procurement decree of December 1932, the Soviet authorities effectively curtailed Ukrainisation in the Ukrainian SSR and terminated it in Kuban, soon thereafter launching an active Russification campaign against Kuban Ukrainians. At the same time, Ukrainisation — including the fulfilment of Ukrainians’ cultural needs — was halted in other parts of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as well.

It should be noted that Raphael Lemkin — the jurist who coined the term “genocide” and co-author of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — pointed out that the genocide of Ukrainians had several components: the destruction of millions of peasants (“the body of the nation”) as bearers of Ukrainian culture, language and traditions; the destruction of the intelligentsia (“the brain of the nation”); and the destruction of the Ukrainian Church (“the soul of the nation”). The jurist’s conclusion was unequivocal: the actions of the USSR against Ukraine constituted “a classic example of Soviet genocide.” In 2010, the Kyiv Court of Appeal recognised Soviet leaders headed by Joseph Stalin as guilty of organising the genocide of Ukrainians.

Russia also promoted other falsehoods distorting understanding of the Holodomor and the genocide of Ukrainians more broadly, for example the claim that Ukrainians themselves were somehow responsible for the famine. The Russian Federation very actively, and often aggressively, opposed the international process of recognising the Holodomor as genocide.

From 1991 to 2014, Crimeans, together with the rest of Ukraine, had the opportunity to learn the truth about the Holodomor and grasp the scale of the tragedy. Scholarly and popular information about it appeared on bookstore shelves, in newspapers, on television and radio broadcasts, and in educational curricula. Gradually, a tradition emerged of commemorating the millions of Ukrainians who perished during the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor. Various commemorative events took place with the participation of both civil society and public authorities. During the twenty-first century, memorial crosses honouring the victims of the Holodomor were erected in different parts of Crimea. Significantly, the first of these was created and donated at the request of Bishop Klyment of Simferopol and Crimea of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate by Crimean Tatar sculptor Ilmi Ametov. 

It was installed in a niche near the entrance to the Cathedral of Saints Volodymyr and Olha Equal-to-the-Apostles in Simferopol. An important positive aspect of this memorial site during the pre-war period was that it fostered mutual understanding and joint efforts between representatives of Crimea’s Ukrainian community and the Crimean Tatar people. Between 2000 and 2013, Crimean Tatar activists participated alongside Crimean Ukrainians in all events held near the memorial cross on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor, as well as in many other commemorative activities.

Of course, even before 2014 the situation regarding the restoration of memory about the Holodomor in Crimea was far from ideal. Even under independent Ukraine, a significant proportion of Crimeans retained the identity of a Soviet person, often accompanied by a negative attitude toward recognising the Holodomor as a crime or attempts to diminish its essence and scale. These attitudes were supported and reinforced by powerful Russian informational and propaganda influence on Crimeans, as well as by the presence of Russian chauvinists and communists within the Crimean authorities. Nevertheless, positive changes in Crimean society regarding understanding of the criminal nature of the Holodomor were also evident.

Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 led to extremely negative changes in virtually all spheres of public life. In particular, the aggressor state immediately set about imposing distorted perceptions of the Holodomor on Crimeans. On the temporarily occupied territory, Russian educational and propaganda clichés denying the genocidal nature of the Holodomor were illegally introduced. Since 2014, there have been documented cases in Crimea of occupiers and collaborators destroying literature about the Holodomor and persecuting public libraries for possessing it. In April of this year, Crimean libraries received yet another directive to purge library collections, specifically requiring the removal of books mentioning the Holodomor. The occupiers dismantled some Ukrainian monuments while simultaneously launching a boom in the illegal installation of new communist monuments and the restoration of old ones. Among them are numerous monuments, busts and memorial plaques dedicated to leading organisers of the Holodomor — Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov.

Naturally, collaborators from the occupation administration ceased participating in annual commemorative events on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor, while many Crimean activists who had taken part in such events before Russia’s aggression were deprived of liberty by the occupying power or forced to leave the Crimean Peninsula. Crimea’s Ukrainian community, whose representatives carried personal or family memory of the Holodomor, has been subjected to enormous assimilation pressure and discrimination. Today, public memorial events commemorating the victims of the genocide of Ukrainians in Crimea are impossible because of the unlawful application of repressive Russian legislation. Until 2022, one of the few places where Crimeans could honour the memory of those who died in 1932–1933 were the churches of the Crimean Diocese of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (formerly the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate). However, following the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Russia destroyed its last centres and forcibly seized the churches. In 2023, the occupation administration seized the diocese’s main cathedral in Simferopol, in whose niche stands Crimea’s first memorial marker dedicated to the victims of the Holodomor.

What explains Russia’s such aggressive attitude toward the memory of the Holodomor? Gregory Stanton, a classic scholar of genocide studies, convincingly argued that denial of genocide constitutes the tenth and final stage of this grave international crime. Moreover, denial often occurs both during the commission of the crime and almost always afterwards. Russia did not declare itself the successor of the USSR and deny its grave crimes by accident. It thereby preserved for itself the possibility of returning to such practices. And during this war, Russia has done exactly that. Today, its goals largely mirror those pursued by the USSR against Ukraine during the genocide of the Ukrainian people in the 1930s. The communist regime centred in Moscow sought to destroy part of the Ukrainian national group in order to undermine Ukrainians’ ability to wage a national liberation struggle and restore an independent state, while intimidating the rest. Unfortunately, under conditions of de facto statelessness and silence from the international community, the Soviet authorities succeeded for a time in achieving the aims of the crime. The emergence of an independent Ukrainian state on the world map in 1991 demonstrated that the communist imperial regime had suffered a historical defeat. Yet the existence of an independent Ukrainian state remained a thorn in the side of Russia’s imperial forces from August 1991 onward. When they realised that Ukraine could not be subordinated by relatively peaceful means, Russia launched an aggressive war in 2014 in violation of its international obligations and international law. Its goal is genocidal: once again, Russia seeks to destroy part of the Ukrainian national group in order to eliminate the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nation.

This time, however, Ukrainians possess their own independent state, a relatively developed civil society and the support of the civilised part of the international community. Thanks to this, despite severe and painful losses, Ukraine managed to thwart the aggressor state’s plans in both 2014 and 2022. Moreover, at this historical stage, with international support Ukraine retains the prospect of eventually halting the genocide and restoring its sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is critically important that a tribunal addressing the crimes of the aggressor state begin operating already now; otherwise, avoiding a repetition of the crime of genocide is unlikely.

Andrii Ivanets

Candidate of Historical Sciences,

Leading Research Fellow at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide

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This publication was made possible through the support of the Democracy Grants Program of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. The views expressed by the authors and the content of the published materials do not necessarily reflect the official position of the United States Government.