Why and how did hunger in Ukraine turn into the Holodomor? How was the fact of genocide proven? How did it happen that the information blockade maintained by the USSR for decades was actually supported in the West? And why, many decades later, is there still a debate about the number of victims of those events? All of this was discussed on the air of "Radio Liberty" by the acting chief research fellow of the Department of Ukrainian History of the 1920s-30s at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Doctor of Historical Sciences Stanislav Kulchytsky.
The scholar notes that it was not officially recorded that peasants were deprived not only of the harvested grain but also of all other food. Instead, official decrees recorded supposed assistance from the state, which greatly complicated proving the fact of the Holodomor: "It was very difficult to prove that there were such decrees; they were searched for in all archives, in all secret archives. There were no such decrees about confiscating all food. And I can prove that for sure. But, first of all, one must first prove what happened. I had this idea, and it was implemented. There are thousands of memories from witnesses of the famine, those who survived. And in these memories, there are several paragraphs, or just a few lines, about the confiscation of all food. I asked one of my colleagues, Tetyana Boryak, to find all these lines and compile a book from them. This was done. The book is about 400 pages long, documenting the location of each witness who said that everything was confiscated, all the food. And this is proof. Because it cannot be considered otherwise. There is a map of the Holodomor made in Canada: the location of each witness is marked with points, and all these points cover the territory of Ukraine and Kuban."
Watch the video recording of the interview
Source: media platform "Radio Liberty"