Lecture by an American historian Timothy Snyder on the Holodomor (“murder by starvation”) in Ukraine

your eminences learner drop.i excellencies thank you very much for this opportunity for a historian nothing could be more touching than to see the memories dark though they may be of the past joined with the effort to remember strenuous as it may be in the present in the hope that what we do remember and strain to remember may have a consequence for the future so is my great pleasure to be among you and I thank you for this opportunity to bring what light my own profession that of a historian can to these dark events what I would like to share with you in the next half hour or so is a sense of what happened in those years 1932 to 1933 to share with you a sense of what was known which really means why so little was known at the time to speak for a moment about just what it was that Archbishop in itzá and other men of the church did in 1932 and 1933 why it was extraordinary and then to say a few words about just what this might signify today so it is it is a difficult task after hearing from my Ukrainian friends about their recollections general and personal of the events of 1932 and 1933 to speak to you about them in a general historical way and yet I think it is very important that we do so for each murder each death is part of a larger story irreducible as it is unforgettable as it is it's also part of a set of events which ought to be remembered understood on their own not least because they can remind us at least in some of their outlines of certain kinds of things that have happened since or god forbid might happen yet in the future Archbishop Shawn Bourne was kind enough to recall that this is an anniversary year of another kind this is an anniversary of the end of communism in Europe as the archbishop was kind enough to mention I've spent the last few days going from European capital to European capital thinking about what it means that communism has come to an end in this sombre setting I'm reminded that we can't know what an ending means unless we've fully understood the event itself it's very easy to celebrate 1989 or 1991 it's very easy to congratulate ourselves on what we think we might have done to bring these good events about but to understand what it means for communism to have come to an end we also have to have our minds and our spirits around the essence of what that system was I think there's a very good case to be made that the events at which we have hinted here the events of 1932 to 1933 are the darkest moment in that history certainly a central one certainly one that tells us a good deal about the history of that system and therefore one which we must try to remember in general as as well as in particular so let me make let me make an essay in that direction what we were remembering today are events that took place inside the Soviet Union events that took place inside the Soviet republic called Ukraine what we're remembering today are a set of events that unfold between nineteen mainly 1932 and 1933 that which are part of a larger project in the Soviet Union building a certain kind of state the Soviet Union when it was established faced two basic kinds of challenges and it was the attempt to overcome these challenges these problems which led to the decisions in 1932 and 1933 which brought about this mass killing the first challenge was the National question so in our discussions today it's been very clear that our nationality our national loyalty the nation which we choose to belong to to be loyal to is a part of a set of other identities a number of the people who have been evoked today including archbishop Shep Tatsuki are very good examples of how our loyalty to a nation is one that we choose among other loyalties the nation is also a political problem the way that the Soviet Union addressed this political problem and beginning was to bring its territories into what it called national republics now this is very important for us to know because the events that we're describing today took part took place at a time when there was a great deal of starvation in the Soviet Union in general in other places too in Kazakhstan first in southern Russia as well but there was a specificity there was a particular character to the events that took place inside Soviet Ukraine so we must know that the Soviet Union had an approach to the national question and that was to divide his territory up into these national units perhaps more important from the Soviet point of view was the peasant question so the idea of a marxist revolution was to serve the working class in the soviet union as it was created in the early 1920s there wasn't very much of a working class so the basic question which faced Lennon and then his successor Stalin was how do we create a working class how do we shift from having had a palette revolution in 1917 - an economic and social revolution in which a working class will be created so what was being contemplated was the dramatic and rapid and violent transformation of a country where there were far more nomads than workers and far more peasants than anyone else into a country which was a working-class country so this was a project of transformation the particular events the particular tragedy of Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 is a part of the Soviet attempt to as they would see it and as they described it to resolve the peasant question or as they would say to resolve the culotte question Kulik being a Russian word for a prosperous peasant in the 1920s after the suffering revolution after the suffering of the Russian Civil War these questions were put on hold for a little while I mentioned early 1920s also for a reason which is that in 1921 and 1922 in eastern Ukraine and in southern Russia there was also a desperate famine in which millions of people died it's worth keeping that in mind because that famine of 1921 and 1922 was broadly known it was not a surprise delegates from many other nations were allowed to visit the United States as well as other countries in several organizations organized massive relief of that famine in 1921 and 1922 I mentioned that only because that's normal it's normal when there was a tragedy for people to be allowed to help this is a striking difference with what happens in 1932 and 1933 in 1932 and 1933 millions of people will be dying but an abnormal thing will happen which is that no one from outside will be allowed to help beyond that anyone from outside who tries simply to describe the event was taking place will be condemned as a fascist or worse that is an abnormal situation so I mention this terrible famine of 1921 and 1922 to create a contrast I also mention it because 1921 and 1922 for some people such as use of Stalin was a lesson the lesson is that hunger is part of politics giving food and taking it away as normal as he sees it part of politics this is the kind of thing which simply happens in the world this brings us to the late 1920s when Joseph Stalin comes to power the Soviet system as some of you will know very well but I will take some time anyway with it the Soviet system is a system which works according to the following logic in principle this is a system which is meant to serve the working class the working class in the system is represented by the Communist Party the Communist Party is represented by a Central Committee the Central Committee in turn by a Politburo and the Politburo by the strongest personality on it in the late 1920s the strongest personality that asserted itself was that of Joseph Stalin he asserted himself with a policy of collectivization no collectivization may seem like a long abstract word but within that notion of collectivization these awkward Russian communist words collectivization dekulakization hides a transformation of society and hide the aspiration to change what human life is like what collectivization meant is that those who controlled land farmers people in places like Ukraine who in the last couple of generations had managed to get control of a bit of private property for themselves that all of these people would lose their land now for those of you who are in the cities and live in a mints this may not strike you immediately as dramatic but this was a time still in the history of the world where most people lived on land and in a place like Ukraine which several people have mentioned already the breadbasket of Europe this was a place where most people still lived on the land live themselves and provided for others from the land so the project of taking people by force away from the land and into a different kind of life is already dramatic enough the idea that peasant should be treated as an enemy in a class war which is Stalin's idea in 1928 in 1929 is already very dramatic the idea that we will take all of the peasants who we believe are most successful and deprive them of their land is already a radical change and this was a change that took place at the same time as the creation of the gulag gulag is another word from Soviet history that we should remember the emergence of the gulag the large system of prison and concentration camps in Kazakhstan in northern Russia this system is created in the late 1920s and the first large groups of people who were sent to the gulag are precisely peasants about three hundred thousand peasants from Soviet Ukraine are sent to the gulag in 1928 1929 and 1930 this creates a situation for them in which they have two very bad choices and choice might be too strong of a word if you are seen to be prosperous or if you are seen to be resisting the collective farm then you will be sent to the gulag but if you stay in Ukraine you will lose your farm you will be assigned to a collective farm you will be governed instead of by yourself you will be governed by the local officials at oisin tractor station and and that will be your life I take it that this system as I describe it in this abstract way seems decisively a tragic enough but what we now have to ask is what happens to the food supply as the system is put into practice so in 1930 in the first weeks of 1930 most of Ukraine most of Soviet Ukraine is collectivized its collectivized in a terrifyingly quick way it's collectivized by force tens of thousands of Ukraine's run across the border to Romania or usually to Poland there's massive resistance to collectivization the the Soviet secret police records 1 million acts of resistance to collectivization early 1930 and so Stalin pulls back he gives a famous speech which is called dizzy with success in which she says this has been going too well we should slow down in 1931 collectivization then moves forward but by a clever more indirect way it moves forward by extreme taxation if you don't join the collective farm your farm is attacked so much that you can't keep it up it's it's it's it's created by seizures of the seed grain in other words if you don't join the collective farm I will take the seed that you need to plant your crop next year and so the second time in 1931 collectivization actually takes place the expectation was that the collective farm would work as well as private agriculture so the Soviet state set a target for how much grain they would take from peasants which was based on the very good harvest of 1930 in 1931 the harvest was much poorer a bit because the weather was bad but mostly because the chaos of collectivization itself had meant that farming simply wasn't as productive and it's in late 1931 that the our vision begins by June of 1932 Stalin himself uses the word Khalid Stalin himself acknowledges that there is famine in Soviet Ukraine the important thing then is what happens next famine in the Soviet Union as a result of collectivization was fairly common by June of 1932 around a million and a half people in Kazakhstan had already starved to death as a result of collectivization people in southern Russia were also starving at that moment as a result of collectivization the thing that was specific about Ukraine was that Stalin defined what happened in Ukraine as political he said this is the result of Ukrainian nationalists Ukrainian provocateurs this proves that Ukrainians in particular are disloyal and Ukrainians in particular are deserving of punishment this one of the statements that Cardinal edits are made in his declaration of October 1933 was very true he said millions of people in Ukraine died and they need not have died that is correct had decisions been taken differently in autumn of 1932 a few hundred thousand Ukrainians would have died instead of about four million so what happens in 1932 is that Soviet policy takes a specific an unmistakably murderous turn against the Republic of Soviet Ukraine let me mention a few of these policies one of them is that the border between Soviet Ukraine and the rest of the world was fortified that had already happened people it's going to be very difficult to escape to Poland or to Romania the second is that the borders between Soviet Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union were sealed so if you were inside Soviet Ukraine you could not you could not flee to Soviet Belarus or Soviet Russia a third is that the peasants were forced to stay in the villages people were denied the papers they would need to go and beg in the city so the horrible the almost unimaginably horrible thing about these photos that you have just seen is that those were the good places those were the cities that was hot Akif the people that you saw dying were the very small percentage of peasants from the countryside who were able to make it to a city and beg and then died on the streets of the city or by the way more often died in dark basements where they were locked up by the city police places that were called The Hunger barracks what you're seeing is a small part of a small part of a small part the huge majority of death was precisely in the countryside another measure that was taken specifically against Ukrainian people living in Soviet Ukraine the countryside was to take away the meat ration again that sounds very abstract the meat ration is the goat that you had that was still alive or the cow that you had that was still alive if you were if you live in the countryside on a farm that last goat or that last cow is your last way of surviving it's the thing you keep alive for the last moment that was taken away another measure which was taken was called the blacklist if your collective farm failed to supply enough grain and in these conditions this was almost impossible you were then locked out of the rest of the Soviet economy and not allowed to trade with the Soviet economy at all so by way of these specific measures and by way of forced requisitions that is by way of so-called brigades coming from cities brigades coming from elsewhere to come and forcibly take whatever was food a situation in which hundreds of thousands of people would have died became a situation in which millions of people died by early 1933 so it's hard to know how to characterize this event but I wonder I want to mention a couple of things that I will develop a bit later one has already been suggested I'd very generously by ambassador Sierra ba which is that this isn't just mass killing it's also mass observation of and mass participation in the dyeing of your students or your family or your neighbors this is not a kind of dyeing which took place quickly and privately this was a kind of dyeing which took place massively and publicly and where the calories in human bodies were something that every other human had to think about this is a kind of dyeing which forced everyone to make horrifying choices in a time in European history where there were many horrifying choices surely these were among the most horrifying choices and in this way and others this was a kind of killing which also destroyed a way of life it destroyed what remained of village solidarity family solidarity solidarity within marriages friendships whatever kind of solidarity remained was destroyed here and in this in this sense this was also perhaps the purest and most radical expression of Soviet policy um it's for these reasons by the way that Rafa Lemkin a Holocaust survivor who invented the word genocide spoke of the Holodomor as a typical Soviet genocide not only because it killed people but because it made a way of living impossible the second thing which is striking about this particular event is that it was the first truly big lie in the politics of the 20th century other big lies will follow the lie Hitler's why of the Jewish international conspiracy is about to become very portant but this was a very big lie the lie that Stalin told and that the Soviet leadership told that nothing of this kind was happening the total denial of an event of this scale was new and is terrifying in a particular way it adds a level I think to the horror to say not only did this happen but from the very beginning all of the individual experiences of the kind that ambassadorship I mentioned all of these individual human experiences were denied but it's not just that they were denied it's that they were characterized as lies and it's worse than that they were characterized as political provocations the official line in Soviet Ukraine among communists was that the starving or provocateurs that their bloated bellies are deliberate provocations against the Soviet regime and that is how they are to be understood so I have told you what historians know now other historians would no doubt tell the story in a slightly different way that is the way history works but what I've tried to do is give you what I think is a rough consensus of the history of Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 I'm telling you some things that people wouldn't have understood at the time what I'd like to do now is give you a sense of what people did know at the time or who knew what the first group of people who knew what happened were the diplomats even the Austrian diplomats who were few and had relatively meager resources knew about the famine in Ukraine if you read their reports which were written directly to Davos you see accurate detailed accounts of villages you see an estimate of total deaths which is fairly close to the mark but there were other diplomats who knew much more the italians the germans and probably above all the poles so the poles had a big embassy in hot cave again the city that you were just looking at they had consulates throughout soviet ukraine they had lots and lots of local informers and they did a lot of traveling around the republic which means that in their reports from spring 1932 to spring 1933 you have dozens of very long accounts very long and detailed accounts of the starvation in soviet ukraine now that is very useful now if you want to know what happened in soviet ukraine the polish diplomats had no reason to change the story one way or another but what and i say this now respectfully what diplomats know in fact every diplomat already knows this what diplomats know does not necessarily translate into policy in in July of 1932 Poland had signed a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union one of the consequences of this non-aggression treaty was that the Polish press did not write about mass starvation in the Soviet Union so diplomats knew but the fact that diplomats knew didn't mean that the world knew who else knew some journalists knew but most of the journalists not all I'll return to this most the journalists were forced to remain in Moscow and most of the journalists did not report on what they knew they gossiped about it to one another they occasionally let a few things slipped Outsiders but most of them chose not to write simple stories about what was happening in Ukraine in order not to lose the ability to stay in Moscow and write about other things so the fact that the journalists knew also didn't count for very much who were the sources then the sources of what was really happening in the world were the refugees the refugees were the sources people knew in Europe what was happening Soviet Ukraine because of the refugees from Soviet Ukraine these came into flood in early 1930 then the Soviets succeeded in fortifying the border so that there were few of them but in May of 1933 a fairly large group of refugees from Soviet Ukraine managed to cross the Polish border into into Poland into what we call gallaecia in Galicia as every Ukrainian will know but I'll just explain this anyway in Galicia there lived a very large group of Ukrainians kaliesha is the territory that had belonged to the Habsburg monarchy was added to Poland so most Ukrainians in the world at that time it's either in Soviet Ukraine or they live just west of that in Galicia or of Alinea they lived in Poland so refugees from hunger made it across the border to Poland this meant that a number of people in Poland Ukrainians in Poland knew what was happening until that time there had been there had been a certain amount of doubt because without human witnesses it's hard to know but as of May 1933 there were sufficient record records that metropolitan under they shipped its key for one could issue an appeal as has already been mentioned but beyond that other Ukrainian political activists began to travel around Europe on the basis of what they knew to try to explain to Europeans and others the scale of this disaster so and that this this for me is very important because it's a story of people who knew the truth on the basis of what they had been told by refugees and how that was stopped with one exception and the one exception is the one we're talking about today Ukrainians from Galicia were a very well organized and effective group in general in the summer and fall of 1933 a number of them and I'll mention in particular milena the Milenio Denis suka who is probably the most important a number of them went from capital to capital from conference to conference - from reporter to reporter trying to explain the significance of this story in September of 1930 several of them and again the most important was Milano to need suka succeeded in Geneva in getting an international women's organization to recognize the Holodomor which meant that there was actually an appeal issued to all civilised women in the world to boycott Soviet goods they succeeded in getting the league of national minorities to discuss the famine in Ukraine and thanks to that they succeeded these Ukrainians and getting the audience at the League of Nations in the end of September 1933 this is a very significant achievement after all the League of Nations is the heart of international governments such as it was in 1933 however the Soviet Union was not a member so what these Ukrainians managed to do was to get the League of Nations to meet but in secret and to pass a resolution but quietly to the effect that there was a famine in Ukraine and that the world ought to help in practice all this meant was communication with the Red Cross and the Red Cross could not enter Soviet Ukraine because Soviet authorities did not allow it to do so which brings us to the exceptional actions that we are discussing today against this context of what was known and how hard it was to say it the actions of Archbishop init sir stand out all the more because the problem wasn't just that you needed first-person accounts you needed a few witnesses the problem was also that the Soviet Union verily very powerfully denied what was happening and denied is too weak a word for it if you said something in public about this you could count on being attacked in vicious vicious ways the the people who did so were attacked and now I want to mention the exceptional journalists there were - - there was a man called Malcolm Muggeridge who wrote for the Guardian who wrote several stories in March of 1933 about famine in Ukraine not under his own name there was one there was one journalist who wrote about the famine in Ukraine on the basis of firsthand observation and under his own name one that man was Gareth Jones from Wales in late 1933 he published a series of articles based upon firsthand observation very close to the pictures that you just saw and had them published in the Western press this made a great deal of difference just one just one made a great deal of difference um but he was of course attacked by his fellow journalists he was attacked by the Soviet Union and in 1935 he was murdered so in this climate that here in Vienna a clear statement was made it's all the more extraordinary the other the difficulties were the general difficulties were mentioned by the learned rabbi this is depression it's a time of depression it's a time of national enmity it's a time of political extremism those are also difficulties against this atmosphere we see the three things that Cardinal in asserted has been all the more extraordinary the first is the appeal of 20 August 1930 an appeal which he can make because of what he knows from and except it's key and from and from greek catholics the second is the first meeting the first ecumenical inter-confessional meeting in Vienna in Aachen in October of 1933 which includes the Roman Catholics the Greek Catholics Armenian Catholics the Orthodox the Protestants as well as the Jewish community and here I want to mention something very special or something which I think is very important since we're speaking of witnesses and I think it ought not to be overlooked the reason why the leadership of mind was so important in 1933 was that in 1933 Ukraine was one of the most important Jewish countries in the world in 1933 Ukraine and Poland are the heart of where Jews actually live in the world so it was important but also understandable that Jews in Vienna had already formed their own committee to help people who were starving in the Soviet Union and that they joined this initiative of Cardinal in it sir but the the point that I want to make about witnessing is this the Holocaust is a distinct crime and one which I can't describe the distinctiveness of here but the people who survived the Holocaust very often had the human generosity to remember other things so if one spends time with the testimonies of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust one notices that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from Ukraine very often mention the Holodomor in other words if we had no other sources today on the Holodomor we would still know about it because Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were asked in the 1970s 1980s 1990s to talk about the Holocaust and who were asked by people who knew nothing about Ukraine nothing about the Soviet Union nevertheless they remembered the Holodomor and why did they remember the Holodomor because it happened in the place where they lived how could you not remember it but I mention this because it's characteristic of how we remember so often that we leave others out but the people who truly remember have to have to be remembering the others if it's actually a memory then it must include the others so the third thing that Cardinal in answer did was to bring together an international conference on the 16th and 17th December 1933 which included the religious communities of Vienna as well as a number of international guests from a number of organizations including including organizations one of the people who spoke with that conference was precisely Milano to need sky this Ukrainian political activist who had probably done more than anyone else in the secular world to bring attention to the tragedy now let me try to summarize the special characteristics of these appeals in these conferences the first has already been stressed and mentioned that these were multi-confessional and multinational in two ways they were multi-confessional multinational in structure but they were also multinational and multi-confessional in their description of the victims because the victims of famine were of course everyone who lived in Soviet Ukraine that means mostly Ukrainians but it also means as has already been mentioned pulls Germans Russians others who lived in Ukraine and that it's very interesting to see that that is the description which is offered by Cardinal in answer at the time the second thing which is special as the archbishop mentioned is that these appeals were made on on the principle of universal human rights interestingly and also on the universal principle of nexton liebe of loving thy neighbor that's that's the I mean it comes from Leviticus of course but it's it's the most it's the most universal the proclamations that one has in our monotheistic religions it comes from Leviticus in for Christians it's most known from the parable of the Good Samaritan we're next and liebe so you know they have a Steiner next ax right your who is your who is your neighbor your neighbor is he who is suffering or you are a neighbor if you behave with mercy so that were next in Lee but was very often invoked and that was that was unusual and extraordinary the third thing which was important about these appeals and conferences were that they were that they were open that is it seems clear that the people were organizing them knew that it would be difficult to actually get practical help food relief across the Soviet border so what they did again and again was to say everyone should know about this which is important in and of itself in this climate where speaking was so was so difficult so this is and then the final thing which is worth stressing and this is something which previous speakers have been too modest to stress Cardinal in answer wasn't the only person to speak about famine in Ukraine he was the only person of European stature to do so the only person of European stature so his stature meant that he was taking particular risks but his stature means also that when we look back his is the only case that we can remember of a European who had a certain kind of profile who was who was willing to take this particular stance um please be patient with me for a moment longer well I tried to summarize why I think this is significant today the first is the affirmation of truth the affirmation of truth simply affirming what could be known on the basis of human witness having the courage to speak the simple truth as it came from witnesses against and within this cloud of denial and denunciation that seems to me in that time and in our time and in all times something which is worth remembering the simple principle of the affirmation of truth and if it seems if it seems easy think of how rare it was in 1933 or for that matter think of how rare it is in in 2000 and and in 19 and contrast the simple statements the modest humble statements that were made by the Cardinal and his his colleagues in December 1933 with the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which took place a month later when these very same events are treated as proof of the genius of Comrade Stalin as proof of the superiority of the Soviet system as the beginning of a huge lie and ask yourself which has survived better the huge lie or or the simple the simple truth right the truth doesn't survive on its own the truth needs people just to speak it the second thing which I think is enduring about all of this is the affirmation of of precisely universal values it's interesting that Cardinal in answer spoke precisely in this way of universal human values and the universal Christian value which of course is also a Jewish value and a value which comes from the earliest books of the Bible is that of nexton niba the third reason why I think this is worth remembering has to do with Austria and Ukraine two countries which can seem very far apart but the Ukrainians who appear in this history the ones who tried to tell the youth that the truth to Europe they were all Austrian subjects in their youth milena Donetsk ah was spent the first 26 years of her life as a subject of the Habsburg monarchy all of these Galician Ukrainians come from Austria this was their capital when they were when they were young and this action from Vienna towards Ukraine is an example of how as Cardinal in assert himself put it Austria could play its traditional role of mediating between east and west this strikes me is particularly important in an Austria which can sometimes feel itself to be a small country which has no neighbors or a small country which is somehow very far away from a Ukraine that has conflict or Ukraine that has refugees or Ukraine about which many lies are told the next reason why I think this is worth remembering is as an example of trying to intervene during times of mass killing we have a history of the Armenian Genocide we the history of the Holodomor we have a history of the Holocaust we don't have a history of people trying to stop these things that's a very weak history it is it is it is it is cheering and ennobling to be able to add at least one small example to that history to the history of people trying if only trying to to bring it about but I wonder though well I wonder if milena Denise ko was right in 1958 when she wrote about all of this when she wrote about Cardinal in it sir when she wrote about herself and the other Galician Ukrainians when she wrote about the campaign of Lies of 1933 she said we failed completely to tell the world about the famine she saw it as a complete of complete failure I wonder I wonder if the failure was as complete as all of that I wonder if the fact that Cardinal Ennis her and others raised their voices in the end of 1933 might perhaps have had some significance because after all famine was never used as a weapon this way in the Soviet Union again famine was never used in in this way by Soviet authorities it was used by others but by Soviet authorities this was the last time historians often wonder why it is that policy change so categorically between 1933 and 1934 I'm not trying to say that I know the answer I'm just trying to say that the fact that a prominent European brought some attention to this in late 1933 might just possibly have made a difference now of course if you're a Ukrainian or if your family's history goes back to Soviet Ukraine you will think yes but millions had already died and indeed millions had already died but afterwards the policy did change and isn't it just possible isn't just thinkable that the one major European attempt to draw attention to this might have had some difference since we have forgotten our subject since we have forgotten about Cardinal in answer since we've forgotten about this appeal I think the question as we remember this appeal is at least worth asking the final the very final point that I want to make has to do with individuals so when we when we tell the story of when Christians tell the story of the Good Samaritan about next and liebe there's only one victim right the victim is the Jew who's in a ditch who's rescued by the Samaritan the member of a different people just one person when we try to remember a tremendous horrifyingly huge tragedy like the Holodomor a challenge is to remember all of these millions as one person at a time and for this that the photograph that do help a bit that we can't remember a million two million three million four million we can't do it but we can try to think of one person over and over and end and over again when we when we try to remember the scale these events the kinds of the kinds of recollections that ambassador said but was courage a courageous enough to share with us are so very important because we can think yes it was like this for that twelve-year-old girl and it was something like that for millions of other people at the same at the same time but what I want to close with is the the importance that single individuals can make during times which seem to be precisely unchangeable I've mentioned millennia ronita there were other Ukrainians who tried to draw attention to the famine but she was particularly significant had she not been there I'm not sure that it would have come to the events that we're talking about today had she not spent half of 1933 trying to draw every international institution into this problem I'm not sure that we would have come to this gareth jones one reporter one one single Western reporter writing in a Western language under his own name one and yet the difference between one and zero is so extraordinarily great and that is of course I think why we we honor a person who you know how times I can Gazette's that he left the sign doesn't mean that he was a perfect person none of us is it means that he was the only person of his stature the only person of his stature to have done something like this in the Europe of his time and that one is ever so much greater than zero thank you [Music]

Channel: ЖИВЕ ТЕЛЕБАЧЕННЯ

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Keywords: Timothy Snyder, Holodomor, murder by starvation, Ukraine

Id: YA92bmoMFv0

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019

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Content warning: quite a heavy description of the Ukrainian famine