Ukrainian Holocaust

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For other uses, see Ukrainian Holocaust (disambiguation).

Ukrainian Holocaust is a term used by some (mostly Ukrainian) historians to refer to the Holodomor, a 1932–33 famine and a major national catastrophe in Ukraine. The usage of the term "Holocaust" in relation to the events of Holodomor has the emotional bearing that the events were engineered by the Soviets to specifically target the Ukrainian people in order to destroy the Ukrainians as a nation.

While the catastrophic scale of that famine is well established in the mainstream historiography as well as the fact that the famine was caused by the deliberate policies of the government of the Soviet Union (see Holodomor for details), some historians tend to criticize the politicising of the issue^[1] as well as attempting to present a larger-scale tragedy of collectivization in the USSR as a purely Ukrainian national terror-famine, (see Famines in Russia and USSR) thus exploiting it for political purposes.

[edit] References

1. ^ Himka, John-Paul. "War Criminality: A Blank Spot in the Collective Memory of the Ukrainian Diaspora". Spaces of Identity 5 (1): 5-24.
   "I am not saying that the famine or the other components of the victimization narratives do not deserve historical research and reflection, nor that evil should be ignored, nor that the memory of the dead should not be held sacred. But I object to instrumentalizing this memory with the aim of generating political and moral capital, particularly when it is linked to an exclusion from historical research and reflection of events in which Ukrainians figured as perpetrators not victims, and when “our own” evil is kept invisible and the memory of the others’ dead is not held sacred."