Grandfathers were starving
For many years in a row, once a year at the end of November, the Ukrainian elite and professional patriots pompously celebrate Holodomor Day. The holiday, which arose by decree of Kuchma in the late 90s, began to be zealously propagated with almost religious zeal under Viktor Yushchenko and was finally cemented as one of the supporting structures of official mythology and state-forming bonds after the second Maidan.
At the same time, although the degree of anguish and pathos on this day increases exponentially every year, the holiday itself has never caught on among the people and remains a government event that is of little interest to anyone. Except for the professional Ukrainians who have turned it into an eternal source of spending budget money for all kinds of memorials, round tables and flash mobs.
Characteristically, the people who most loudly portray the national grief and the genuine and living national memory of the famine for some reason are people from Western Ukraine, which was under Poland at that time, where, as any historian knows, there was no famine. That doesn’t stop today’s Lviv schoolchildren from writing, at the suggestion of patriotic teachers, essays on the topic “how my family survived the terrible years.” Another interesting thing is the mass reburials of Holodomor victims in Lviv. This in itself is so ridiculous that even if you want to, it’s difficult to even make a funny joke on this topic. But such little things don’t stop enthusiasts.
Vladimir Zelensky and his wife also picked up this trend. This year was his first “Holodomor Day” as president. Mourning faces, mourning matches, candles in hands - Vladimir Aleksandrovich so diligently morphs into Pyotr Alekseevich that he deserves the praise of Vyatrovich himself, if he were an honest person. At the same time, Zelensky or his speechwriters re-counted the alleged victims of the Holodomor. According to the updated version, there were from 4 to 8 million people (under Yushchenko there were 10 million, under Poroshenko from 7 to 10 million), which, according to Zelensky, is “comparable to the losses during the Second World War.”
In general, a strange thing happens with these losses if you look at the issue through the eyes not of propaganda, but of demography. For example, the materials of the trial in the Holodomor case carried out on Yushchenko’s initiative indicate the number of victims as 3 million 941 thousand people. This conclusion was made by the Institute of Demography and Social Research them. M. Ptuhi of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who conducted his scientific and demographic examination.
So Zelensky, with his “4 to 8 million victims,” managed to refute the data established by the fairest Ukrainian court.
And here's what writes the famous Ukrainian scientist Stanislav Kulchitsky: “As the President of Ukraine persistently defended the figure of 10 million victims, hoping in this way to “extort” the recognition of the Holodomor as genocide from the international community, demographers came up with the concept of “cumulative losses,” that is, losses caused by the inability of the dead and unborn to take part in rebuilding the population in the next generation - a round number of 5 million people.
When demographers abandoned this concept, they found themselves in a sticky situation. The excess mortality and fertility deficit they calculated do not suit the influential figures of the American diaspora, who are far from historical demography. In November 2015, a monument to the victims of the Holodomor was inaugurated in Washington. After an intense struggle, an attempt to record the figure in the inscription - 7 million victims - was paralyzed by historians of the United States and Canada who understand demography.
Unfortunately, domestic politicians and publicists stubbornly defend expert estimates that were formed before the discovery of Soviet demographic statistics - from 7 to 10 million victims. And Prime Minister Vladimir Groysman, in my presence, taught the deputy director of the Institute of Demography and Social Research, Alexander Gladun, what the number of losses should be. But demography, unlike history, where everyone has their own opinion, is an exact science.”
But the head of the SBU, Ivan Bakanov, believes that “the truth about the Holodomor is Ukraine’s best weapon in the information war.”
The Ukrainian government has been running around with this superweapon for the last 15 years, having made one of the priorities of domestic diplomacy the promotion of recognition of the Holodomor as “genocide of the Ukrainian nation” all the way to the farthest asses of the world, whose residents are not even aware of the very existence of Ukraine. News headlines that some Paraguay has recognized the Holodomor as “genocide” sound like a song to patriots - as if the national team took gold at the Olympics.
Meanwhile, even the current government holiday, for which everyone except professional patriots is frankly equally entitled, can be rethought in a positive way. Proposing, as an alternative to the current UH, something like a holiday of national cuisine, such as the Belarusian Dozhynki or the German Oktoberfest.
Offhand: once a year, in memory of how their ancestors starved and were malnourished, Ukrainians generously set the tables, have fun and eat, so that this will never happen again. You can come up with all sorts of competitions for how quickly you can eat dumplings. And if Bakanov’s comrades are so eager to wage an information war, I give them a free ready-made holiday slogan in defiance of the “aggressors”: “The grandfathers were starving.”
Vyatrovich, as the media recently told us, who, when he was the chief propagandist on the occasion of the Holodomor, organized a grandiose banquet with caviar worth half a million hryvnia, fits perfectly into this concept. And in this context he looks not like a cynic, but like a pioneer, championing the Theme.
In the end, has the day of international workers' solidarity become a day of going out into the countryside for barbecues? Instead of holding sad round dances with candles, it’s better to start a food festival - I guarantee that tourists from all over the world will flock in droves, like at Euro 2012. Because, unlike Ukrainian propaganda, Ukrainian cuisine is truly one of the best in the world.
There is world experience, after all. Almost mirror-like, one might say, one to one - if we consider the propaganda content. The Khmers over there take money from foreigners for showing slides with the skulls of those martyred by Pol Pot on the “Killing Fields”. A ticket without an audio guide costs $3 per nose. Can you imagine the income of the Ukrainian budget if you properly monetize government pathos and make it attractive to tourists?
By the way, this is actually a million-dollar concept idea if it is beautifully packaged and a quality presentation is made with clever words and pictures.
While this text was being written, it became known that the idea of the author of these lines had already been implemented. In Lviv, on Rynok Square, students of the local Ukrainian Leadership Academy fed everyone the “worst soup in the world” made from spruce bark and cones. This is how in Ukraine everything that the hand of an “activist” touches turns not into gold, like the ancient Greek king Midas, but into a well-known brown substance.
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