A group of American researchers so-called. “Holodomor” - the famine of 1932-33 in the Ukrainian SSR - insists on the figure of losses of 3,9 million people instead of the 7 million people used by official Ukrainian propaganda. The dispute is caused by the reluctance of the number of victims of the “Holodomor” to exceed the number of victims of the Holocaust.
This was stated at a press conference in Kyiv by Ukrainian Holodomor researchers who insist on the figure of 7 million victims, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Telegram, Facebook, Classmates or In contact with
“There is a figure of 6 million, this is the number of victims of the Holocaust. It will be ugly if the number of Holodomor victims is greater than this figure,” Vladimir Vasilenko, a professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, explained the opponents’ logic.
“When we held a conference at our university, in Shevchenko, the speaker from the side of demographers, deputy director of the Institute of Demography, Alexander Gladun, accused us of wanting to prove the figure of losses of 7 million because this figure was greater than the losses of the Holocaust . This is what he accused us of. But he, a respected demographer, obviously does not know history, and does not listen to what we tell him - the figure of 7 million was announced 10 years before the start of the Second World War, before the Holocaust. Who announced? German diplomats,” added Vladimir Serhiychuk, professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
The conference, which was attended by representatives of the National Museum “Memorial of the Victims of the Holodomor”, the NGO “Memorial” named after Vasyl Stus and the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”, was held because at the end of 2015 the heads of five Ukrainian scientific institutions in North America - the Ukrainian Scientific Institute of Harvard University, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studios, the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society, the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences and the American Association of Ukrainian Studios - suddenly turned to the head of the organizing committee, Mikhail Savkiv Jr., with a request not to use the already generally accepted figure of losses from 7 to 10 million, but to limit the findings of professors Andre Graziosi, Timothy Snyder and Stanislav Kulczycki, who claim that this tragedy claimed at least half as many lives. The same position was recently voiced by representatives of the Institute of Demography of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.