NEW YORK — Holding signs like “Genocide by famine: The Ukrainian Holodomor, 1932-1933” and “We stand with Ukraine,” a group of largely Russian emigres gathered in Times Square here Nov. 26 to protest the famine Joseph Stalin’s counterrevolutionary regime imposed there 90 years ago.
Maxim Bashilov, who arrived in the U.S. from Russia in January, told the Militant this protest and others like it worldwide were an important commemoration, marking “a bloody page in Soviet history.”
In the Holodomor, which means “death by hunger” in Ukrainian, at least 4 million people were deliberately starved to death. Stalin had ordered the requisition of all grain in Ukraine to export for sale abroad, leaving nothing to feed the overwhelmingly peasant population. This took place during Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture across the USSR, but with a special vengeance against Ukrainians, whose yearnings for independence he feared.
Olga Kosolapova, one of the organizers of the event, told the Militant she was from St. Petersburg and had joined “protests there at the beginning of the war” as the Vladimir Putin regime invaded Ukraine. “It was scary when the police attacked the protests.
“It’s important to be here in solidarity with Ukraine,” she said. “There are both Ukrainians and Russians here. We know that Putin is backing Hamas.” She agreed that Putin’s regime and the Islamist terror group are both reactionary.