ROME — Pope Francis has likened Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine to Joseph Stalin’s 1930s Holodomor, when the Soviet leader engineered a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.
“Yesterday tormented Ukraine commemorated the Holodomor, the genocide perpetrated by the Soviet regime which, 90 years ago, caused millions of people to starve to death,” the pontiff said Sunday following the weekly Angelus prayer.
“That lacerating wound, instead of healing, is made even more painful by the atrocities of the war that continues to make that dear nation suffer,” he stated.
The pope’s message was transmitted by videoconference from his Casa Santa Marta residence because of his “problem of inflammation of the lungs.” The papal text was read by Monsignor Paolo Braida who regularly ghostwrites the pontiff’s reflections.
Saturday marked the 91st anniversary of the start of the famine, commemorated in Ukraine with a Day of Memory every year on the fourth Saturday of November. “Holodomor” is a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).
In 1953, Raphael Lemkin — the Polish international lawyer who coined the term “genocide” — gave a speech to the Ukrainian community of New York commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Holodomor.
File/Dead and dying horses near a Belgorod collective farm during the man-made Holodomor famine in the Ukraine, former Soviet Union, 1934. (Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
In that speech, Lemkin addressed what he called “the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”
“As long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart of Sovietism,” he stated.
It was understandable that the Soviet plan would target the farmers, Lemkin said, “the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine.”
“The weapon used against this body is perhaps the most terrible of all — starvation,” he declared. “Between 1932 and 1933, 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death, an inhumanity which the 73rd Congress decried on 28 May 1934.”
People visit the memorial to commemorate the victims of the Holodomor, a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians, despite the snow in Kyiv, Ukraine on November 27, 2022. (Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the leader of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic community, has also compared the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin to those of Joseph Stalin.
“Various voices full of weeping and despair appeal to me, in particular, from those who are forcibly deported from Ukrainian soil,” Archbishop Shevchuk said a year ago.
“We see that just as entire nations were deported from their lands under Stalin, the same is being repeated today on Ukrainian soil.”
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