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This week, to commemorate those who died from former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s forced starvation, the Holodomor Victims’ Memorial – National Museum and the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation presented the Holodomor geo-information system.
“The Soviet authorities, in order to hide the mortality scale caused by the Holodomor-genocide and prevent the spread of infection, organized the collection and burial of dead bodies. Then the Soviet government tried to hide these mass graves sites and succeeded in it. They built factories, and roads on those places. So that no one could remember and honor the memory of those killed,” Olesia Stasiuk, director of the Holodomor National Museum said.
The Holodomor Victims’ Memorial – National Museum managed to find more than 900 mass graves sites. A criminal investigation opened by Ukraine’s Security Service helped to reveal 857 of these.
The Geoinformation system is available on the website of the Holodomor National Museum in the mass graves sites’ section. One can find the information on burial places in any city or town with the help of the search box.
The largest number of these sites, 114, are in the Kharkiv region.
At that time, Kharkiv was Ukraine’s capital. Thus, people went there with a single hope – to escape from hunger.
The Ukrainian Postal Service, Ukrposhta, commemorated the victims with a marked envelope.
“The envelope circulation amounts to 400,000 copies. From now on, they are sold at all post offices. Today, a special cancellation ceremony of letter correspondence is taking place in Kyiv, at the Main Post Office. And the information about this tragic event in the history of Ukraine will spread around the world with the help of letters,” Ukrposhta representative Natalia Mukhina said.
The Holodomor National Museum also spreads data via its archived materials and memoirs of the genocide survivors, which it also has available on its website.
