Archbishop Gudziak: Ukraine remembers Soviet-era genocide amid ‘new genocidal war’

NEW YORK (OSV News) — The Ukrainian global community is marking the 91st anniversary of a Soviet-era genocide, even “as a new genocidal war is being perpetrated against Ukraine and its people,” said Metropolitan Archbishop Borys A. Gudziak of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia.

The archbishop joined hundreds in prayer Nov. 23 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to commemorate those who died in the Holodomor, an artificial famine in Ukraine engineered by Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin between 1932-1933.

The annual commemoration of the famine was organized by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.

Named for the Ukrainian words signifying “hunger” and “death,” the Holodomor claimed anywhere from 4 million to 10 million Ukrainian lives in tandem with a brutal Soviet policy of collectivization, theft, terror and abuse that sought to erase Ukrainian cultural and political identity. Ascertaining exact numbers of the fatalities by scholars has been hampered by Soviet destruction of Ukrainian demographic records.

“Ninety-one years ago, on the most fertile land in the world, millions of people were forced to die of hunger,” said Archbishop Gudziak in his opening remarks, noting that both “the last surviving victims” of the Holodomor were present at the service along with those who have suffered during the current war in Ukraine.

Among the dignitaries in attendance at St. Patrick were Metropolitan Antony of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA; Ukraine Ambassador to the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya; UCCA president Michael Sawkiw Jr.; and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York provided music for the gathering, including a rendition of Mykola Lysenko’s “Prayer for Ukraine,” a spiritual anthem of that nation long performed as a closing hymn at Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Orthodox Church of Ukraine liturgies.

Well over 30 nations have officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. The Vatican noted in its 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church that the 20th century “bears the tragic mark of different genocides,” listing Ukrainians among the victims as well as the Jewish people in the Shoah, the preferred Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

However, Sawkiw warned, “the world has not yet learned the cruel lessons of the Ukrainian Holodomor,” as “food continues to be used as a political weapon in the world today.”

He pointed to Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian grain, which has netted the Kremlin and its partners close to $1 billion since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which continues aggression launched in 2014 and which has been declared a genocide in two joint reports from the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.

Sawkiw reminded prayer service attendees of the gathering’s theme: “Holodomor Then, Genocide Now, and Justice When?”

Nadiia Veselova, who attended the service with her 4-year-old daughter Miia, told OSV News that her grandmother had survived the Holodomor, and had passed down stories to her family’s successive generations.

“My grandmother told me terrible things about what happened,” said Veselova, a Kharkiv native who fled to the U.S. on humanitarian parole at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “Russia tried to say that never happened, and it’s the same with the (present) war and with everything that they’re doing (to Ukraine).”

Archbishop Gudziak, who thanked “all Americans for the singular American support for Ukraine,” stressed that “God’s truth will prevail” as “post-genocidal Ukraine is trying to avert another genocide.”

Schumer commended Ukraine’s “inspiring resilience in the face of evil,” saying that “just as Stalin failed, so will (Russian leader) Vladimir Putin” fail in eradicating Ukraine and Ukrainian identity.

“We thank God for the miraculous resilience of a small country standing like David against Goliath,” said Archbishop Gudziak. “We come together to pray because we have faith in God’s love and the Lord’s providence. We as a people who went to the depths of hades in the Holodomor, but rose again to live, have seen too much not to believe.”

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