Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
suit. In 2005 president Viktor Yushchenko declared 26 November as official Ho-
lodomor Remembrance Day, and called on the international community to recog-
nise the famine as genocide. Critics, however, continue to argue that the famine
was aimed at certain social, rather than ethnic, groups. The Council of Europe ad-
opted this stance in 2010, Russia remains firmly opposed to any 'genocide' de-
scription and new president Viktor Yanukovych has declared the events of the early
1930s a tragedy, but not genocide.
WWII
Even by the standards of Ukrainian history, WWII was a particularly bloody and fratri-
cidal period. Caught between Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and an ongoing struggle for
independence, some six to eight million Ukrainians, at least 1.6 million of them Jews,
were killed. Entire cities were levelled. The Red Army rolled into Polish Ukraine in
September 1939, the Germans attacked in 1941, and the Nazis and their Romanian allies
occupied most of the country for more than two years. Two million Ukrainians were con-
scripted into the Soviet army and fought on the Russian side. However, some nationalists
hoped the Nazis would back Ukrainian independence and collaborated with Germany.
This was a source of much postwar recrimination (and a very ill-informed 'debate' still
occasionally flares up today when its suits the political aims of one group or another), but
many partisans in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought both German and Russian
troops in a bid for an independent state. The catacombs just outside Odesa sheltered a
celebrated group of partisans.
The 'Ukrainian Katyn' (mass grave) was revealed globally in 2007, when authorities re-
buried 2000 victims of the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD). The deaths at Bykovyna, near
Kyiv, occurred in the 1930s and '40s.
In the end the Soviet army prevailed. In 1943 it retook Kharkiv and Kyiv before
launching a massive offensive in early 1944 that pushed back German forces. In the pro-
cess any hopes for an independent Ukraine were obliterated. Soviet leader Stalin also
saw fit to deport millions of Ukrainians or send them to Siberia for supposed 'disloyalty
or collaboration'. This included the entire population of Crimean Tatars in May 1944.
Towards the war's end, in February 1945, Stalin met with British and US leaders Win-
ston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta's Livadia Palace to discuss the adminis-
tration of post-war Europe, among other things. The fact that the Red Army occupied so
