Holodomor Museum

These days, side by side in Kyiv’s Holodomor Museum are exhibits from 1932-33 and 2022-23.
 
For each time period, the rescued manuscript of a book is on display.
 
In the early 1930s, Stalin’s imposition of collectivization in Ukraine decreed that all agricultural grain had to be handed over to the state.
 
It caused the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainian people by starvation. In June 1933, 28,000 people died of hunger every day.
 
While the USSR exported grain to pay for industrialization, hungry farmers were punished for collecting the crop leftovers from fields with ten years imprisonment and confiscation of property or execution.
 
In July 2023, a mass Russian missile strike destroyed 60,000 tons of Ukrainian grain. Now, as then, a Russian tyrant wants to suppress the people of the Ukraine, their culture, and their right to exist as an independent nation.
 
In the 1960s, Lavr Nechyporenko made an eyewitness account of the holodomor in a novel called “1933”. He handed over the MS to dissident Ivan Kovalenko who was arrested, losing the book. Kovalenko was finally—remarkably—reunited with it in 1994. That is the first book.
 
On 1st July 2023, 37-year-old Ukrainian novelist and war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina, was killed by a Russian missile attack. Shortly before her death, Amelina had found the manuscript of a war diary, “Vivat”, kept by Volodymyr Vakulenko, buried in the backyard of his house in Kharkiv, where the Russians had invaded. Vakulenko was killed on 20th March 2023. That is the second book.