No ‘War Fatigue’ for Visitors to Holodomor Museum – Director Lesia Hasydzhak

As Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine passes the grim milestone of 1,000 days, Ukrainians have been remembering the heroes of the Heavenly Hundred by commemorating the Day of Dignity and Freedom. We now turn to remember another sad page in our country’s history – the Holodomor (Great Famine) of 1932-1933, which is recognized as genocide, killing millions of Ukrainians.

On Nov. 18, at the start of an emotionally difficult week for Ukrainians, Kyiv Post met with Holodomor Museum director Lesia Hasydzhak.

KP: Lesia, please tell us about the museum’s current research projects. Have there been any new discoveries about the Holodomor?

In general, this year has been complicated and intense. There has been lots of routine work and analysis, lots of things we are pleased with other things we want to strengthen and improve upon. But this year – for the first time in the history of the Holodomor Museum – our exhibits went to an exhibition abroad, to France, which has been a big achievement.

We have also launched several projects that will continue into next year, and their implementation will be of great importance to the Holodomor theme. We have also launched a detailed study of our stock collection, which we have been accumulating over many years of the museum's work, so it’s time to put things in order.

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Historians Kateryna Lukianets and Svitlana Starovoit began an archaeographic study of the collection of Jerry Berman's letters. It was given to the museum a few years ago by his heiress, granddaughter, Alison Marshall. Berman was an engineer from South Africa who worked in Donbas, in mines and factories, and from there he wrote letters to his family. So this will be a publication of epistolary materials, with comments, indexes, and scientific research.

Most Ukrainians today will know of [Welsh journalist] Garrett Jones, who came to Ukraine, wrote articles, and was one of those who told the world about the Holodomor. But letters from an outsider working in Donbas, who saw hungry people and saw how they were fleeing to industrial centers, are rare, and this is very important.

Turning to another area of our work, we recently received a gift in the form of a collection of art from the US-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC) and the heirs of its former President Morgan Williams, who the works belonged to. Mr. Morgan unfortunately, died a few months ago. The collection includes 700 exhibits spanning paintings, posters, graphics, badges and stamps, photographs, and books. This is the largest comprehensive collection on the Holodomor in the world.

We also have a colleague who has been writing a monograph about Ukrainians in the Kuban for two years. I believe this will be a promising study and that next year we will be able to publish it. After all, for various reasons, the Kuban once experienced several waves of migration of Ukrainians – the registered and Sloboda Cossacks from the Ukrainian provinces, and the Cossacks after the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich, who settled there and integrated, becoming virtually autochthonous.

During the Ukrainian Revolution, they appealed to the Central Rada to join the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), and then were subjected to repression and persecution. And this region, the villages of the North Caucasus, became the territory of the Holodomor and suffered repression against the Ukrainian population, Russification, and denationalization.

I hope that in a few weeks we will also have a manuscript of the original research on the Holodomor in Kyiv. It has value in telling us how the city lived at a time when the village was doomed to extinction. Most researchers focus their attention on rural areas. And this is correct, because the main mechanism of the Holodomor was to destroy the Ukrainian, i.e. the wealthy owner. But what did the Ukrainian city look like then? A study will soon be released to tell us this.

Another area of work centers on oral history. This year, we did everything we could to record the last witnesses of the Holodomor. The head of the department, Yulia Kotsur, has a talent for finding and talking to anyone. The department made an expedition to the Chernihiv region in the summer, where it recorded the memories of a 106-year-old woman!

Another important collaboration this year has been our cooperation with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center. As part of the memorandum of cooperation, we took a collection of letters for scanning and processing. These were written to the director Mykola Loktionov-Stesenko in the late 1980s by those who responded to his call in the newspaper “Village Life” to tell their memories of the famine of the 1930s, collectivization, dekulakization, etc. Later, some of the authors and their stories became the heroes of the first documentary film on the history of Ukraine – “The 33rd. Eyewitness Testimonies,” filmed in 1989.

As for our latest research, I can briefly tell you about the Holodomor Glossary [presented after this interview was recorded, on Nov. 20 - ed.] A small number of copies have been published, but it is the result of the work of museum scholars this year. The glossary presents and explains the meaning of keywords on the Holodomor, which denote terms related to collectivization, the mechanism, village life, consequences, commemoration, etc.

KP: Speaking of educational work, how intensively does the museum work with young people and students?

The employees of our information and education department are real museum educators. They don't just give tours, they also run classes. We have many of these, for example online classes and those for children as young as six years old. The months of October, November and first half of December are always very busy times, and we are very grateful for the professionalism and pride of all our colleagues, headed by Yana Horodniak.

KP: How is the museum's collection being updated now? You recently made an announcement that you were collecting items that might have been left by the descendants of those who survived the Holodomor in Kyiv?

We’ve made a call for people to bring us things and artifacts related to the Holodomor in Kyiv. These will inform the exhibition I mentioned earlier. This work is ongoing and when we are ready, the exhibition will be opened.

KP: How many items and artifacts have been added to the museum's collection this year?

I can't say for sure right now, but it's around 1,000 items. In 2023, the museum collection grew by 25 percent. We haven't summarized the results yet, but I think this figure will double because the year has been fruitful.

In addition, we have already started collecting artifacts related to the full-scale invasion.

These items and artifacts can serve as evidence of how the Russian-Ukrainian war is genocidal.

For example, we are currently exhibiting a drawing by a Russian schoolboy, which he sent to the front to a Russian soldier for support, just as our children are writing to Ukrainian soldiers. The boy’s

name is included along with the school where he studied, which is a cadet school.

In this letter, the Russian boy clearly and unequivocally writes that he wants to be like a Russian soldier, to kill Ukrainians. This phrase has been crossed out by a proofreader – apparently, the boy's teacher tried to intervene – but everything can be clearly made out.

These kinds of artifacts show once again how much the Russian government has already militarized and brainwashed its society and what they – these new Russians – are like, and what kind of people they are raising.

We received a set of documents from a man who was born in Russia, then moved to live in the Donbas and worked as a miner, in particular, at the infamous Zasyadko mine. He became a citizen of Ukraine and then joined the ranks of the so-called DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] army,” and eventually died. It forms a kind of colorful story of the life of an “ordinary man” who could not decide what he wanted from life: freedom or something else.

KP: How has society and life in Ukraine changed over the past year, taking into account the so-called war fatigue and different attitudes and issues the museum faces?

Nothing has changed here. That is, interest in the topic remains at the same level as it was.

Anyone who comes to the Holodomor Museum does not talk about war fatigue, because they understand the cause-and-effect relationship of what is happening to us now.