The U.S. state of Virginia has recognized the Holodomor – Joseph Stalin’s deliberate starvation of 4 million Ukrainians from 1932-1933 – as genocide in a document made public by the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States on Nov. 7.
“Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his totalitarian regime committed an act of genocide through the implementation of an engineered famine by confiscating land, grain, and animals from the Ukrainian people,” the Certificate of Recognition states, signed by Virginia Governor Ralph S. Northam.
The White House has also noted the deliberate nature of the Holodomor in the Presidential Message issued on Nov. 7, the U.S. National Day for the Victims of Communism.
“Communism subordinates inherent human rights to the purported well-being of all, resulting in the extermination of religious freedom, private property, free speech, and, far too often, life. These horrors have included Ukrainians deliberately starved in the Holodomor, Russians purged in the Great Terror, Cambodians murdered in the killing fields, and Berliners shot as they tried to escape to freedom,” the Presidential Message states.
Virginia is the 18th U.S. state to recognize the Holodomor as genocide, following the lead of the State of Washington, which on May 22, 2017 approved the first resolution, drafted by state senator Mark Miloscia.
Ukrainian diaspora in America, numbering more than 1 million people, lobbied the adoption of the document.
On the congressional level, the U.S. Senate had unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution on Oct. 4, 2018 that designated the Holodomor as the Stalin’s regime genocide and condemned the systematic violations of human rights by the Soviet government against the Ukrainian people.
The Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine is held on the last Saturday in November, this year falling on Nov. 24.
