www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Remembering Holodomor

I am not surprised that the UOC-MP would not participate in an service or commemoration with the UOC-KP and the others.

I found this at the UOC-MP english language site:


Word of His Beatitude Metropolitan Volodymyr on the Commemoration Day of Political Repressions and Holodomor Victims


In the 20th century the Ukrainian nation had survived through one of the most awful tragedies in its history - Holodomor. Ukraine, which had always provided the bread to the whole world, had experienced mass famine. The famine brought about a considerable number of victims and brought much desolation. It had both subjective and objective origins and consequences. The artificial famine of 1932-1933 was planned by the Bolsheviks in order to accelerate the forceful collectivization, to liquidate the kulaks (better-off peasants) as a social class, to annihilate the "hostile elements". http://orthodox.org.ua/eng/node/1021

David, thank you for finding this important quote from a high ranking Orthodox cleric about the horrors of the Ukrainian famine.

Ray

Are you willing to retract that now?

No.

The statement by Archbishop Volodomir is an equivocation that refuses to acknowledged the Holodomor as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. It mirrors exactly the line taken by the Russian government that the famine in Ukraine was an unanticipated side effect of Soviet collectivization elements, and that the Ukrainians were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. History says otherwise: the Ukrainians were targeted as a means of undermining their nationalist aspirations. So, if by "annihilate hostile elements" His Grace means "destroy the Ukrainian people", I guess you could say he was correct.

I feel odd defending the MP Church but I don't see how this constitutes 'equivocation':

"....But in the 1930-ties it was for the first time that Ukraine e[i]xperienced artificial famine, mass cynical, purposeful and cruel murder of millions of her citizens. Such genocide might have taken place only in a God-hating and man-hating environment. Millions of people died in terrible agony on the rich Ukrainian black earth. This Famine was an attempt to exterminate the very soul of the nation, to carry it to complete spiritual slavery. It became an instrument of diabolic revenge for the impossibility to eradicate the filial memory of God, the Love of God, faithfulness to God and faith in God from the conscience of our wise people, instinct with high virtue. This faith could be destroyed only through the physical annihilation of its carrier. Therefore the God-fighting power, having created the spiritual hunger, foredoomed the nation to physical starvation....

Ukraine had lost millions of its children that time. All of them had suffered severe pains and awful death. Those who survived had forever remembered what the paradise on the earth without God was like.

75 years have passed since. The time heals the wounds of soul, but the wound in the soul of Ukraine cannot be healed. It will always remind by insatiable pain of the times when the devil dominated Ukraine and other nations of the Soviet communion.

Our family had suffered from Holodomor too. I remember my mother crying bitter tears recalling 1932-1933. Then one of my brothers was born. A baby also became an objective of sacrificial love. [i]My mother exchanged some ancient silver spoons for a glass of wheat. It was an only thing she hoped to feed the child with for a few days. The last chance to save him from the starvation death. And the soldiers of the Red Army broke into the house. Not having found anything except misery, they grasped the baby at his leg, threw him out of the cradle and took away the wheat my mother hid under the child. This action cannot be called human....

...It is with a deep sorrow that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church prayerfully recalls the victims of Holodomor and other repressions of the Soviet totalitarian rule. The number of victims totals tens million people - all those shot, murdered in prisons, tortured by various moral and physical tortures, deceased because of the pains of hunger. There was no such number of victims even in the war times. Indeed, the power led a bloodshed war with its own people....

The Church warns against such defective and inhuman ideology that caused such a tragedy and calls to penance all those who has not yet understood and haven't disavowed theomachy in all its forms."

I realize that some will not be satisfied with anything that the UOC-MP may have to say for so long as it is alligned with Moscow and not self-ruling. There certainly may be justification for such feelings. Not being Ukrainian it is not for me to say or judge.

That being said, it is simply bearing false witness against the Metropolitan to state was has been stated. As to Cardinal Huzar or Metropolitan Philaret, you can be assured that I would respond as vigorously in their defense if they were similarly charged and the facts that can be read and printed do not support such claims.

I guess that is a result of my legal training. So be it.

Do you have a statement issued not by Kyr Volodomir, but by the Patriarch or his Synod? If not, then my statement stands. The Moscow Patriarchate does not put much daylight between itself and the Putin regime or its puppet in Kyiv.

Clearly.

Look, here is the problem: The Putin and Yanukovich governments jointly are engaged in a campaign to whitewash history and deny the culpability of the Soviet state in the deliberate genocide of the Ukrainian people. They refuse to describe Holodomor as genocide. In Ukraine, textbooks have been amended to minimize the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Ukrainian people, turning the famine instead into an unfortunate side effect of Soviet collectivization policies, and trying to dilute the impact on the Ukrainian people by stating, blandly, that these policy had adverse effects on people throughout the USSR.

This is on par with Holocaust denial, or attempts to minimize the unique position of the Jewish people in the Shoah by noting that Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and other "undesirable elements" also perished in the concentration camps. If you think such statements are acceptable, then you will have no issues with the current Russian approach to Holodomor--but I think most of you will not.

In the midst of this debate stands the Moscow Patriarchate, which presently enjoys the favor of the Putin regime, and vice versa. If the Patriarchate was morally and intellectually honest, it would disavow and denounce the statements and policies of the Russian government regarding the history of the Ukrainian genocide--and the ongoing whitewash of Soviet history in general. But we hear nothing. The Church aids and abets the Russian state in the selective amnesia to which Russia is being subjected, which one can only assume it is doing because it wishes to maintain its favored status with the government, rather than bearing witness to the truth.

This is shortsighted at best, and is guaranteed, eventually, to place the Church in the same position of thralldom to the state it occupied under the Tsars from Piotr Velikiy onward, as well as under the Soviets. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and every day, with the assistance of the Church, the Russian people forget more and more of their past.

So it's really guilt by association. Even when the ruling Metropolitan does speak out and say it was the Bolsheviks that did it. Oooookkkkkaaaayyyy then.

Of course the Bolsheviks did it. The Russian story line is a variant on the past passive exculpatory--"Mistakes were made". They weren't specifically targeting the Ukrainians, that was just an unfortunate side-effect of badly conceived economic policies. Sorry about that.

What I want, from the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, over the signature of the Patriarch, with all other bishops concurring, is a statement that acknowledges the Holodomor was the result of a deliberate policy of extermination aimed directly at the Ukrainian people. And this statement ought to include an explicit denunciation of the Putin regimes concerted and extended attempt to rewrite Russian history in a manner that minimizes the implications of the Ukrainian genocide and justifies the maintenance of an increasingly tyrannical authoritarian government that systematically violates the human rights of the Russian people and aggressively interferes in the internal affairs of neighboring countries with legitimately elected governments.

I don't think it's too much to ask a Church to stand up for what is right, even if that means breaking its sugar daddy's rice bowl.

While they are at it they can admit that all the various ethnic groups of the old USSR were starved into submission, deported from their traditional homelands, tortured and massacred. The Patriarchate should know this as This was the fate of huge numbers of their own people from the holy Patriarch of the day down to the laity. I have just read a promo for a book telling of the fate of people in Central Asia. Same story, artificial famine and a reign of absolute terror.

I would agree with this, if *they* were responsible for it. The ruling Metropolitan of the OUC-MP recognizes the holodomor as genocide, a word *he* used. Words you said did not exist.


Sounds good. I wouldn't mind seeing a denunciation of U.S. foreign policy either - regime change, extraordinary rendition, pre-emptive war, torture, aggressive interference in other countries affairs and violation of human rights either while they're at it.

We don't get to play the moral high ground game anymore.

They don't have to be responsible for it. That the government is trying to distort the truth about it requires the Church to speak out for truth. That is what a Church founded on truth does--it bears witness to the truth. The Catholic Church is not responsible for the Holocaust, but it would be morally wrong for the Catholic Church to remain silent in the face of those who deny the Holocaust, or worse still, to be seen as active allies of those who deny the Holocaust.


Ah, but he's just one bishop, and note that he avoided any criticism of Yanukovich, let alone Putin. We need the Patriarch and all the bishops of the Russian Orthodox synod, to stand forth and declare what happened for what it is, and denounce those who would call it something else.


Moral equivalency didn't work well in the Cold War, and it does not work well now. The inability to make distinctions of degree and category are a sign of faulty moral reasoning. Or simply disingenuousness.

There is a great book by R.J. Rummel entitled: "Death by Government" http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM of which he uses the term "democide." He suggests that more people have died throughout history by the hands of their own governments.

Ray