As russia again spread darkness across Ukraine, candles in windows carry two meanings.
Today, present meets past.
Today a candle in remembrance for victims of another genocide by russia.
Holodomor, a manmade famine that from 1932-33 killed 25000 Ukrainians every single day.
The Holodomor (1932-1933) is one of the largest genocides in history. It began when Stalin forced Ukraine into collectivization. Ukrainian farmers were forced to give up their land, livestock & harvest.
“Starve them to submission”
Soviet authorities seized every grain of food: harvests, livestock, seeds, even the bread inside people’s homes.
They set quotas no one could ever meet.
Then sent armed brigades to go door to door to strip everything edible—
leaving entire villages with nothing but death ahead.
To ensure Ukrainians couldn’t survive, Stalin sealed the borders.
No one was allowed to flee.
No one was allowed to search for food.
Villages were blockaded like giant open-air prisons.
Trying to hide grain? Executed.
Starvation became a weapon.
25,000 Ukrainians were dying;
Imagine a death toll equal to an entire town erased every 24 hours.
Mothers, children, grandparents—gone.
And the world’s Breadbasket was turned into a graveyard by design, not drought.
While millions starved, Stalin bragged of “record harvest”
The Soviet exported millions of tons of grain, enough to feed Ukraine’s entire population.
A crime russia continues today, stealing Ukrainian grain, selling stolen goods to fuel their war & kill those they steal from.
For decades, the USSR erased the Holodomor from history.
Foreign journalists were sent to staged “Potemkin villages”—fake scenes of prosperity hiding mass death.
Like russia does today, sending “influencers” to Mariupol, to
Showcase the fake fronts, while hiding the ruins.
A few brave reporters—like Gareth Jones & Malcolm Muggeridge managed to document the truth, but were silenced by Soviet sympathizers in the West.
Most infamous was Walter Duranty of NYT, he denied the famine & won a Pulitzer for it. His lies helped bury the murder of millions.
Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the truth resurface through newly opened archives.
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, called the Holodomor “the classic example of Soviet genocide.”
The world is still catching up to that reality.
Stalin made sure the true death toll won’t ever be known.
The Soviet regime destroyed Birth & death registers, census data, village archives — all “corrected,” falsified, or vanished.
Doctors were banned from writing “starvation” on death certificates
This is why estimates vary from 7-10 million people.
And scholars argue: anything less than 10million ignores the reality of the people in the villages that were completely erased.
Where no one survived, no one were there to keep count, there was no one left to remember.
Then there’s the number often unmentioned: of the unborn.
It’s estimated that over 600,000 unborn or infant losses.
Pregnancies ended, newborns alongside their mothers died of starvation.
Demographers call this the “lost generations” effect — a hallmark of genocide.
Most reliable estimates come from “excess mortality” — comparing expected population growth to the sudden plunge in 1932–33.
Even conservative models show millions vanished from Ukraine in a single year.
That alone proves the scale of the crime.
So when someone asks: “How many died?”
The most honest answer is:
More than the world will ever be able to count.
Because this genocide wasn’t only about killing people.
It was about erasing them so completely that even their memory couldn’t survive.
The importance of remembering, sharing and talking about this history is now more important than ever.
As russia is once again trying to erase Ukraine’s identity, sovereignty, and existence.
Genocide denied becomes genocide repeated.
The Holodomor is not only history.
It is a warning of what unchecked totalitarianism does—again & again—when it is not stopped.
Ukraine has faced attempts of erasure before.
It was silent then. It’s loud now.
There is no excuse for allowing this chapter to be repeated.
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