Museum-memorial on the Dnieper slopes should be completed by the Holodomor 90th anniversary – Zelenskyi

The construction of the second stage of the National Holodomor-Genocide Museum should be completed before the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyi stated this during a speech at the "Ukraine 30. Humanitarian Policy" forum, Ukrinform reports.

"By the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor-Genocide, the second stage of the National Museum-Memorial to the Holodomor victims will be completed and be built on the slopes of the Dnieper in Kyiv," the head of state said.

Zelenskyi noted that next year Ukraine would commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor — the genocide of 1932-33.

"Time takes us further and further away from those tragic times. There are almost no living witnesses who survived the Holodomor. And today we're responsible for preserving and passing this memory on to our present and future generations, for conveying true information about our lives, about our history, about the Holodomor," President stressed.

Note

The National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide was established by order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on July 8, 2009, and the actual opening of the museum took place in August 2009.

The first phase of the complex was built in 2008. The second phase of the complex began to be implemented in 2017.

The first phase of the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide (Memorial to the Holodomor Victims) was erected in 2008-2010 to perpetuate the memory of millions of people who died from the famine artificially created by the USSR leadership in 1932-1933, which became an instrument of the genocide of the Ukrainian people. The memorial complex is visited by official delegations of foreign countries.

On July 31, 2015, the National Museum "Memorial to the Victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine" was renamed the National Museum "Memorial to the Holodomor Victims."

The need to change the name is connected with the use of the genocide of the Ukrainian people in the singular. After all, today in Ukraine, at the legal and legislative level, only the genocide of 1932-1933 has the status of the Holodomor. The events of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947 qualify as a mass famine, the genocidal nature of which hasn't yet been proven.

Thus, the use of the word "Holodomor" in the plural eliminates the notion of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide, provokes criticism from the world community and opponents, and is a reason for not recognizing the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

On November 28, 2020, during the commemoration of the Holodomor victims in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to co-finance the project of the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide.