World Holocaust Forum founder denies Holodomor was genocide
by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau
KYIV - A top global leader for Holocaust remembrance denies the Holomodor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, was a genocide committed against the Ukrainian people.
World Holocaust Forum Founder and President Vyacheslav "Moshe" Kantor at a September 26 press conference in Kyiv offered his personal view of the Holodomor when asked by The Weekly whether his respective organizations acknowledge it as genocide.
"My personal position is the Holodomor is a statewide calamity of the country that called itself the Soviet Union, not only Ukraine," said Mr. Kantor, a Russian chemical industry magnate who is also president of the Russian Jewish Congress and chairman of the board of the European Jewish Congress.
"It was a problem of the Soviet Union. From the Holodomor, people died in the Volga region, in Ukraine, and it had no relation to national differences," he added.
Mr. Kantor, also a non-governmental advisor to President Viktor Yushchenko, made his comments at a press conference to discuss the 65th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, where 150,000 Jews, Ukrainians, Gypsies and others, including partisans, Soviet prisoners of war and Ukrainian nationalists, were executed by the Nazis in 1941-1943. Some 3,000 Jews were killed in the first mass execution on September 29-30, 1941.
After Mr. Kantor offered his interpretation, the Presidential Secretariat's humanitarian policy director, Markian Lubkivskyi, sat by silently without offering any correction.
Mr. Lubkivskyi is a member of the Pora political party and son of Shevchenko Prize laureate Roman Lubkivskyi.
No Ukrainian reporters at the press conference asked any further questions on the topic, and The Weekly's reporter didn't pose any follow-up questions.
So far, no official condemnation has been issued of Mr. Kantor's remarks denying the genocidal nature of the Great Famine of 1932-1933.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 1, 2006, No. 40, Vol. LXXIV
| Home Page |