Day 18: Independence Square and the Famine Memorial

Our next destination was the Great Patriotic War museum on the banks of the Dnieper River.  However, as we were going there we encountered a number of monuments and memorials, the first of which was this column dedicated to the independence of the Ukraine following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.  As with most places in the former Soviet Union, this square has gone through many name changes:
* Khrestshchatys Square (pre-1871) which is the name of the ravine that existed there.
* Parliamentary Square (1871-1919) since the Kiev Duma was built here.
* Soviet Square (1919-1935) because the Soviets won the Russian Civil War and this whole parliamentary thing is so non-Soviet.
* Kalinin Square (1935-1977) Mikhail Kalinin was the first chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
* October Revolution Square (1977-1991), renamed when the square was rebuilt to accommodate the Kiev Metro.
* Independence Square (1991-today) after the Ukraine gained its independence.

The Ukrainians have a somewhat different perspective on the past hundred years of history than you will find in Russia.  Even though most of Ukraine has been a part of the Russian Empire since the 17th Century, there is a cultural division in the country that exist to this day.  Eastern Ukraine tends to be closer aligned towards Russia versus Western Ukraine which is more pro-Western and anti-Russia, and the Ukrainians are much more ready to draw attention to the crimes of the Soviet state.

As we were walking along the west bank of the Dnieper, we encountered a memorial to the victims of the Great Famine from 1932-33.

The Great Famine monument with the National Museum “Memorial in Commemoration of Families’ Victims in Ukraine” underneath the monument.

For background, the Great Famine came about from the forced collectivization in the Ukraine, also known as the “голодомор” (Extermination by hunger).  During the reconstruction after the Russian Civil War, the Soviets ruled with a relatively light first under the New Economic Policy (NEP) that basically tolerated some capitalism under a different name because it worked (prior to the NEP, in the realm of agriculture for instance, the government simply took all agricultural surpluses from farmers without compensation.  Not surprisingly, when the government changed this policy under the NEP to only taking a percentage of the production as a tax, the farmers grew considerably more food).  After Stalin came to power, he ended the NEP in 1928 and began the Five Year Plans.

The Five Year Plans were originally intended to force development of heavy industries in order to develop a sufficient industrial base to equip a strong military comparable to the West.  In terms of agriculture, the First Five Year Plan adopted the policy of forced collectivization and redistribution of land, seen as a way to boost agricultural production.  The “kulaks” (wealthy farmers) became enemies of the state and were arrested, executed, or deported.  Production quotas for the collective farms were raised significantly and in 1932 all food was declared state property, meaning that peasants who took food home from the fields were subject to arrest.  Approximately three million people died from the famine and the birth rate dropped dramatically in the Ukraine compared to Belarus or Russia.  The Soviets denied that the famine ever happened until the glasnost period in the late 1980s.