Nadejda Veter was only 10-years-old when famine hit Ukraine in 1932. She recalled the time when the authorities went into her village and took all of her food. 

[Nadejda Veter, Famine Survivor]:

“My grandmother baked a fresh loaf of bread. They put it inside a bag. Then they opened the oven. There was a pot of soup in there. They took out the meat, ate it and threw the pot onto the ground, breaking it. Grandfather was starving, swelled up and died of hunger.”

According to historians, the 1932-1933 famine took the lives of approximately 10 million people in Ukraine. It wasn’t caused by a lack of harvest. Rather, it was caused by a complete confiscation of food from farmers. The harvest was shipped abroad, and any excess supply was just thrown away.

[Nadejda Veter, Famine Survivor]:

“All of the grain was transported to Germany to Hitler. Stalin, too, had an arrangement with Hitler. When there was too much grain, the bags were tossed into the sea, and we were dying inside the villages.”  

In order to survive, Nadejda had to drink a concoction that was made of grass. Today, she has become one of the key witnesses to give a testimony on the horrible years of famine.

[Congressman Gregory Omelchenko, Ukraine]:

“Famine is the primary part of the entire criminal activity of what used to be the soviet totalitarian regime headed by Stalin. The proof is represented by the ideology of this crime. To obliterate the spirit of independence in a Ukrainian farmer, who, throughout their entire life, wanted to have their own domain. It started with the relinquishing of spirituality, then the educated classes, and the last blow was delivered to Ukrainian farmers.”

The Security Service of Ukraine launched an investigation into the crimes of the famine, which later turned into a lawsuit. It relied on eyewitness accounts and uncovered documents.

[Nikolai Gerasimenko, VP, Security Services of Ukraine]:

“A thousand witnesses were questioned by the citizen protection services. We found and uncovered around 4.5 thousand documents. We discovered over 800 mass graves from that time.”

These documents were relayed to the Ukrainian prosecutor's office and later to court. On January 13, Kyiv's appeal court decided that hunger is a form of genocide and named the parties who were guilty of this crime: Stalin, Molotov, Postishev, Kosior, and Hatayevich.

Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko gave a speech on January 14 proposing the creation of an international tribunal, with the purpose of deciding cases of communist crimes. He called on the leaders of Eastern Europe which suffered from the communist regime.

NTD News, Kyiv, Ukraine.