The Holodomor Industry
The 'Bandera Lobby' and the Ukrainian Holocaust industry
Note to subscribers: Substack says this post is “too long for email.”
The term “Holodomor” became popular in Ukraine and among the diaspora especially in the late 1980s. The phonetic similarity of Holodomor to Holocaust was not a coincidence. The immediate trigger for the nationalists’ famine discourse was the popular miniseries Holocaust, which was broadcast in 1978 by NBC and was watched by millions of North Americans … At that time and into the 1980s, relatively little demographic research had been conducted on the subject of the famine; this made it easier to exaggerate the number of victims. The approximate number of 2.5 to 3.9 million Ukrainian victims of the famine became known only in the early 1990s. The nationalist elements of the diaspora claimed that during the “Holodomor” more Ukrainians were killed than Jews were during the Holocaust.
—Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe’s biography of Stepan Bandera (2014)
Indeed the number of Holocaust victims became “sanctified” in Jewish and everyone’s minds. Regardless of what was, is or will be said, that’s the number of killed Jews. Question it and you become an evil denier. So why are we, Ukrainians, allowing a discussion about the number of Holodomor victims? Why are some Ukrainian and non-Ukrainians discounting the number of dead to a mere 4 million? My generation of baby boomers grew up with the figure of 7 million Ukrainian men, women and children starved to death by Russia in 1932-33 just for being Ukrainian. That figure must be sanctified against all others in our and everyone’s minds.
—Ihor Dlaboha, former editor of OUN-B’s “National Tribune” (2020)
Holodomor Observance: 10 million Ukrainian men, women and children starved to death by Russia. Never Forget; Never Forgive!
—Dlaboha, months after Russia invaded Ukraine (2022)
Many contemporaries, such as the Italian ambassador, who traveled through Ukraine in summer 1933, deemed the famine deliberate. Monstrously, Stalin himself made the same accusation—accusing peasants of not wanting to work. … Nonetheless, the famine was not intentional. It resulted from Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization-dekulakization, as well as the pitiless and incompetent management of the sowing and procuring campaigns, all of which put the country on a knife-edge, highly susceptible to drought and sudden torrential rains. … [Stalin’s] actions do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians. … [T]here was no ‘Ukrainian’ famine; the famine was Soviet.
—Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Josef Stalin (2017)
So how many people were actually killed by the famine? From 2.5 to 3.5 million. Those who died disproportionately were the rural population (predominantly Ukrainians) and little children. May their memory be eternal. And let me add: may it be unsullied by falsehood. I find it disrespectful to the dead that people use their deaths in a ploy to gain the moral capital of victimhood. To this end, they inflate the numbers ... The point of these ideas is that the Holodomor is bigger than the others, particularly bigger than the Holocaust. I do not understand why others are not offended by this competition for victimhood, even if the numbers were true, which they are not.
—John-Paul Himka, noted historian of Ukraine (2008)
‘Holocaust Industry’ vs. ‘Holodomor Industry’
Apparently around the time that Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, in the spring of 2021, the OUN-B legal “hit man” in the United States, Askold Lozynskyj, wrote an article on “the complexities of Jewish-Ukrainian relations,” which in short he blamed on the “Holocaust industry.” Five years earlier, Lozynskyj debated historian John-Paul Himka on the role of Banderites in the Holocaust, and at the first opportunity, smeared Himka of being “perceived as a self-loathing Ukrainian” and “a hired gun, if you will,” for the “Holocaust industry.” According to historian Per Rudling, “Anti-Semitism is a central component in Lozynskyj’s apologetics.”
[Lozynskyj] claims that ‘an … overwhelming amount of Soviet accomplices during the Soviet’s two years in Western Ukraine from 1939-1941 were Jews,’ alleges Jewish control over Canadian media, and charges that scholars who study the anti-Jewish violence of the OUN and UPA are paid to ‘invent demons’ by Jewish interests. He dismisses scholarly studies of the OUN’s racism with references to the alleged Jewish ethnicity of the researchers.
After the Ukrainian American former Nazi death camp guard, John Demjanjuk, died behind bars in Germany in 2012, Askold Lozynskyj mourned him as a “martyr” of the “Jewish Holocaust industry.” Lozynskyj, a former president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (1992-2000) and the Ukrainian World Congress (1998-2008), subsequently chaired the international coordinating body of OUN-B “facade structures” formerly known as the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front” (2009-2013). For years, Lozynskyj was an attorney for Bohdan Kohziy, a Banderite former member of the Nazi auxiliary police. It was under Lozynskyj’s leadership that the Ukrainian World Congress organized its “International Coordinating Committee for Holodomor Awareness and Recognition.”
Arguing “The Case for Seven to Ten Million” on behalf of the “International Holodomor Coordinating Committee,” Lozynskyj admitted that this range included the unconceived children of those who died. From at least 2008 until his death this year, Stefan Romaniw of Melbourne, Australia was a top leader of the Ukrainian World Congress and the chairman of its International Holodomor Coordinating Committee. “We can hope for a better future only if crimes against people are recognized,” Romaniw once said. Another time, after someone vandalized the famous “Bitter Memory of Childhood” statue next to the Holodomor memorial complex in Kyiv, Romaniw drew a connection to Canada’s vandalized monuments that honor the Waffen-SS Galicia Division.
Stefan Romaniw (1955-2024) was the longtime chairman of the Australian Federation of Ukrainians Organisations. In 1986, he became the head of the “Ukrainian Liberation Front” in Australia and made a speech on behalf of Banderite youth at the funeral of the monstrous OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko. That year, Demjanjuk’s most high-profile trial began in Jerusalem, Oxford University Press published The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Australian association of Banderite World War II veterans (from the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”) compiled an extremely antisemitic 110 page screed: “Why is One Holocaust Worth More Than Others?”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, set up by Congress, began to conduct its research, and eventually concluded that an anti-Ukrainian genocide claimed anywhere from 3 to 8 million victims in 1932-33. According to the journalist Savroula Pabst, “Although mostly conducted by United States government officials … nine of the fifteen members of the commission were chosen because they were prominent members of the Ukrainian American community.”
Among the Commissioners was Bohdan Fedorak of Warren, Michigan, the president of the World Ukrainian Liberation Front who campaigned against the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations and succeeded Stetsko upon his death as the honorary chairman-in-exile of the short-lived pro-Nazi government that the Banderites declared on June 30, 1941. Russ Bellant’s 1988 exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party,” meant that Fedorak had to step down from the “Ukrainians for Bush” campaign, but not the Famine Commission.
Stefan Romaniw, the undisputed leader of the organized Ukrainian Australian community, took over OUN-B in 2009, not long after his inauguration as king of the Banderite-led “Holodomor lobby.” It was in 2003, “after heavy lobbying by Australia’s Ukrainian community,” that the Australian Senate recognized the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine as “one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history” which killed “an estimated 7 million Ukrainians.”
Romaniw’s third term as the OUN-B leader came to an end in 2022, but he organized the October 2023 convention of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), and got re-elected as its first vice-president. This Banderite leader of the UWC and its International Holodomor Coordinating Committee (IHCC) represented the Ukrainian diaspora as one of the founders of the charity tasked with financing the construction of Ukraine’s “National Holomodor-Genocide Museum.” (Last year, Zelensky announced that Canada agreed to cover the remaining costs.)
By 2008, the IHCC was established with Irene Mycak of Canada as its secretary. She apparently remains in this position. For many years, Mycak has also chaired the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ National Holodomor Awareness Committee. As of 2012, she was a board member of the League of Ukrainian Canadians and the secretary of two more Canadian OUN-B front groups: Homin Ukrainy Publishers and Ucrainica Research Institute. At the same time, Irene Mycak worked for the Ukrainian World Congress, also based in Toronto, as its communications director. Her husband, Harry Nesmasznyj, has been the executive director of the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada for about 35 years.
In the fall of 2020, the UWC’s Banderite-led IHCC announced the “Global Holodomor Descendants Network,” to be chaired by Olya Soroka, a member of the U.S. Holodomor Committee. Soroka is also a board member of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation (UAFF), the financial arm of OUN-B in the United States that owns 40% of the Banderite headquarters building in Kyiv. The agenda for the 2021 annual meeting of the OUN-B “Land Leadership of America,” distributed by the UAFF president (Walter Zaryckyj), called for reports from representatives of the Banderite “facades” in the United States, including a “Holodomor Survivors Society.” This probably referred to the US branch of Soroka’s network.
The chief ambassador of the UWC’s Banderite-led “Holodomor Descendants Network” is Kateryna Yushchenko (née Chumachenko), former First Lady of Ukraine (2005-2010). Like Soroka, she is a Banderite from Chicago. In the 1980s, after a controversial OUN-B takeover of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), Chumachenko directed the UCCA’s Ukrainian National Information Service in Washington before working in the Reagan White House. The UCCA’s Banderite-infested Washington office, with especially close ties to the far-right Heritage Foundation in those days, initiated the creation of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus in 1997 and the U.S. Holodomor Committee in 2006.
Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko came to power after the “Orange Revolution” of 2004-2005. Yushchenko was the first President of Ukraine to embrace the Bandera cult and the 10 million “famine-genocide” narrative. According to the historian Georgiy Kasianov, in his 2022 book, Memory Crash,
It is well known that Viktor Yushchenko, who was well informed about the numerous and diverse studies of historians and demographers of the 2000s, chose to ignore their data and insisted that the total number of Holodomor victims amounted to seven to ten million people. The source of his inspiration is no secret: it was actively defended by the “nomenklatura” of the Ukrainian diaspora, in particular the leadership of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC). The June 1, 2008 report of the International Coordination Committee of the UWC headed by Stefan Romaniw, the leader of the OUN (Bandera faction), clearly contained the figure of seven to ten million victims, which was to be promoted to the presidential secretariat and the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. The victimhood competition evolved in the context of a political situation in which the formula “seven to ten is greater than six” played an important role. Stanislav Kulchytsky recalled, that the head of the World Congress of Ukrainians Askold Lozynskyj insisted on 7–10 million simply because it is bigger than 6 million, the number of Jews who perished during Holocaust. Lozynskyj in turn suggested that Kulchytsky and his followers deliberately reduce the number of Holodomor victims to avoid competition with the Holocaust. The very term “Holocaust” was appropriated. During the period of active build-up of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33 was quite often called the Ukrainian Holocaust. It should be mentioned that this pattern of manipulation of the figures was not appropriated even by the majority of supporters of the genocidal version of Holodomor in Ukrainian academia.
As many reading this will already know, shortly before leaving office, Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Stepan Bandera the title of “Hero of Ukraine.” “Yushchenko’s presidency represented the pinnacle of diaspora influence on history writing in Ukraine,” historian Per Rudling wrote about a year later.
It elevated the diaspora’s historical myths to state policy and provided state funding to institutions tasked with the development of legitimizing narratives which the cult of the OUN leaders required. Yushchenko developed a memory politics based heavily upon a victimization narrative, “a meta-narrative that categorized Ukraine as a nation-victim by integrating all central historical events of the twentieth century, from the civil war and Sovietization to the Chernobyl disaster.” The culmination was the 1932–1933 famine, presented as the central and defining event of the Soviet period.
In November 2007, Viktor Yushchenko awarded Australian OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw the Order of Merit for his “Holodomor” activism. In the coming days, Romaniw visited Yushchenko at his presidential residence to discuss the “year of global activities” planned for 2008 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine.
Ukraine had recently held parliamentary elections, and soon had a new Cabinet of Ministers. According to the Ukrainian Weekly, the new government included a “pair of key officials with whom Mr. Romaniw has been working closely on Holodomor recognition”—vice-prime minister for humanitarian affairs Ivan Vasiunyk and foreign affairs minister Volodymyr Ohryzko.
Foreign Affairs Minister Ohryzko and his team will also play a role in supporting a planned International Holodomor Torch Relay, that will be launched in Mr. Romaniw’s native Australia and will pass through 17 countries, until ultimately reaching Kyiv on the last Saturday of November, when annual events commemorating the Holodomor are held.
As we shall see, the Banderites largely spearheaded this global relay of the “International Holodomor Remembrance Flame,” also known as the “Ukrainian Genocide Torch.” Stefan Romaniw singled out Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the nationalist director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) under Yushchenko, as someone who “has proven to be a true leader on these issues, certainly setting the pace.” According to Georgiy Kasianov,
During Yushchenko’s term as president, the SBU began to manage the National Memorial Museum of the Victims of Occupational Regimes “Prison on Lontskoho [A.K.A. Lonsky] Street,” created in 2008–2009 in Lviv; the museum belonged to the agency and the SBU was the formal employer of the museum staff.
This Banderite-run museum, where “Jewish suffering is omitted,” houses the main office of the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement, an OUN-B “facade structure” via which the Banderites largely seized control of the SBU archives and eventually the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. Nalyvaichenko’s SBU even published “a list of perpetrators of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, defiantly accompanying their party pseudonyms with their birth names and surnames.” Again quoting Memory Crash by Kasianov:
The resulting list included many Jewish surnames. The Ukrainian Jewish Committee (UJC) immediately reacted to the publication with a statement that the SBU “places responsibility for the Holodomor tragedy on Jews and Latvians.” The UJC emphasized that in this particular case, the SBU did not mention several high-ranking Ukrainian party members who were obviously responsible for the disaster.
In 2008, a well-known Australian journalist, Steve Waldon, produced an article on the “year of global activities approved by Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko and largely driven by a Melbourne man, Stefan Romaniw.” Waldon wrote that Yushchenko “put him [Romaniw] in charge of the worldwide Holodomor commemorations.” That turned out to be a lifetime appointment for the OUN-B leader.
The torch made two trips to Canada in 2008, at first accompanied by Romaniw. Stefan Horlatsch, an elderly founder of the Canadian branch of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Youth Association, reportedly “carried the International Holodomor Remembrance Flame across Canada.” The torch’s arrival on Canadian soil and presentation at Toronto’s City Hall coincided with the opening of an exhibit there (“Holodomor: Genocide by Famine”) that was “prepared by” the OUN-B’s League of Ukrainian Canadians and its Ucrainica Research Institute, which is a co-owner of the OUN-B headquarters building in Ukraine.
“Together Let’s Build 1000 Monuments to the [Ten Million] Victims of the Holodomor,” says Ucrainica’s outdated “Holodomor education” website. According to Per Rudling, “A prioritized area for Ucrainica’s activities includes the ideological training of the [Ukrainian-Canadian] youth, disseminating its narrative of the past through OUN(b)-affiliated schools.” In 2008, Yushchenko got a “hero’s welcome” in Canada, including standing ovations in Parliament, and the Canadian government recognized the “Holodomor” as a genocide. Canada also established “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day.”
In those days, Paul Grod, a former Banderith youth leader (and now president of the Ukrainian World Congress), chaired the politically influential Ukrainian Canadian Congress. In addition to getting the “famine-genocide” recognized, another stated priority for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was defending Wasyl Odynsky, a Ukrainian Canadian former “Trawniki man” reportedly “sent to serve as a guard near the grounds of a [Nazi] forced labour camp operated by the SS at Poniatowa.” According to the UCC, “after significant advocacy by the [Ukrainian Canadian] Congress, the Government of Canada decided not to revoke the citizenship of Wasyl Odynsky, who was found by a federal court to have misrepresented his war time activities when he immigrated to Canada.”
The UCC singled out the lobbying efforts of the OUN-B affiliated League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) to “ensure the passing of Holodomor legislation in Ontario.” Fifteen years later, in November 2023, Ontario decided to make “Holodomor education” mandatory for high school students. The UCC’s National Holodomor Commemoration Committee, chaired by LUC member Irene Mycak, reported during its first “National Holodomor Awareness Week” in November 2008,
Alberta’s Ministry of Education included the Holodomor in its high school curriculum. The Toronto School Board will include the Holodomor in its 2009 curriculum and the fourth Friday of every November will be marked in the schools as Holodomor Memorial Day. There is a great deal of work still to be done. We must continue working with our provincial ministries of education and local school boards to ensure that our students in Canada learn about the Holodomor.
Meanwhile in Kyiv, President Yushchenko unveiled Phase One of the Holodomor Memorial Complex. Days later in Washington, the Banderite First Lady of Ukraine spoke at the dedication of the future site of the “Ukrainian Genocide Memorial” in the U.S. capital. Kateryna Yushchenko and Michael Sawkiw, the Banderite proxy chairman of the U.S. National Committee to Commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Ukrainian Genocide, gave special thanks to Rep. Sandy Levin (D-MI).
In 1993, Levin introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the “forced famine to repress the Ukrainian peasantry in order to suppress Ukrainian self-assertion,” according to which “an estimated 7 million to 10 million people starved to death in Ukraine.” The Banderite-led Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) takes credit for having “initiated the formation of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus” in 1997, which Sandy Levin co-founded. In the coming years, he sponsored legislation that authorized the Ukrainian government to establish “a memorial to victims of the Ukrainian famine and genocide of 1932 and 1933” in Washington.
“To say that Rep. Levin is a friend of Ukraine is an understatement!” declared UCCA president Michael Sawkiw in 2008 (who was elected president again in 2024). “Where would we be today without his vigilant support and sponsorship of so many important issues, in particular the new site appropriated for the Ukrainian Genocide Memorial?”
Some may recall Levin’s close relationship to OUN-B leaders from his district, Bohdan Fedorak and Borys Potapenko, whom he considered “strong and close pals” by 2000. In the late 1970s, Potapenko led a campaign against NBC airing its Holocaust miniseries, which according to historian Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe was the “immediate trigger for the nationalists’ famine discourse.” For several years now, Potapenko has chaired the “International Council in Support of Ukraine,” the OUN-B coordinating body formerly known as the “World Ukrainian Liberation Front.”
From Memory War to Civil War
Askold Lozynskyj, the president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (1992-2000), and Orest Steciw, the longtime president of the Ucrainica Research Institute in Toronto, were among the OUN-B members from the Ukrainian diaspora that delivered speeches in Kyiv at the founding “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists” in July 1993. Instead of a coalition of front groups, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists became a political party that represented OUN-B in 1990s Ukraine. (The Ukrainian Banderites also created a paramilitary wing, Tryzub, that turned into a splinter group, which eventually spearheaded the notorious “Right Sector.” Its first leader, Dmytro Yarosh, was probably an OUN-B member in the 1990s.)
Roman Krutsyk, one of the founders of the Banderite political party, became the longtime leader of the Kyiv chapter of the “Vasyl Stus Memorial Society.” When Krutsyk died in December 2023, the OUN-B mourned him as a longtime leading member. By 2003, Krutsyk’s branch of “Memorial” created an exhibit, “Not To Be Forgotten: A Chronicle of the Communist Inquisition in Ukraine 1917-1991.” It was reportedly displayed in the Ukrainian parliament, and toured the Ukrainian diaspora.
Congressman Levin’s “strong and close pals” had their hands all over this. Borys Potapenko organized the tour in the midwestern United States, and his mentor Bohdan Fedorak was “directly associated” with the exposition, according to Fedorak’s granddaughter. Krutsyk told audiences raised on the myth of seven million “Ukrainian Genocide” victims that his organization’s “current number” was ten million. A couple years later, according to the Toronto-based Ucrainica Research Institute, “The exhibit Holodomor: Genocide by Famine was produced by the League of Ukrainian Canadians in cooperation with the Kyiv Memorial Society in Ukraine.” Ucrainica credits itself as “the lead initiator of the first English-language comprehensive exhibit” on the famine.
In the meantime, Roman Krutsyk ran for parliament with the “social-nationalist” Svoboda party, and became the deputy head of Yushchenko’s newly created Institute of National Memory. In 2007, with support from the President of Ukraine, the “Chronicle of the Communist Inquisition” formed the basis of the “Museum of Soviet Occupation” in Kyiv, with Krutsyk as its director. That year, the historian Yuri Shapoval wrote,
I am directly involved in this exposition because I was the one to create it. Excerpts from documents, a chronicle of historical events, photographs, copies of documents, even the tape of the first guided tour … Incidentally, I have an official copyright. However, exposition is not what matters, but in whose hands it is. As it is, this exposition is in the hands of people who (a) lack historical knowledge (mildly speaking); (b) have a one-sided (nationalistic) party affiliation. Nor was it coincidental that I suddenly found myself crowded out from the Memorial’s academic council and relieved of my post as its chairman. … Now they have divided this country into the occupiers and the occupied. Do you think this will help consolidate Ukraine? I think that this will serve precisely the opposite purpose. Once there are occupiers, they must be driven away: the dead ones, from historical consciousness, and the surviving ones, from this country.
The next President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych (2010-14), put the brakes on Yushchenko’s divisive nationalist memory projects, including the rehabilitation of Banderites and recognition of the “Holodomor-genocide.” In November 2010, nationalists took matters into their owns hands and organized the “Public Committee for the Commemoration of the Victims of the Holodomor-Genocide of 1932–1933.”
OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw co-chaired this Public Committee with two officials from the Yushchenko era: Ivan Vasiunyk, the former vice-prime minister for humanitarian affairs (2007-2010), and Ihor Yukhnovskyi, the first director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (2006-2010), who was “a sympathizer of the extreme right Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine [SNPU]” according to Per Rudling. (The SNPU became the Svoboda party in 2004, at which point OUN-B members joined the leadership. The “social-nationalists” disbanded their paramilitary wing, but a former Tryzub leader in Kharkiv — Andriy Biletsky — revived the SNPU’s “Patriot of Ukraine,” which eventually spearheaded the neo-Nazi “Azov” movement.)
Several notable Banderites joined the Public Committee, most of them connected to the OUN-B’s Center for Studies of the Liberation Movement (which published press releases for the Public Committee) and/or the future Banderite-infested “Civic Sector of Euromaidan,” such as Ivan Patryliak, Hennadiy Ivanushchenko, Andriy Kohut, Volodymyr Viatrovych, Yarynsa Yasynevych, and Olena Podobied-Frankivska. There was also Serhiy Kvit, who would become the Education Minister of Ukraine after the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” overthrew Yanukovych.
In 2011, without support from the Ukrainian government, the Public Committee and Ukrainian World Congress (IHCC) organized events to commemorate the 10 million victims of the Ukrainian Holocaust. On behalf of the Kyiv City Organization of the Vasyl Stus Memorial Society (AKA the “Kyiv Memorial Society”), Roman Krutsyk presented Conservative Canadian politician James Bezan with the “Memorial Cross of Petliura” for his Holodomor recognition work in Canada. (Bezan is today the Shadow Minister of National Defense, who recently suggested that one of the Banderites’ least favorite journalists in Canada is a Russian agent.) Earlier that year, Krutsyk was reportedly “visited by associates of the Mayor’s Office and the SBU” after a citizen denounced him in a sensational letter to the authorities, according to which,
Krutsyk, a native of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, values Ukrainians from Galicia more than Ukrainians from central and eastern Ukraine. He has seized this organization [Kyiv Memorial Society] like a raider; he denigrates the former leaders of the organization, calling them all “stupid.” He has thrown out practically all the normal people, saying that he does not need them. He has left three or four people, who are merely his yes-men. Using these three people as a base, he created the Museum of Soviet Occupation and the Public Institute of Historical Memory. He has contacts not only in the Ministry of Culture … but also in the Presidential Administration … high-ranking officials who were part of the former administration and the current one. They listen to him and do everything that he tells them to do; they do not regard the President as an authority. And the Western security services tell Krutsyk what to do … For example, in Canada, where he has many friends and is provoking the Ukrainian diaspora beyond Ukraine’s borders to ignore the President of Ukraine, V. F. Yanukovych … The Western security services of Canada and the US are actively financing Krutsyk.
The SBU had already arrested the Banderite director of the problematic “Lonsky Prison Museum,” where “Jewish suffering is omitted.” John-Paul Himka told the story in Chapter 7 of Perspectives on the Entangled History of Communism and Nazism:
After Viktor Yushchenko was replaced by Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine early in 2010, historical politics made a U-turn, which deprived the Lontsky St. museum of its formerly powerful patronage. Moreover, Yanukovych introduced a much more authoritarian form of government than any of his predecessors, even to the point of jailing the most important opposition figures in 2011. On September 8, 2010 the reoriented Security Service of Ukraine detained the director of the museum on Lontsky St., Ruslan Zabily. They held him for fourteen hours and confiscated two external hard drives with historical documents, claiming that he was about to pass on state secrets.
Scholars around the world immediately reacted in protest. Among those who spoke out publicly against the arrest or signed a petition of protest were a number of scholars who disagreed fundamentally with the kind of historical politics Zabily represented, but who insisted on the need to protect freedom of speech. Nationalist activists in the Ukrainian diaspora, however, recognized that the Zabily case—with its violation of human rights and its confirmation of a familiar, frequently reiterated narrative of Ukrainian victimization—could be effectively utilized to legitimize the kind of historical presentation found in Zabily’s museum. This legitimization campaign was successfully conducted in, among other venues, the Canadian political sphere …
Not long after the detention of Ruslan Zabily, Prime Minister Harper himself visited Ukraine. In Lviv on October 26, 2010, he went to the memorial museum on Lontsky St. and met with Zabily. This was intended to send a strong signal of disapproval to President Yanukovych for clamping down on free speech … The delegation included a number of persons who served in executive positions in Banderite organizations, not only UCC president Grod, but also Ivanna Baran, Taras Podilsky, Borys Potapenko, and Lisa Shymko …
The meeting between Prime Minister Harper and Lontsky St. museum director Ruslan Zabily on October 26, 2010 was not their last. At the end of a cross-Canada lecture tour sponsored by Canadian Banderites, Zabily was received by Prime Minister Harper once again on October 19, 2012. In his speech to a Canadian delegation about to monitor the parliamentary elections of Ukraine, Harper praised Zabily’s courage and his museum’s preservation of memory. Harper ended his brief speech with the slogan associated with the Bandera movement: Slava Ukraini, that is, “Glory to Ukraine.” [BLB: this was before the slogan became normalized in 2014 Ukraine.]
In February 2012, the OUN-B’s “International Council in Support of Ukraine,” formerly known as the World Ukrainian Liberation Front, informed the Democratic chair and Republican ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “we support regime change in Ukraine as the only viable way for Ukraine to return to its democratic course that is severely undermined by the Yanukovych regime.” The letter was signed by the OUN-B coordinating council’s president, Askold Lozynskyj, and secretary, Borys Potapenko.
In November 2013, one day after the first “Euromaidan” protest, the OUN-B headquarters in Kyiv hosted a meeting to select new leaders of the International Council in Support of Ukraine. That year’s “Holodomor Memorial Day” march, organized by the Public Committee, took place about 24 hours later. A handful of OUN-B leaders from the diaspora led the march with the Ukrainian opposition leaders from parliament. In the coming weeks and months, the far-right nationalist vanguard of the so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” including Banderites and neo-Nazis, toppled Yanukovych and helped to provoke a civil war in Ukraine.
Banderite influence in Kyiv reached its height under the Maidan government led by President Petro Poroshenko (2014-19). During this time, the “Holodomor Genocide Memorial” went up in the center of the U.S. capital, and the 85th anniversary of the famine was commemorated. In 2018, the Senate recognized the “Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933” as a genocide, and Rep. Levin, accompanied by numerous OUN-B members from the diaspora and Ukraine, spoke at a special plenary session of Ukrainian parliament dedicated to the 85th anniversary. That year, “Memorial,” the Public Committee, and the Ukrainian World Congress (IHCC) co-founded the International Charitable Foundation of the Holodomor Museum.
‘Holodomor Then, Genocide Now’
As many readers already know, after Volodymyr Zelensky’s landslide election victory in 2019, the OUN-B spearheaded the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (ROK) to kill his peacemaking ambitions. Borys Potapenko eventually joined the leadership of this Banderite front which allied itself with Petro Poroshenko’s nationalistic “European Solidarity” party. The Ukrainian World Congress and ROK supported the far-right street opposition led by neo-Nazis from the Azov movement that threatened to overthrow Zelensky or worse if he pursued peace negotiations with Russia.
The Banderite-led ROK formed an advisory “Strategic Council” to give a respectable face to their undemocratic “Resistance Movement.” One of its members, Volodymyr Ohryzko, had worked closely with the Banderite-led “Holodomor lobby” as Yushchenko’s Minister for Foreign Affairs (2007-2009). Another member, Ukrainian diplomat Volodymyr Vasylenko, was part of the “Public Committee.” When Vasylenko passed away last year, OUN-B leader Oleh Medunytsia said, “For a long time he collaborated in various scientific and public projects initiated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Bandera).”
In the summer of 2020, as Ukrainians lobbied the German parliament to recognize the 1932-33 famine as a genocide, the Public Committee, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Capitulation Resistance Movement demanded the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians to change the title of an online event, which dared to ask: “Was the Holodomor a genocide?”
According to the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv, the title was “an insult to the memory of millions and humiliates Ukrainian civil society, for which the genocidal nature of the Holodomor is an indisputable fact.” To make matters worse, historian Georgiy Kasianov participated in the conference, and spoke “about use of memory of Holodomor as a political tool.” The Banderite-led “Resistance Movement” published an appeal from OUN-B leader Stefan Romaniw on behalf of the Ukrainian World Congress, demanding Zelensky to intervene.
Romaniw’s International Holodomor Coordinating Committee launched the Global Holodomor Descendants Network a couple months later. By the time they started registering descendants of famine survivors, the Ukrainian World Congress, International Charitable Foundation of Holodomor Museum, and Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy signed a memorandum of partnership to develop Phase Two of the National Holodomor-Genocide Museum, reportedly “with the intention of fully opening the museum for visitors in November 2023.” The war obviously got in the way of this goal, but it also inspired a new wave of governments to recognize the “Holodomor-Genocide.”
Canada, as usual, took things a step further and accused Putin’s Russia of committing genocide in the spring of 2022. It’s not a coincidence that Canada is the country most beholden to the “Holodomor lobby.” To Ukrainian nationalists, it’s obvious that Vladimir Putin simply decided to finish the genocide that Joseph Stalin started. Days earlier, Walter Zaryckyj, the Banderite director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, yet another OUN-B front group (which organizes conferences in Washington and New York), recalled “when they asked me once, man, at a Holodomor—one of those genocide get-togethers,”
“Why is the Ukrainian thing unique?” I said, well, in the others, the Holocaust is the most devastating cause it’s the most systemic, but … the Ukrainians’ [genocide] is the most troubling, and it’s unique in its own way, because its last chapter has not yet been written.
It should come as no surprise that the “Holodomor industry” became an appendage of the “war lobby.” Take for example the Ukrainian World Congress’ coordination with the Capitulation Resistance Movement, which declared in late February 2022 that peace negotiations would lead to “another genocide of the Ukrainian people.” As Alexander Motyl, a regular participant of Walter Zaryckyj’s conferences, wrote for The Hill earlier this year, “Ukraine can’t negotiate with a nation that wants to erase its people from existence.”
The above-described “Holodomor lobby” is more or less the Banderites’ imitation of the “Holocaust industry.” For the Banderite memory warriors, and now many more Ukrainians, Russian aggression is always genocidal, and supporting the real genocide in Gaza absolves them of antisemitism (including Holocaust obfuscation which borders on denialism). Zaryckyj, for example, may have given countless antisemitic lectures to Banderite youth, but he is proud that his son-in-law is Israeli—his brother was shot on October 7th at the Nova music festival—and of his collaboration with the “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter” (UJE) in Canada. A director of the UJE has said this about OUN-B: “its leaders are strongly pro-Israel and not antisemitic.” Before I even researched this topic, in my early days of investigating the OUN-B network, Zaryckyj once defensively asked me, “Incidentally....are you a Holodomor denier???”
Thanks for reading. If you want to support my work, you can “Buy Me a Coffee.”
TL;DR like the Holocaust, the memory of the Holodomor is carefully cultivated and nurtured, because it happens to be politically convenient at the moment.
Mass deaths in Vietnam or Cambodia as a result of American aggression are not politically convenient, and so the Vietnamese and Cambodians are basically told to walk it off, these things happen after all.
For that matter, the Ukrainian nationalists of the 1930s were quite aware of the famine, and they didn't much care. At that time, Poles (and Jews) were the traditional Ukrainian folk enemies, and Soviet Ukraine offered greater cultural autonomy than did the aggressively polonizing and centralized Polish Second Republic. Like the fascists that they were the OUN were all about The Nation, but they were at best indifferent, if not actively hostile to the people living in it.