DUSHANBE, November 19, 2014, Asia-Plus – The Embassy of Ukraine in Dushanbe is organizing a photo exhibition to commemorate the victims of Holodomor of 1932-1933.
The exhibition will open at the Ukrainian Embassy in Dushanbe at 11:00 am of on November 22.
Since 2006, Ukraine officially marks a Holodomor memorial day on the fourth Saturday of November. In 2006, the Holodomor Remembrance Day took place on 25 November. Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko directed, in decree No. 868/2006, that a minute of silence should be observed at 4 o”clock in the afternoon on that Saturday. The document specified that flags in Ukraine should fly at half-staff as a sign of mourning. In addition, the decree directed that entertainment events are to be restricted and television and radio programming adjusted accordingly.
The Holodomor (Extermination by hunger) was a famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1932 and 1933 that killed about 4 million Ukrainians. During the famine, which is also known as the “Terror-Famine in Ukraine” and “Famine-Genocide in Ukraine,” millions of citizens of the Ukrainian SSR, the majority of whom were Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the independent Ukraine and several other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly; anywhere from 1.8 to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million. The exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths inside heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included.
