On Human and Non-human Witnesses of Holodomor
A Voice From the Other Side
I cannot even remember where I read this; it might have been some careless commentary in the best traditions of Facebook community, but it said something like this: “Ukraine doesn’t want to be with Russia and rejects communism because it is still offended over Holodomor”. I froze after reading this, I could not believe what I was looking at. I was looking at, perhaps, one of the most barbaric ways of referring to Ukrainian history’s darkest, most tragic episodes.
No dictionary can provide words to properly express the harrowing reality of the Holodomor. Holodomor is a Ukrainian word. “Holod” means hunger, and “mor” means death. It took the lives of almost 4 million Ukrainians in only two years, between 1932 and 1933. It has been recognised as an act of genocide carried out by the Soviet authorities by more than 30 countries around the globe and the Council of Europe. An impressive amount of research has been done over the years, which explored the testimonies of the survivors, historical contexts, official Soviet documentation and other sources. Timothy Snider, Anne Applebaum and Robert Conquest are among those who provided the world with knowledge about this unspeakable crime against humanity. One of the first ones to report on the Holodomor in the West as it was happening was Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist. Agnieszka Holland’s picture Mr Jones, released in 2019, tells the story of his trip through starving Soviet Ukraine.
All of these sources provide uncontestable evidence that the series of actions ordered by Joseph Stalin were aimed at exterminating Ukrainians, namely, the country’s farmland population. The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium based in the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta was established in 2013 to gather, archive and analyse the sources on Holodomor. Their open-access archives include photographs, letters, and survivors’ testimonies. This is one of them:
In 1932 the harvest was a normal one. It was brought in before anyone suspected what was to happen. It was winter when they came in to take the grain that had already been ground into flour and was sorted in bags. They came and seized all of this grain, not only from us but from all the villagers. And ours was a large village—6,000 people lived there. The sound of crying was everywhere. Those who seized the grain carried out their orders without mercy. I remember as if it were yesterday how a man ran away, leaving behind a wife and three children. They took absolutely everything: cows, pigs, everything. There was nothing left for the wife to do. She sent her children away to fend for themselves, set fire to the house, and hanged herself. Things were a little different in my family. My father was always on the run during the day and would only come at night. We had nothing; they had taken everything from us. They came with their pikes, poked around, asked questions, and grabbed my mother by the hair. They tore off my mother’s earrings and her cross. We children cried, but nothing helped. No one paid any attention to our tears. They locked our mother in the basement. So there we were, five of us children with me the oldest, and our father nowhere to be found. They came back to see if they had missed anything and found one egg that had not been taken. They took it away. Father would sometimes be able to bring us a little flour, sometimes a little grain, anything that had not been seized. But protecting the food was impossible because our house was under constant surveillance, and he could not get to us every night. They took everything, even our clothes. We did not even have a blanket. We were poor as church mice. We huddled together at night to keep warm. After two weeks they let mother out of the basement. But what could she do when there was nothing to eat? In March or April, 1933, they took our cow. The first to die was my youngest sister, then another sister. Then my brother and a third sister died at the same time. Father died and was buried on Holy Thursday. Mother died two days later, and they threw her in a hole on Easter Sunday. I remember how a neighbor came and comforted me, saying that although my parents had gone, they had died on holy days, Holy Thursday and Easter. It was a terrible time for me. I was starving myself to such an extent that I could not walk. Before he died, my father had asked one of the teachers to take me under his wing. I was only in the first grade at the time, and it was only thanks to this teacher that I survived. He took me to a hospital. I don’t remember who the doctor was or anything about the place. I only remember that my skin was shiny and transparent like glass. The doctor cut me open in several places and let the liquid under my skin run out. It smelled like dead flesh. When I left the hospital, I had no strength to walk and sat 31 in the sun. The teacher picked me up and saved my life. But many who had owned everything they needed now died like flies. It was hard. While still swollen, I would go to the point to catch fish and frogs. I tore them up and ate them raw.
“Testimony of Mr. Ivan Kasiianenko of Los Angeles, California.” In Second Interim Report (1988). Excerpt.
In My Family, We Never Wasted Food
My family originates from the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv and Donbas. I learned about the Holodomor at a very young age — not through stories but through habits. Leftover food was never discarded, especially bread. Every meal had to be finished, and we became remarkably skilled at turning the previous day's leftovers into delicious dinners. Once, I found my mother crying over a pan of leftover buckwheat (she had not learned the right amount to cook for two), anxious about having to throw it away. “Are you sure that I should do this?” she asked, eyeing the trash can. “We have been eating it for days, and I think it has gone bad anyway”, I tried to comfort her, but it did feel surreal to throw away three tablespoons of boiled buckwheat.
There were no stories told about it because those relatives who survived the Holodomor in Luhansk and Kharkiv were not willing to speak about it. The Soviet Union strictly prohibited talking about it, and whoever was heard in the middle of such a story was risking an imminent arrest. But it did remain running in our blood. The irrational subconscious refusal to waste even a few grams of food caused anxiety, guilt, and would always start an uncomfortable conversation. The stories about Holodomor always sounded like a horrible nightmare, something otherwise unreal, because they were always lacking the most harrowing details. On one hand, a human mind does everything to protect itself, often removing traumatic memories. On the other hand, it turned out to be very hard to talk about the Holodomor with its survivors, as they remained scarred by the fear of being caught for life.
Victim of the Holodomor, Kharkiv, Ukraine, photo by Alexander Wienerberger, 1933.
My grandmother told me that her father used to take her for a walk in the woods, and this was the only place where he could spill some of the details, and they were horrifying. They used to live in one of the streets of Kharkiv adjacent to the Railway Station Square. My great-grandfather had to cross it every day to get to work. In 1933, the square was covered in dead bodies — swollen corpses with shiny, transparent skin and skinny limbs.
Mass graves filled with victims of the Holodomor, Kharkiv, Ukraine, photo by Alexander Wienerberger, 1933.
A wagon would roll into the middle of the square every few days to load the bodies and take them away. That part of the country is covered in mass graves of those who perished of hunger in 1932-1933.
When I was a child, one family photograph used to give me shivers. It was a black-and-white group photo of my grandfather’s family. A regular picture anyone has in their archive. However, the lingering ghostly presence in the background always terrified me. It was my grand-grandmother, who, in her final years, looked more dead than alive. Her sunken cheeks revealed the form of her skull, and her fish-like blue eyes stared right into my soul, freezing it with horror. I tried to retrieve this photo, but it was lost, along with a big part of the family archive and our home in Luhansk at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2014.
However, my mom managed to save one photo of her. Her name was Tasia, or Grandma Tasia, as my mother and grandmother called her. She survived the Holodomor, which took a heavy toll on her mental health. Later, her husband would fall under Soviet repressions and be arrested. He returned from the labour camp completely blind, and soon after, he died under the bus he could not see coming.
Tasia, from my family’s archive.
Tasia’s mental health has never stabilised. Nobody has ever seen her smile, perhaps, except for her late husband. The Soviets sentenced her to a life of loss and grief, and only she knew what memory she was mourning on a given day. However, no matter how tragic Tasia’s life was, someone always had it worse. In fact, every Ukrainian has a family history similar to Tasia’s or even way more dramatic. The Soviet Union ruined generations and generations of Ukrainians, who were denied an opportunity to reconstruct a family tree, reconnect with extended family due to repressions, mass executions and events like Holodomor (there were more than one, three, to be precise), or even pass on some heirloom. My ancestors were forced to fight both World Wars in the Red Army, my great-grandfather even got decorated for fighting in the Winter War in Finland, which is now missing from Russian history textbooks because the Soviets lost it. But the documents about his recognition are safely stored in my family archive and are proof of yet another colonial war Russia started and, luckily, failed to win.
A Word to Silent Witnesses
As I was recovering some of the stories, I came across a stunning reminder of just how sensitive art can be towards its viewer, how empathetic and moving artistic concepts may become when they tell real stories of real people. Daria Koltsova is a Ukrainian artist from Kharkiv, and while having admired her art for years now, a real show-stopper for me was one of her latest exhibitions in Suprainfinit Gallery in Bucharest.
In The Splendour of Fallen Suns is a visually gorgeous installation, where nothing finds itself by chance. Daria Koltsova’s passion for stained glass matches her sensitive approach to the material. Whoever works with this technique has to reckon with its complex history, as well as a challenging production process. In fact, over the centuries, this fascinating medium has been affordable only to the clergy or governments, thus bearing the remnants of an ideological role it was once charged with.
The story of Koltsova’s creations inside the exhibition goes far back into her own family's history. It begins with the artist’s grandfather, Petro Koltsov, a scientist who worked with the genetics of the grain, with the varieties of the sacred crop. He was active at the beginning of the 1930s, sliding right into the horrid years of the Holodomor. Ironically, Joseph Stalin himself did not think of genetics as real science, putting all researchers in imminent danger of persecution. A man of a big heart, Petro Koltsov would give away his grain to starving friends and neighbours, emptying his stack meant for sowing and research. Always under the attentive eye of the authorities, his family had to move around frequently to flee the brigades that browsed the farmers’ houses in search of hidden food or grain.
Koltsova remembers that every story her grandfather ever told her would include walking through infinite fields. A field as a path, as the very source of life, as an escape route. “Even our flag is composed of the symbolic representation of a yellow field of grain and blue sky”, she reminded me. Ukrainian fields became witnesses to multiple crimes and tragedies, bearing the history of wars and famines inside of them. In present-day Ukraine, fields are filled with mines, which makes it impossible to sow grain and other crops. The same fields become battlegrounds that poison the soil with hot metal and decaying bodies of the occupants. It will take decades, if not generations, for the soil to be de-mined and reborn.
Daria Koltsova, In the splendour of fallen suns, exhibition view, Suprainfinit Gallery, 2024. Photo by Roald Aron.
This brings me right back to Koltsova’s Bucharest exhibit In the Splendour of Fallen Suns. First, Daria invites everyone to step into a round cabin made of stained glass. The design of it is inspired by a Soviet image of an endless field illuminated by an enormous sun, and under its circle – a small figure of a soldier. In her work, Koltsova removes the soldier, thus taking away the image’s heavy ideological inclination, boiling it down to the essential: a breathtaking landscape flooded in sunlight. When I think of this scenery, an overwhelming feeling of familiarity takes over my mind. I grew up in the fields just like the one from Koltsova’s imaginarium, chasing lizards, learning about the land’s inhabitants and plants. The afternoon sun illuminates everything with a special rigour, a splendid golden light so intense that I can still feel the scent of it. Inside the stained glass cabin, there is a panoramic view of my childhood vision. Whoever is inside of it stands on the same spot as the removed soldier, bringing new life and meaning with every other visitor.
Daria Koltsova, Witnesses, 2024, metal, stained glass, 205 x 84 x 40cm / 202 x 84 x
60 cm. Photo by Roald Aron.
Next, the viewer, blinded by the sun of glass, steps out into the field. A series of sculptures varying in form bear the same title: Witness. A group of them resemble a burnt sunflower. Made of metal and black glass, the round surface of the flower is perfectly reflective of its surroundings. Daria Koltsova uses vintage glass produced in the 1960s. It lacks the most fundamental quality – transparency. It is transparency that made glass come into mass use, its absence cripples the material, making it disfunctional. However, in the lack of clearness, a new form of communication emerges: reflection. A confrontation with an artwork that reflects the viewer provides a space for an internal dialogue. One may ask, what else did this mirror see? What memory does it hold?
An image of a sunflower has accompanied every Ukrainian since birth, both literally and symbolically. Sunflower seed holds heat, time, and economic value. The flower follows the movement of a giant star, rotating on its tall, flexible stem, in fields that are truly infinite. Or at least, they used to be. Koltsova’s flowers are similar, only instead of sunlight, they absorb the reality around them with their black, mute reflective surface.
What does a Ukrainian field witness? What have Ukrainians had to witness and endure that still refracts in them, one generation after another? It is a trauma that makes one focus on their internal space, rather than the surroundings, therefore reflecting, rather than providing an input. A trauma of famine, of loss, of undying fear of irrational punishment, of atrocities of war. A moment always comes when one has to face the trauma and figure out their reckoning. When forgetting is not an option, commemorating becomes one.
Daria Koltsova, Witnesses (detail), 2024, cement, stained glass, 282 x 32 x 36cm. Photo by Roald Aron.
The second group of Witnesses towers over its viewers in their solemn symbolism. The squared columns of stained glass and concrete take on a form of giant totem-like spikes of wheat. Nature’s perfectly equillibrated creation, here it is a weighty reminder of the cost of every seed of Ukrainian grain that does not lose its painful symbolic meaning of loss and hope even today. What was created as a plant became a memorial statue under the hand of Daria Koltsova. As a memorial to those who perished of famine, as a monument to those who unmine and sow Ukrainian fields today, and ultimately, to Daria’s dear grandfather, so devoted to it, to life itself. One of the columns features the aforementioned black glass. When Russians burnt entire fields of Ukrainian grain, it was not only an act of war but a reenactment of the Holodomor’s gruesome setup. These spikes of grain, of glass and concrete, allow the viewer to gaze inside themselves. To reflect themselves in our tragedy, our hope, and our history.
A recurring image of grain runs through many artworks that come out of Daria’s workshop. It is a universal symbol of abundance, of hope, of wellbeing. For Ukrainians, it is also a bitter reminder of just how fragile these basic goods can become, of the price of freedom, of community, of life.
In the Splendour of Fallen Suns is a walk through a Ukrainian field that witnessed so much pain. However, the majestic golden light that pours inside the gallery space through the installation feels like a beacon of hope. The sun is eternal. So will be Ukraine.
Daria Koltsova, In the splendour of fallen suns, exhibition view, Suprainfinit Gallery, 2024. Photo by Roald Aron.
