Блаженнейший Митрополит Владимир обратился к нации в связи с Днем памяти жертв голодоморов ХХ века

Millions of people fell victims to the revolutionary upheavals, civil war and mass starvation in the early 20th century. The 1921-1922 starvation is known in history as ‘Transvolga Hunger’ but it spread further on to Ukraine and the Crimea, Siberia and Kazakhstan. The total number of its victims is estimated to amount to 7 million people, while the number of starving people was up to 30 million. Mass starvation also marked the period of collectivization and the first years after the Great Patriotic War.

On the last Sunday of November (this year it fells on November 26), Ukraine observes the Commemoration Day of the Victims of the Starvation. The Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine addressed the nation on this sad day.

All the social cataclysms of the Soviet period had something in common, namely, a radical revolution in people’s worldview. In this revolution they renounced God-man Christ and the Christian morality to choose a new faith in man-god, in antichrist, His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir stated in this massage, adding, ‘The adepts of this faith wanted to build a paradise on earth, to build a bright future for humanity. But there is no future without God. Their light was actually darkness. Their worldview was based on the principles of eternal darkness, because it is only God Who is the source of light. Their ideology brought evil instead of good because it is only God Who is the Creator of all good things. Where a paradise is built without God, there is hell. Instead of promised life in paradise, the people, deceived by the Soviet ideology, suffered infernal agony’.

‘The history of our homeland has known of many hard times’, the message reads, ‘Calamities, wars, socio-political upheavals and other disasters led to various crises, among them ‘destruction, and the famine, and the sword’ (Is. 51:19). But what Ukraine endured in the 1930s was artificial starvation, a mass murder of millions of fellow-citizens, cynical, purposeful and merciless. It is only in a milieu full of hatred to God and man that such a crime could occur’.

Recalling the terrible agony of starvation to which millions were subjected, among them his own, family, Metropolitan Vladimir writes, ‘Seventy years have passed since that time. Time heals spiritual wounds, but this wound inflicted on the heart of Ukraine cannot be healed. It will always painfully remind us of the time when Ukraine and other nations in the former Soviet community were dominated by devil’.

‘The Church urges to reject extremism, intolerance, revenge, fratricidal hatred, division into one’s own and others. There are no others for God. The time has come for the Ukrainian people to unite and return to the age-old spiritual values. History has vividly shown what can be brought by the rejection of Christian principles. It is only holy faith, firm hope and all-conquering love that may help to build up a dignified future and prevent us from repeating the mistakes of the past’, His Beatitude Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and All Ukraine underlined.