Ukrainian Holodomor

Fiona Bruce Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I rise to support the motion, and to commend my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) for bringing the debate to the House.

Central European countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Croatia and, of course, Ukraine are the most active countries in the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, which I currently chair as the Prime Minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief. It is very much from that perspective that I will speak today. Why are those countries among the most active in our alliance? It is because they know persecution and oppression. They have lived it, and in Ukraine many live it today. They live with the results of the holodomor of the 1930s. I believe that that is one reason why the Ukrainians have such a strong character now, and are able to stand so commendably against what Putin is doing to attack their country.

All too often—I hope I will be forgiven for saying this—those of us who have lived our lives mainly in the UK, and have even reached a certain age, see opposing persecution or discrimination on account of what people believe or who they are as a principle worth fighting for. That is worthy, but for the central European country colleagues with whom I work it is more than a principle; it is a lived reality. They have suffered, their countries have suffered, their families have suffered. My Slovakian counterpart as a Government-appointed representative on the IRFBA is Ambassador Anna Záborská. While she was growing up as a young girl, her father spent 12 years imprisoned by the communists for his beliefs. Ambassador Robert Rehak, the vice-chair of the alliance and the Czech Republic representative, was a teenager in the late 1980s when the communist state police came to his school and told him, “'If you speak out once more, we will take you away.” He knew that they meant it, because he had seen bodies taken away through the streets of Prague in black bags.

Today, we have heard again about the deliberate starvation of people in Ukraine by the USSR within living memory, during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. To us, the cruelty that was inflicted on millions then is almost beyond comprehension. Farming families were thrown out of their homes and off their farms, losing their livelihoods, and were deported or given the option of being forced to work in collectives or starved. They were barred from returning to the fields that many had farmed for generations, even to gather a few grains, on pain of being killed—as many were. According to one account, teenage children were placed as border guards on the watchtowers above the fields of grain so that local people did not return to their farms to gather even a small amount of food. One such youth even betrayed his own father, who had tried to return for food. His father was killed as a result, and, tragically, the boy was then killed by his grieving grandfather.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire spoke of cannibalism during that period. I read, with incredulity, an account of children's limbs being displayed for sale as meat on a market stall. This dehumanisation, this total absence of respect for people as human beings, contrasts starkly with what motivates so many of us today to work for freedom of religion or belief—the importance of respecting every individual as a human being, whatever their beliefs. During the period we are speaking of today and the communist decades, communism was militantly atheistic and declared religion to be its mortal enemy. Clergy were murdered and countless believers cast into prison and work camps, where many suffered indescribable torture. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and feminist scholar, says of totalitarianism—a state that seeks to control not only actions but thoughts and emotions:

“wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

In the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, by Czech writer Milan Kundera, the character Sabina, a lifelong citizen under communism, says:

“the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.”

Perhaps the most utterly moving book that I have read describing the holodomor and other heartrending suffering in the USSR, particularly in Ukraine, is “Stalin’s Children” by Owen Matthews. He traces his family over three generations, several of whom lived through Stalin’s purges. The book was published over 10 years ago, but it is harrowing to read it today as Putin crouches at the door of so many of the countries I mentioned at the beginning of my speech—Ukraine, yes, but many other countries that border or are near that country.

That is why I believe it is so pertinent that the next freedom of religion or belief ministerial will be held in the Czech Republic at the end of November under the title, “FoRB Under Authoritarian Regimes”. The people of the countries in that region lived through those regimes. They have stories to tell and lessons that they have learnt. They have a collective message to convey out of their collective memory about what can happen when an ideology seeks to suppress religious belief, and with it human dignity and life itself.

That is a message that needs to be told. A 2019 survey found that only 51% of US millennials—their UK counterparts could well be the same—believe that the declaration of independence offers a better opportunity for freedom and equality than the communist manifesto. Any romanticised perception of communism must be debunked. In the UK, the Holocaust Education Trust has in recent years been doing a tremendous job educating our children and young people about the horrors of the holocaust, so that maybe—just maybe—“never again” becomes a reality for their generation as it has not been for ours. Similarly, the horrors of life under the communist regime before and after the Nazis must be told to this young generation—horrors that include the holodomor. Recognising the holodomor as a genocide is one way we can begin to address this.