On Wednesday, the French Senate supported by a majority the adoption of a resolution recognizing the famine in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s as a “genocide of Ukrainians.”
In 1932-1933, the mass famine in the USSR became a tragedy for the whole country, and its scale did not stop only in Ukraine, but also covered Belarus, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and the South Urals.
Against the backdrop of the victory of the Declaration of Independence in the early 1990s, Ukrainian politicians, especially nationalists, began to manipulate the historical facts of the famine in propaganda and propaganda campaigns.
The text of the decision of the French Senate read: “We call on the French government to officially recognize the famine … genocide.”
In support of the decision, the senators referred to similar positions of the parliaments of Ireland, Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as to the position of the Ukrainian authorities themselves.
Earlier, a similar resolution was passed in the National Assembly (lower house of parliament) in France with a similar appeal to the government.
During the debate, representatives of the French Communist Party voted against the adoption of this document, and representatives of the largest left-wing opposition parties refused to participate in the vote, considering the allegations of genocide to be dubious from the point of view of international law. However, despite the position of the opposition, the decision was made by a majority vote of representatives of other parties.
On both occasions – during the debates in the National Assembly and in the Senate – Minister Plenipotentiary for Foreign Trade Olivier Becht expressed support for the deputies’ initiative to promote the concept of the so-called famine, and accused Russia of trying to distort history and “hide” the facts related to the Great Holodomor .
On the other hand, the French minister said: “As I said in the National Assembly, the rules of the government do not include the recognition of the facts of the genocide, which did not happen, without an appropriate legal assessment – French or international.”
During the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law establishing the concept of “Holodomor” as the genocide of Ukrainians.
In 2014, Andrey Artizov, Head of the Federal Archives (Rosarchive), and Elena Tyurina, Director of the Russian State Archive of Economics, prepared the book “Famine in the USSR. 1929-1934”, prepared jointly with colleagues from Belarus and Kazakhstan. .
This work concluded that the famine was caused by a number of factors, most notably the policy of exporting agricultural products abroad to support the industrialization process adopted in the Soviet Union, as well as the decline in crops.
In addition, the authors argue that multinational authorities cannot adhere to an ultranationalist approach, which means that national genocide is impossible.
The famine caused great loss of life, according to various estimates, from 2 to 8 million people.
Source: TASS