AFP/Kiev
Ukraine marked 80 years yesterday since the Stalin-era Holodomor famine, one of the darkest pages in its entire history that left millions dead and which is regarded by many as  genocide.
The 1932-33 famine took place as harvests dwindled and Josef Stalin’s Soviet police enforced the brutal policy of collectivising agriculture by requisitioning grain and other foodstuffs.
“It is 80 years since the catastrophe came to our lands,” President Viktor Yanukovych said in a statement. “This crime changed the course of history for the Ukrainian people. It was one of the worst crimes that we suffered.”
The country held a nationwide minute of silence after thousands of people marched through central Kiev to the city’s main memorial, the statue of a small, emaciated girl dying in the Holodomor.
Ukrainian nationalists have always regarded the Holodomor as a genocide specifically aimed by Stalin’s regime at eradicating the potentially awkward Ukrainian peasantry as a class.
Yanukovych however has controversially dropped the moves by his more nationalist predecessor, the 2004 “Orange Revolution” leader Viktor Yushchenko, to have the Holodomor recognised as genocide against Ukrainians.
In a move many saw as an attempt to appease former Soviet master Russia, Yanukovych in 2010 said it would be wrong to seek genocide recognition as Stalin-era famine was a catastrophe suffered all over the Soviet Union.
The magnitude of the death toll remains hugely controversial among historians, with estimates of those who died in Ukraine ranging from 5mn to 9mn.
Ukraine has remembered the Holodomor (which means extermination by starvation in Ukrainian) and political repression on the fourth Saturday of November since 1998.
However, after changes imposed by Yushchenko, the November date exclusively remembers the Holodomor and a new date in May was created to remember political repression.