Ukraine is a nation interrupted, its identity and promise stolen by invaders and predators for centuries.
Ukraine's
principle oppressor has been, and remains, Russia where leaders like
Russian President Vladimir Putin propagate the fiction that Ukraine is
"little Russia." But the two are distinctive and the Ukrainian language
is as different from Russian as is Spanish from French.
Putin's
postulation is not only inaccurate, but deeply hurtful and insulting,
given Russia's historical and ongoing abuse of Ukraine. In the 1930s,
Joseph Stalin perpetrated one of the greatest crimes against humanity by
purposely starving to death millions of Ukrainians for resisting his
Five-Year Plan to collectivize agriculture.
Finally, a film will
be released in the new year that portrays Stalin's monstrous policies
and how they brought about The Great Famine of 1933, known in Ukrainian
as the Holodomor (death by starvation).
The new movie is entitled
Bitter Harvest
and stars veteran actor Terence Stamp and new British sensation Max
Irons, in his first leading role. It is a love story set during one of
history's darkest moments and portrays events most don't know and cannot
imagine.
Canadian Ian Ihnatowycz produced this film to set the
record straight for the West about the suffering of Ukrainians at the
hands of Russia, a reality that still continues. His parents and
grandparents fled the country during the Second World War.
"Like
all Ukrainians, my family suffered enormously," he said. "There isn't a
Ukrainian alive who doesn't know about the persecution, executions, and
starvation. Given the importance of what happened, and that few outside
Ukraine knew about it because it had been covered up, the story of this
genocide needed to be told. It's relevant today."
The scale of
The Great Famine remained hidden by the Soviets, but in 1991 Ukraine
declared independence and opened the Soviet archives. These revelations
led to a 2003 United Nations Joint Statement, signed by Russia, that
declared the Holodomor had taken seven to ten million innocent lives.
Then on October 23, 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution
recognizing the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.
The movie
is a fitting backdrop to the current violence against Ukraine by Russia.
In 1933, alarming reports about mass starvation were reported in the
British press, but ignored in the United States. That same year, the
United States officially recognized the Soviet Union and in 1934, Stalin
won membership into the League of Nations.
Today, concern about
Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has been muted considering that it
is Europe's largest country, the size of Germany and Poland combined,
with 45 million people.
Several books about the Holodomor have been published since but the most comprehensive is
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,
written in 2010 by Yale Professor Timothy Snyder. The slaughter he
documents and details is, quite frankly, difficult to comprehend.
"More
than five million people starved to death in the Soviet Union in the
early 1930s, most of them in Soviet Ukraine. The hunger was caused by
collective agriculture, but the starvation was caused by politics," he
wrote.
During the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, "the Soviet
leadership identified peasants, the victims of collectivization, as the
prime threat to Soviet power. Nearly 700,000 were executed, although the
true number may be somewhat higher," he wrote.
Another 300,000
were executed by Ukrainian government puppets of Moscow and hundreds of
thousands more shipped off to Gulags and work camps.
Then the
Second World War followed. In 1941, Hitler invaded Soviet Ukraine and
Belarus. Between 1933 and 1945, Snyder estimates that a total of 14
million non-combatants were killed by Stalin and Hitler in the
Bloodlands, principally Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus.
The
Holocaust, that killed six million Jews across Europe, took place
during this time and has been well documented and depicted. But
Bitter Harvest represents the first feature film to expose the world to the catastrophic Holodomor mass murder.
Naturally,
the film is disturbing. Stamp's performance is riveting, as the
patriarch of a family facing extinction, as is Max Irons' poignant
portrayal of Stamp's grandson, a young artist and that of Samantha Barks
as his lover.
Irons and Barks are ranking members of the "Brit
Pack," young and talented artists from United Kingdom who are successful
internationally. He is best known for his roles in
The Riot Club in 2014,
The White Queen and
The Host in 2013, Barks for her performance in the movie version of
Les Miserables, and Stamp is an acclaimed veteran of stage and screen.
Distribution plans are being negotiated and the film should be available to the public in 2016.
The
movie was filmed at Pinewood Studios and on location in Ukraine where
final scenes were shot days before Ukraine's corrupt former President
opted in late 2013 to join Russia instead of the European Union. That
decision sparked mass street protests throughout Ukraine and eventually
his overthrow.
In spring 2014, Putin took advantage of the chaos
and sent in operatives to destabilize and occupy Crimea and the Donbas.
His objective was to invade and annex most, if not all, of Ukraine, but
resistance has been heroic.
"It's ironic that before we even
finished our film we had yet another example of Russia's aggression
against Ukraine," said Ihnatowycz.
This time, Ukraine is once
more a victim of Russian predation and once again a casualty of Russian
propaganda and tepid concern by world leaders.
For these and other reasons,
Bitter Harvest is an important movie that everyone should see. Its relevance is undeniable and enlightening.
This is the real narrative of Ukraine, an unbowed but bruised nation with defiant resilience, still yearning to be free.
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