(New York, 10 December 2007)

Dear friends,

Fellow colleagues,

In 2007-2008 Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the tragedy of the 1932-33 Holodomor.

Over those two years seven to ten millions of Ukrainians were murdered by the criminal Stalin regime.

In 2003 a Joint Statement, honoring the memory of the innocent people who were tormented to death during the Holodomor, was circulated as an official document of the General Assembly. It recognized the Holodomor as a tragedy. It also emphasized the importance to continue to study the reasons and consequences of the tragedy in order to make all of us know how inhuman a totalitarian regime can be.

In recent years Ukraine has opened up the voluminous secret archives, inherited from the Communist party and the secret service (KGB) of the former Ukrainian SSR. We have discovered a horrific truth. We had supposed it, though the genuine history was kept secret by the Soviet regime till its collapse.

The exhibition, that contains some of the archival materials, will show you how famine, which affected several regions of the former USSR, was purposefully used against Ukraine as a weapon, through introduction of special punitive measures against the population. This exhibition will walk you through the evolution of the crime – from its conception to implementation.

75 years after the Holodomor, we want the world to understand that the Soviet regime had committed a crime. We want the world to know that that crime had had a successor which was the Soviet Union. The empire had been carefully concealing it till its very break up. The crime was committed by the country that put its signature under numerous international legal acts which condemned crimes against humankind and humanity.

We want the world to know that even nowadays there are attempts to continue to hide the truth and to falsify it. But it is no longer possible to do that as the tragedy, which once became known through the witnesses of foreign diplomats, honest journalists and writers, has now emerged from recently declassified Soviet archival documents.

We count on your solidarity, dear friends.