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Our Life | Наше життя November | Листопад 2020 While the Holodomor occurred primarily in Ukraine, the famine extended to other areas, such as the Kuban region of the northern Caucasus. One may think that this supports the claims of Holodomor deniers that the famine was not a genocide directed at Ukrainians, but actually the Kuban region was home to substantial numbers of ethnic Ukrainians. The Kuban was the destination of the first Ukrainian mass migration, that of the Zaporizhian Cossacks after the liquidation of the Sich by Catherine II in the 1790s. The Archives of the UHEC hold the Oleksii Balabas Papers. Oleksii Balabas was born in 1890 in Kuban. He served as a cavalry officer during World War I, but returned home after the Revolution of 1917. He became active in the Kuban People’s Republic, which was attempting to form an independent state that could ally itself with the Ukrainian People’s Republic against the Bolsheviks. His activism resulted in his expulsion by the Russian ultra-nationalist “Black Hundreds,” and he eventually settled with his wife and daughter in the thriving Ukrainian émigré community of Prague, Czechoslovakia. While in Prague, he managed to re-establish communication with his family back in Kuban. Most of the letters deal with mundane family matters, but two of the ones from 1933 allude to the Holodomor. In the first letter dated June 8, 1933, the author states that she is working in the children’s clinic of a hospital, but that her wages of 40 rubles per month are not enough to let her buy even cornmeal-based bread, and that wheat flour is essentially nonexistent. However, such flour is readily available at the Torgsin, or hard currency store (the name is an abbreviation of the Russian “torgovlia s inostrantsami” — “trade with foreigners’’). Unfortunately, she has no gold or foreign currency with which to purchase anything — unlike Liza (again, we don’t know who she was, but possibly a sister-in- law), who had a gold tooth pulled so that she could buy flour. Having received this letter, Oleksii sends a remittance to the Torgsin in Krasnodar on June 21, 1933, for 94 Czech korunas (the receipt for which is also in the Balabas archives). In the second letter, dated July 31, 1933, the author is profusely grateful for the money. She was immediately able to buy 20 kg of flour, and she made varennyky with cherries from some fruit trees they owned. She goes on to say that this was the first thing made out of dough that they had seen in two years. It is stories like these that make history real. Let us never forget them! We are unveiling a Holodomor Collection page on our web- site this November (www.UkrHEC.org/Holodomor), and in 2022–2023, UHEC plans to mount a Holodomor anniversary exhibition featuring the fine art and other objects in the collection. We are grateful to the UNWLA for its past generous financial support of the UHEC Holodomor Collection. Visitors can schedule an appointment to view objects in the museum or archives collection for research purposes privately or to access documents. Copies of the cookbook are available for purchase at $10 each, and UHEC will consider lending out a portion of the framed prints for viewing. For more information, please visit www.ukrhec.org or email info@ukrhec.org. 1. Bohdan Pevny, Zemlia (Earth), 1962. Oil on canvas. Ukrainian History and Education Center, Patriarch Mstyslav Museum Permanent Collection. 2. Mykola Bondarenko, Kukurudza-kachny (Corn Cobs), from the series Ukraine 1933: A Cookbook, 1993 . Linocut. Ukrainian History and Education Center, Patriarch Mstyslav Museum Permanent Collection. 3. Letter to Oleksii Balabas from an unknown female relative in Krasnodar, Kuban, July 31, 1933. The underlined sentence reads: “It has been exactly two years since we have seen anything made out of dough.” Ukrainian History and Education Center Archives, Oleksii Balabas Papers, Box 1, Folder 9. 2. 3. 13
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