At the entrance to the memorial park in Kyiv, there is a sculpture of an extremely thin girl with a very sad look holding a handful of wheat in her hands. Behind her back is the Candle of Remembrance. This monument commemorates the Holodomor.
What is the Holodomor?
After the end of the First World War, Ukraine was an independent state, but in 1919 the Soviet Union "sucked" it into the community of Soviet states. The Ukrainians considered themselves a Central European country, like Poland, and not an Eastern European country like Russia. They tried to restore Ukraine's independence.
In 1932, not wanting to lose control of Europe's main source of grain, Stalin took away the grain-producing land from the Ukrainian peasants and also all the grain, creating an artificial famine. The goal was to "teach Ukrainians to be smart" so that they would no longer oppose Moscow. The people who produced the most grain in Europe were left without a crumb of bread.
The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. In Ukraine at that time, 17 people died of hunger every minute, more than 1,000 every hour, and almost 24,500 every day. People were starving to death in the streets.
Stalin settled Russians into the emptied Ukrainian villages. During the next census, there was a huge shortage of population. Therefore, the Soviet government annulled the census, destroyed the census documents, and the census takers were shot or sent to the gulag, in order to hide the truth.
Today, 28 countries around the world present the Holodomor as genocide against Ukrainians. You couldn't learn about in school because almost all evidence was destroyed and victims were covered up for decades. To this day mass graves are being uncovered.
Books are now being written. Movies are now being made (see Bitter Harvest movie from 2017 starring Max Irons and Barry Pepper:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3182620/).
The Holodomor at that time broke the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine's independence from Russia eternal.