The Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has said that the 1930s famine in Ukraine was a genocide and that it is praying for its victims.

"Millions of people were dying in horrible pain on the generous Ukrainian black earth. This genocide was an attempt to destroy the very soul of the people, to submit it to total spiritual enslavement," the Synod said in a letter "on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the 1932-1933 holodomor" in Ukraine, posted on the Ukrainian Church's website.

"It became a weapon of diabolic revenge due to the inability to eradicate from the consciousness of our wise people endowed with great virtues its filial memory of God, the love of God, the loyalty to and faith in God," the document said.

"This faith could only be destroyed through the physical extermination of its holders, this is why by creating the spiritual famine, the theomachist power doomed the nation to the physical one," the Ukrainian hierarchs said.

"In the 1930s Ukraine experienced for the first time an artificial hunger, the cynical, targeted and merciless massacre of millions of civilians. Such a crime could only happen in an environment that hates God and humans," the Synod said.

"The 1932-1933 artificial famine was planned by Bolsheviks in order to speed up forced collectivization, to eliminate kulaks as a class, to destroy 'hostile elements'," the hierarchs said.

"Time heals the soul wounds, but the wound in Ukraine's heart cannot be healed. It will always be a painful reminder of the time when the devil reigned both over Ukraine and other peoples of the former Soviet community," the letter said. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church "is praying with great sorrow for the victims of the holodomor and other repressions by the Soviet totalitarian regime," the Synod said.

"Tens of millions were executed, decayed in prisons, were subjected to spiritual and physical tortures and died of hunger. Even the war did not see such a number of victims. Indeed, the regime led a bloody war against its own people," the document said.

Source: Interfax-Religion