Holodomor Remembrance Day, 23 November 2024

Today Ukraine remembers those who died in the famine of 1932 and 1933.

A number of national parliaments have formally recognised the famine in recent years. I have heard people ask, reasonably, what a resolution passed in another country nine decades later actually changes.

It changes what is taught. A recognised event enters textbooks, museum programmes and public commemoration in that country, and a generation of schoolchildren there learns something their parents did not.

That is slow and it is not nothing. Most of what a country knows about another country's history arrived in exactly that way.

Tonight the form is unchanged: a candle in the window at four o'clock. My respect to everyone marking today.