Home - Southern California Holodomor Genocide Committee

Thursday, June 5, 2025 the family and friends of Mr. Vladimir (Bill) Budilo put him to rest with profound appreciation of the gift that he had been to us. Born August 13, 1926 in Kamyanka, Ukraine, he was living through the Holodomor genocide by age 6. At the age of 9, he buried his older brother and by age 16, he was going house to house begging for enough wood to construct a coffin for his deceased mother. When World War II broke out, his family fled the Soviet Army from one flank and the Nazi Army from the other. It was a 1,100 mile journey, mostly on foot. He was captured and sent to a German labor camp. Germans had a word for captured Slavs: “untermench”, those who did not deserve to live.

Freed by the Americans, he was held in a Displaced Person’s (DP) camp in Garmisch, Bavaria, Germany. He met people there who would be life-long friends. He also met the love of his life, his future wife, Tatiana Vdovkin. While in camp, he studied automotive maintenance, assisting the Americans, and then engineering. He learned German and English. After five years in the D.P. camp, with the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt, he was able to get on a boat bringing him to Boston, MA with 2,000 other immigrants. Two days later, he was flying to Oxnard, CA and picking lemons.

In February 1951, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and because he was fluent in four languages, sent to Berlin, Germany to work in military intelligence. He returned to the States in 1953. Meeting Tatiana Vdovkin at a social dance, they were subsequently married. They had four children, eight grandchildren, and numerous great grandchildren. He was one of the founders of two churches, The Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Church in Oxnard and St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Los Angeles. He with others organized Ridna Shkola, the Ukrainian language and culture school. He was very active in the Ukrainian Culture Center, Ukrainian Engineers Society, American Legion Post 139, and St. Steven’s senior Citizens Club.

We hold this gentle man in our hearts and adopt one of his mantras for our own: “When someone asks you for help, it is your responsibility to help them”. Vladimir Budilo died on May 22, 2025, just shy of his 99th birthday.

Вічна і світла пам’ять

Commemorating
the Holodomor Genocide
in Ukraine

SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Please consider and support the measure that would declare November 2023, and annually thereafter, as Holodomor Memorial Month, and November 25, 2023, and the fourth Saturday of November annually thereafter, as Holodomor Memorial Day.

mln people died due to hunger

mln people unborn due to decline of population growth after the Famine

mln people lost by the highest estimation

countries recognized the Holodomor as a genocide

US states recognized the Holodomor as a genocide

monuments commemorate the Holodomor outside Ukraine

Holodomor Pamphlet – Ukrainian Institute of Remembrance

What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. <…> The full force of the Soviet axe has fallen, with its familiar tools of mass murder, deportation and forced labor, exile and starvation.

Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine... Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger.

Though collectivization was a disaster everywhere in the Soviet Union, the evidence of clearly premeditated mass murder on the scale of millions is most evident in Soviet Ukraine. Collectivization had involved the massive use of executions and deportations everywhere in the Soviet Union, and the peasants and nomads who made up the bulk of the Gulag’s labor force hailed from all of the Soviet republics. Famine had struck parts of Soviet Russia as well as much of Soviet Ukraine in 1932. Nevertheless, the policy response to Ukraine was special, and lethal.

The Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, which followed the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, is much more than the most appalling event in the Soviet government’s war against the peasantry. Persuasive evidence suggests that it was really a function of Soviet nationalities policy, carried out in tandem with a campaign to crush every manifestation of Ukrainian national life and constituting an attempt to crush the social basis of that life.

A genocide begins with the killing of one man – not for what he has done, but because of who he is.

History has not recorded another such crime as the famine perpetrated against an entire nation, nor one ever carried out in such a cold-blooded manner. <…> Indeed, it was a genocidal famine, the one that was employed by Stalin and his followers as a means of subduing the Ukrainian farmers. <…> The famine of 1932-33 in the Soviet Union has been an entirely ignored, neglected, misinterpreted, and distorted event. <…> Americans have had difficulty in accepting a story so unbelievably inhuman.

The bottom line is that Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and their ilk were convinced that the Ukrainian peasants as a group were “enemies of the people” who deserved to die. That was enough for the Soviet leadership; that should be enough to conclude that the Ukrainian famine was genocide.