Found here: http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/pennst.htm; originally printed in the Ukrainian Weekly as a transcript of a speech presented at Penn State in 1995. 

The genocidal famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 is still affecting my country. It is an event of the present perfect rather than past simple tense.

Unlike other tragedies of this magnitude - the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, the Holocaust, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge [in Cambodia] - it was followed by a successful cover-up. Any mention of the famine, let alone its honest investigation or literary description, were ruthlessly persecuted. But repressions or cynical propaganda campaigns alone could not explain why the Soviets had managed to keep it a secret for almost six decades. Their victims were also reluctant to speak about what they had been through, because there was nothing to boast about or to be proud of.

Despite the deep psychological trauma that a rape can inflict upon you, you could still gather enough courage to expose and accuse your rapist. But when the rape becomes an everyday occurrence, it almost universally leaves the victim crushed, demoralized, overwhelmed with apathy, self-pity and self-disgust.

And because this is precisely what happened to Ukraine, we up to this day cannot put it behind us. The famine and its consequences have never been talked about and dealt with openly and sincerely, and they both directly and covertly motivate our present behavior.

Generally, the survivors had to cope with this tragedy in the only way that was possible under those circumstances - i.e. by trying to live on without turning back. Let me illustrate this in the example of my wife’s family. Her grandfather was from the Mykolayiv region of southern Ukraine. In the 1930s, he was arrested and spent 10 years in a Gulag labor camp in Siberia. He was so happy to survive and come back that he never talked about what happened to him. His son, my wife’s father, was grateful to the “Soviet power” that it allowed him, “the son of the people’s enemy,” to enter university, join the Communist Party and eventually make a career and become director of a research institute in Kyyiv. For his son, the events of 1932-1933 are as distant as the Boston Tea Party is for most Americans.

He may not care a damn about the famine, but he, or for that matter the whole generation he belongs to, is not at all free from the genocide that nearly wiped Ukrainians away.

I remember in 1989, when I was first allowed to venture out into the treacherous Western world, I could not help pinching whatever I could lay my hands on - a teabag, a napkin, a pack of sugar or instant coffee in the students’ canteen, a pen, a pencil or an empty envelope from an office storeroom. Just in case. Because good tea or coffee is hard to find in Kyyiv. Because they won’t let you go abroad again. Because I’d be a fool to miss such a chance.

Now if you look at our government and Parliament you can easily notice the same attitude towards new opportunities prevailing among Communist dinosaurs and former dissidents alike. As a rule, all of them come from the same peasant stock, children or grandchildren of 1932, who had to flee their picturesque countryside or face extinction. Their lifetime goal was to run away from the sight of tragedy and to secure a decent future for their kin. At any cost. Even if it required jettisoning their national heritage (a sure sign of hillbillyism) and language (which had become directly associated with rustic poverty or “nationalism)”. Now that their time has come, they try to get as many cushy jobs as possible, their newly acquired appetite for foreign currencies is insatiable. Meanwhile their country is plunging into economic, political and moral squalor.

But could it have been otherwise? Our national trauma has never been properly discussed and time alone cannot heal it. A Ukrainian 40-year-old woman who was present at the showing of the “Harvest of Despair” and the discussion that followed came up and criticized me for being “too personal” and for “showing dirty laundry in public.” This convinced me once again that we are only in the initial stages of recovery. What we need is an honest exposure of our wounds to the sun. Otherwise they will rot. And in any case we should not he afraid of ourselves.

But this is probably a task for the next generation.

[Emphasis added.]