The Great Famine of 1932–33, also known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, is one of the most tragic pages in the country's modern history. Mass starvation caused by Stalin's policy of forced collectivisation took the lives of almost four million people in less than two years. Draconian requisitions of grain were followed by repressive measures which prohibited starving peasants from leaving their villages. The Famine was silenced by Soviet officials, but is remembered in many Ukrainian families. It was only since the end of the 1980's that this tragic event has become a subject of open discussion and public commemoration. This upsurge in the memory of the Famine contributed to the delegitimation of Soviet rule in Ukraine and helped to mobilise public opinion in favour of national independence. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the narrative of the Great Famine as one of the biggest crimes of Stalin's regime, i.e. the deliberate policy of ‘terror by hunger’ with the aim of suppressing the national aspirations of the Ukrainian peasants and their resistance to Sovietisation, became an important pillar of nation building. To the end of the 1990s, despite the resistance of the Ukrainian Communists, the Holodomor entered the official canon of national memory. However, compared to other post-communist countries Ukraine's record of coping with its difficult past is rather ambivalent. The former KGB archives have remained under the control of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), until 2010 no legal qualification was given to the crimes of the former regime, and no lustration law has been adopted. Although there were some civic initiatives aimed at documenting communist crimes and memorialising their victims (most notably, the Memorial association), Ukraine until recently had no national memorial or national museum devoted to the Famine and mass political repressions of the Stalin's era.

The Orange Revolution in 2004 marked a new era in Ukrainian politics of memory. President Viktor Yushchenko, elected on a pro-European platform, declared a break with the Soviet past and made national memory his top political priority. It was during his presidency that the commemoration of the Holodomor entered a new dimension.