Sometimes, it comes in handy having an historian in cabinet.

Jobs, Trade and Technology Minister Bruce Ralston not only has history degrees from UBC and Cambridge, but his father was a well-respected historian for many years at UBC.

So it seems appropriate that Ralston was the minister representing the provincial government today at a ceremony in Surrey commemorating one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Up to 10 million Ukrainians died during the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.

Known as the Holomodor, it was Stalin's man-made famine, resulting from his liquidation of the land-owning peasant farmers known as the kulaks.

The B.C. government has declared November 25, 2017, as Holomodor Memorial Day.

“For generations, British Columbians of Ukrainian descent have helped to build this province culturally, economically and politically,” Ralston said in a news release. “Their families have lived with the horrors of Holodomor and will never forget them. I ask every British Columbian to join me in commemorating the victims of this tragic event so we can ensure nothing like it ever happens again.”

In terms of man-made 20th-century famines, the Holomodor was only surpassed by Chinese dictator Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, in which approximately 45 million died.

Another famine in China from 1907 to 1911 killed up to 25 million, and many millions also perished in a Persian famine from 1917 to 1919.

But what makes the Holomodor and the Great Leap Forward even more chilling is that these famines were intentional and resulted from the actions of political tyrants.

In fact, the word Holomodor itself is a Ukrainian term to describe "extermination by means of starvation".

There were three of Holomodors during Stalin's reign, including ones in 1922-23 and in 1946-47.

According to the Hague Institute for Global Justice, "They were engineered by the Soviet government with the aim of mass murder of the indigenous Ukrainian population, bearing the signs of ethnic cleansing through death by starvation." 

However, these horrors have largely gone under the radar in the minds of many Canadians because they haven't been depicted to any large extent in Hollywood movies or in popular literature.