Ukraine’s Interior Ministry on Saturday released documents on cannibalism cases investigated during the Holodomor that illustrate the suffering caused by the Great Famine of 1932-1933, which killed millions of Ukrainians, a “genocide” perpetrated by the Soviet Union, The Independent Kyiv reports.

The archive of the ministry contains 1,022 criminal cases initiated by the Soviet police for cannibalism during the Holodomor.

The evidence is now being made public through the “Real Story” project for Holodomor Memorial Day, 90 years after the Holodomor.

“I would very much like the materials made public today to give impetus to serious historical, legal and other scientific research,” said State Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Inna Yashchuk.

“This is an important step for the research of physiologists and psychiatrists… People who resorted to cannibalism are victims of the Holodomor,” she emphasized.

Ukraine lost between 4 and 8 million inhabitants during the Great Famine of 1932-1933, amid collectivization organized by Stalin to suppress any nationalist tendencies in the country, which was then a Soviet republic, reports AFP.

Historical evidence shows that acute hunger drove some people to cannibalism.

Judging by archival documents, criminal cases about cannibalism were heavily politicized and falsified, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine reported.

Ukraine and more than 30 other countries recognize the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people, committed by the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a part at the time, in order to suppress Ukrainians’ desire for independence.

Moscow denies that the deaths were caused by a deliberate policy of genocide and says that Russians and other ethnic groups also suffered from starvation.