The Holodomor (Голодомо́р, "kill by starvation" in Ukrainian), was a horrific famine that struck Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. Whether this was a deliberate act of genocide or a frenzied ideological campaign that failed, it was unquestionably one of the worst crimes against humanity perpetrated by the regime of Josef Stalin.
The number of Ukrainians killed is generally estimated to be around 3.5 million, with the number rising to between 5-8 million when including the devasted areas of Southern Russia, Caucasus and Kazakhstan.
Background: War Communism and Ukrainian Independence — 1917-1921
The Russian Civil War, which lasted from 1917-1921, was one of the bloodiest cataclysms in human history. The massive death and destruction can be attributed to two factors: War Communism and ethnic separatism.
When Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks gained power in the aftermath of the October Revolution, they brought about their desired dictatorship of the proletariat by expropriating every business, farm, enterprise, and any private property they could get their hands on. This policy became known as War Communism as Soviet Russia fought a massive civil war, and the government began expropriating crops from the peasantry without compensation. Unsurprisingly, this led to peasants lowering their production of grain. A massive famine broke out in 1921 that killed as many as five million people.
In this period, Ukraine was divided among numerous factions, including a short-lived Kyiv-based Ukrainian republic, a short-lived German-backed monarchy, numerous Bolshevik factions, an anarchist movement led by Nestor Makhno, the Russian White movement, and intervention by Poland in the Polish-Soviet War.
Ultimately, none of the Ukrainian nationalist movements were successful and Ukraine, except for a small sliver controlled by Poland, found itself under Bolshevik rule by the end of 1921. In a dark foreshadowing of the future purge of farmers, the Red Army allied with Nestor Makhno's anarchists against the Whites only to betray Makhno and demolish the movement once they served their purpose. Another group of people that endured persecution were the Cossacks, self-governing warrior tribes who were loyal to the tsar. Many of these groups lost their autonomy as the Bolsheviks considered them to be a fifth column.
Kronstadt, the New Economic Policy, and Cultural Autonomy — 1921-1928
While the White Movement was more or less crushed by 1920, Lenin's government faced a new wave of dissent from the Greens, peasants rebelling against the confiscation of grain, and anarchists who rebelled against Lenin's suppression of dissent.The two most prominent revolts were the Tambov Rebellion, led by former tsarist dissident Alexander Antonov, and the Kronstadt rebellion, a revolt by the sailors at a key naval port near Petrograd. While both rebellions were brutally suppressed, the threat of further rebellion drove Lenin and his associates to abandon War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy, or NEP. Under it, while most significant industries remained under state control, limited free enterprise was allowed, and peasants could farm their lands freely in exchange for a tax on their produce.note Despite some issues, by 1928, the Soviet economy and food production did begin recovering.
Under a policy known as indigenization, Ukrainians enjoyed a degree of cultural autonomy, with Ukrainian publications, art, poetry, and education flourishing throughout the decade.
The Rise of Stalin, Five-Year Plans, and Dekulakizaion — 1929-1931
By 1928, Josef Stalin had crushed all severe opposition to his rule. With his hands firmly on the levers of power and frustrated by Russia's backwardness, he soon abandoned the NEP. He sought to industrialize Russia at a breakneck pace with the first of his Five-Year Plans to make Russia economically and militarily competitive with the West.The most significant causality of the Five Year Plan was the kulaks, a group of independent farmers who sought to trade their goods in the market privately. Stalin saw the existence of these independent farmers as an ideological threat to this regime but also believed their crops could be exported for hard currency and their lands collectivized to hasten Russia's industrialization.
Beginning in early 1928, Stalinist propaganda denounced kulaks as subversive parasites who were to blame for famines by hoarding grain. The Soviet government began confiscating the kulaks' land and forcing them onto collective farms. This policy led to a collapse of agricultural production as farmers were no longer incentivized to produce; some even destroyed their crops and culled their livestock - some reports say that half of all produce was destroyed this way - to spite the Stalinist regime. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed or imprisoned in the expansion and continuation of the Tsars' Gulag system of prisons.
Red Famine — 1932-1933
Between 1932 and 1933, collectivization reached a fever pitch in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with catastrophic results for the nation. The drought, the aforementioned destruction of crops and livestock, and the strict adherence to quotas designed to support the industrialising urban areas and trade agreements created a horrific famine.Whole villages saw their populations starve, acts of cannibalism were reported, and in the most extreme cases, children were expelled or even murdered by their parents. To understand the impact of the famine in Ukraine, the lifespan of someone born in 1933 is estimated at around five years, and at the height of the famine, 28,000 people were dying daily.
Was it a deliberate genocide?
Scholars debate about the true motivations of the Stalinist regime: whether or not the Holodomor was deliberately inflicted upon Ukraine by the Soviet government or if it was "merely" a failed ideological campaign.Ukraine was not the only area afflicted by famine: many parts of the Volga, Caucasus, and Central Asia were also hit hard. Kazakhstan saw its own brutal famine
that killed roughly 1 million Kazakhs, roughly one-third of the Kazakh community, as a result of the Soviet regime forcing Kazakhs out of their nomadic lifestyle and onto the farmsnote .
However, while there was no official document that showed Stalin singled out Ukraine, there were signs that the Soviet government targeted Ukraine and Ukrainians to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and autonomy just like Tsarist Russia tried in the previous centuries.
The famine went hand in hand with the Executed Renaissance, a brutal purge of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals. The Ukrainian language was altered to be more Russian, and many institutions devoted to Ukrainian culture were shuttered. The lack of aid sent to Ukraine, the arrest and execution of farmers for possessing food just for subsistence, and the deliberate attempt by Soviet authorities to block starving peasants from fleeing Ukraine speak to an incredible malice by the Soviet leaders toward their people.
Statistically, Ukraine and areas with large numbers of Ukrainians saw more significant death tolls. Ukrainian communities in The Caucasus were practically destroyed during the famine, and their cultural organizations were suppressed.
One of the examples given to argue that it was a deliberate genocide is the Kuban region, which despite being officially part of Russia rather than Ukraine had a majority Ukrainian population (and as such had been part of the territory claimed by the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic before it was absorbed into the Soviet Union). After the Holodomor, only 1% of the remaining population was Ukrainian. The fact that Russians suffered so much less in the same region than their Ukrainian neighbors is taken as evidence that the starvation was specifically targeted at Ukrainians.
Contemporary Responses
Unsurprisingly, the Soviet government tried to suppress any news about the famine, to the point of executing the gravediggers who dug the mass graves for the victims of the famine. Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter whose fabricated stories were given a Pulitzer Prize, aided them in this regard. Duranty's motivations for his actions are debated: he may have held a blind belief in Stalin's ideology, or he may have been blackmailed.Nevertheless, reporters like Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones sought to tell the world the truth. But ultimately, it came to naught: for geopolitical reasons, Western nations continued to pursue relations with the Soviet government, and the Roosevelt administration restored relations with the Soviet Union the same year Ukrainians were dying by the side of the road.
Tragically, things would not improve much for Ukrainians in the following years. While the Polish-ruled parts of Ukraine were nominally better off, the Polish government became increasingly intolerant of Ukrainian culture and identity and subjected Ukrainian elites to persecution campaigns, leading to ethnic tensions that culminated in the Volhynian Slaughter.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans, only for them to discover the Nazis would be even more unrelentingly brutal than Stalin as part of Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan to exterminate millions of Slavs to create living space for German settlers. By the end of the war, roughly 8 million Ukrainians had died, most of them civilians, as did Ukraine's hopes to break from Soviet control.
It was not until the late 1980s, under the policy of glasnost (openness), that any open discussion or scholarly study of the Holodomor was allowed within the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, the one who tried to open up Soviet Russia, had come from a Ukrainian Caucasian community and had lost several relatives during the famine.
Remembrance
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when scholars gained access to the archives of the Soviet government, there have been more significant attempts to study and commemorate the Holodomor. The Ukrainian government has declared the fourth Sunday of November to be a day to honor the Holodomor. Several nations, including Canada and the United States, have declared the Holodomor genocide.The ongoing mass scale Russian invasion of Ukraine since early 2022 has led to some mutterings about the past repeating, especially since Russian authorities, in addition to repeating the pattern of forced russification of the Ukrainian areas that they occupy if not deportation of Ukrainians and massacres (such as Bucha and Izium), have chosen to destroy a monument to the Holodomor and shamelessly practice historical negationism about it, followed by many pro-Russian outlets worldwide. Since Ukrainian history has become more well known and understood worldwide as a result of the invasion, some more major nations (such as France in 2023), have recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.
Media about the Holodomor:
Documentaries:
- Harvest of Despair (1984)
Films:
- Famine-33 (1991)
- Child 44 (2014): The Holodomor is briefly brought up.
- The Guide (2014)
- Bitter Harvest (2017)
- Mr. Jones (2019): Biopic about the attempt of Gareth Jones to make the mass starvation known outside of USSR.
Literature:
- Maria (1934 novel), by Ulas Samchuk
- Chernobyl (2019), Episode 4, "The Happiness Of All Mankind" (briefly referenced)
