The Holodomor

The Holodomor was a mass man-made famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of people (academic estimates of direct losses range around 3.5–4 million). It was not a natural disaster but the consequence of the policy of the Communist Party led by Stalin: forced collectivization, inflated grain-procurement quotas, and the total confiscation of food from Ukrainian villages. Ukraine, the United States, and the parliaments of many states qualify the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Nature or policy

Soviet and present-day Russian propaganda portrays the Holodomor as an ordinary famine caused by natural factors — drought and crop failure — that supposedly struck the entire USSR evenly. This is refuted by the facts: the 1931 harvest was good, and the lethal famine of 1932–33 was caused precisely by grain-procurement policy. A detailed analysis appears in the article “The Holodomor: a man-made famine, not a natural disaster”.

Why Ukraine specifically

The collectivization of 1929–1930 triggered a wave of peasant uprisings, the most numerous of which occurred precisely on Ukrainian lands. Stalin regarded the Ukrainian national movement as one of the greatest threats to the USSR — so the terror by famine was directed first and foremost at Ukraine. To the political motive was added an economic one: the confiscated grain was exported to finance forced industrialization.

Denial and recognition

For decades Soviet historiography denied the very fact of the famine. The subject was instead researched and documented by independent historians: as early as 1953, Raphael Lemkin — the author of the very concept of “genocide” — described the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a classic example of Soviet genocide; the U.S. Congress Commission (the report by James Mace, 1988) concluded that it was genocide; the leading Ukrainian researcher of the subject is Stanislav Kulchytsky.

Recommended reading

• Stanislav Kulchytsky — the leading researcher of the Holodomor, Doctor of Historical Sciences at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; he began studying the subject back in the USSR.
• James Mace — American historian, executive director of the U.S. Congress Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1988 report).
• Raphael Lemkin — jurist, author of the concept of “genocide”; in his 1953 work he analyzed the Ukrainian famine as a case of Soviet genocide.