The Holodomor: a man-made famine, not a natural disaster

The myth

In a typical dispute, the opponent denies the very definition: supposedly “there was no so-called Holodomor,” the famine was everywhere, and to call it man-made is wrong^[1]. The logic is simple: if a famine arises from drought and crop failure, then it is a natural disaster, not a crime, and there is no question of any targeting of Ukrainians.

Natural famine versus man-made

The key to refutation lies in distinguishing two different events. A famine did occur, but the Holodomor was a man-made famine, caused not by natural factors. A telling counter-example is the famine of 1921–22: it really did have a natural component (a very dry summer) alongside the actions of the Bolsheviks, and that is precisely why no one calls it a Holodomor^[2].

By contrast, the famine of late 1932 — the first half of 1933 cannot be explained by any natural factors: the harvest was normal, and 1931 was an exceptionally good year. The mass death on the territory of Ukraine, where up to 4 million people died, was brought about solely by the actions of the Communist Party led by Stalin — above all by inflated grain-procurement quotas that swept all the grain out of the villages^[3]. (Academic estimates of direct losses range from 3.5 to 4 million; this figure rests on the work of historians, not on “television.”)

Not only Ukraine: the Kazakh parallel

That the cause was political rather than natural is also evident from the geography. The same course — forced procurement — led in Kazakhstan to a catastrophe known there as the “Asharshylyk”: around 40 %, and by the estimate in the video up to half of the Kazakh population, perished; this too is considered a man-made famine^[4]. By contrast, there was no famine on this scale on Russia’s own territory in 1932–33. The disaster struck not “the whole USSR evenly,” but specific grain-growing regions with a particular population — those from which grain and livestock were confiscated.

The substitution: the Holodomor is not the Volga famine of 1921

Hence the typical substitution: the opponent conflates the Holodomor with the famine in the Volga region of 1921–23. But what is called the Holodomor in Ukraine is exclusively the man-made famine created by the Soviet authorities in 1932–33; to equate it with the natural famine of the previous decade is an error that erases the difference between a natural disaster and a man-made crime^[5].

What Soviet historiography denied — and what the sources say

It is no accident that Soviet historiography denied the famine altogether: it “never happened,” and this was asserted for decades, until even the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine began to acknowledge the fact^[6]. That is why reliance on sources is decisive here. Among them are the report of the U.S. Congress Commission (published in 1988) with eyewitness testimony, the works of American historian James Mace, the research of Doctor of Historical Sciences Stanislav Kulchytsky (who began studying the subject back in the USSR), and the contemporary works of Hennadii Yefimenko^[6]. Denial of the man-made nature of the famine, as a rule, rests on no scholarly work at all — only on “prejudice.”

Why: a motive, not chance

If the famine was man-made, the main question arises — why. The answer that distinguishes the Holodomor from an ordinary crop failure lies in the realm of politics, not weather. The collectivization of 1929–30 triggered a wave of peasant uprisings, and the most numerous of them were precisely in Ukraine^[7]. At first Stalin temporarily backed off with his article “Dizzy with Success” (1930), and the protests subsided; but already in the autumn of that same year a resolution on the pace of collectivization was issued, ordering Ukraine to “take one of the first places” — the Ukrainian countryside was to pass through the crucible of collectivization by 1933^[14]. Stalin ordered Ukraine driven into collective farms, well aware that it would rise up again. He regarded the Ukrainian national movement as the greatest threat to the USSR, so the terror by famine was directed precisely at the Ukrainian lands^[8].

To the political motive was added an economic one. The USSR was carrying out forced industrialization, for which it needed to buy machine tools and equipment in the West — and therefore to earn hard currency. This came from exports: grain (along with timber and minerals) was shipped abroad even when people were dying of hunger in the villages. So grain was taken from the peasants for sale as well^[11]. The famine was not a side effect but a means of simultaneously breaking resistance and extracting a resource.

Hence the mechanism itself: from November 1932 to February 1933, villages were surrounded and everything edible was confiscated, down to the grain from the oven and the seed stock, so that people would die. In parallel, dekulakization was under way: “kulaks” were divided into three categories — execution, deportation to another republic, resettlement within the republic — with all their property confiscated^[9]. These were not the consequences of a crop failure but a planned operation against a specific stratum on a specific territory.

That is precisely why the event is qualified as genocide: the parliaments of many countries have recognized the Holodomor as such^[10]. Tellingly, Raphael Lemkin — the jurist who actually introduced the term “genocide” (1944) — in his 1953 work analyzed the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a classic example of Soviet genocide.

The Holodomor in the context of the 20th century

The man-made famine of 1932–33 was not an isolated episode. Historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes that Ukraine found itself at the epicenter of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century: the First and Second World Wars, communist terror, three famines, and mass deportations^[12]. In his work “Bloodlands” (2010), Snyder places Ukraine within the broader space of Eastern Europe — the lands between a notional West and a notional Russia, where millions died systematically from deliberate policy rather than from combat^[13]. In this framework the Holodomor appears not as a chance disaster nor as a “famine that was everywhere,” but as one of the central crimes of the era — alongside the Great Terror and the Nazi murders, but with its own purposeful logic directed against the Ukrainian countryside.

What this means

The argument over “natural or man-made” is not a terminological trifle. If the famine was natural, then there is neither a culprit nor intent; if it was man-made, then there are both policy and responsibility. The facts stand on the side of the latter: a good harvest on the eve, selective geography along the line of grain procurement, decades of official denial, and recognition as genocide at the level of the U.S. Congress Commission. The Holodomor was not a whim of the weather but the consequence of decisions made in Moscow.