# The Holodomor

> An overview of the Holodomor of 1932–1933 — a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that took millions of lives and is recognized as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Canonical: https://holospravdy.com/en/holodomor
Period: mizhvoyenniy | Type: hub | Updated: 2026-06-18

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"](/en/holodomor-man-made-famine).

## 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.