Holodomor

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор), also known as Ukrainian Genocide ([1], [2], [3]), is the specific term for the 1932–1933 man-made ([4]) famine in Ukraine, which death toll was estimated between five and ten million ([5]). The exact number of the killed is unknown due the official Soviet and modern Russian policy of secrecy covering the crimes against humanity in the USSR. The NKVD archives of the Holodomor have never been fully disclosed. The premeditation of the mass murder can be judged from the official Soviet figures of grain exports. The USSR exported 1.70 million tons of grain in 1932 and 1.84 million tons in 1933 ([6]), almost a quater of a ton in each year per each dead in the Holodomor.

As independently confirmed by the US Government Commission on the Ukrainian Famine ([7]) from live witnesses and documented data, the Holodomor was caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities. It was also confirmed that "while famine took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin's interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are paralleled only in the ethnically Cossack area of Don and Kuban of Russia" (also [8], [9]). The Soviet authorities made sure to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available. The government and parliament of Ukraine have officially recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

Etymology

Holodomor is the noun derived from the Ukrainian expression moryty holodom, "to inflict death by hunger".

Causes and outcomes

The famine affected almost exclusively the rural population, while urban areas were virtually unaffected. In comparison to the previous drought and famine in the USSR, of 1921–22, and next one in 1947, the famine of 1932-1933 was caused not by infrastructure break-down, or war, but by deliberate political and administrative decisions (e.g., see [10]).

Stalin’s policy of collectivization in the rural area of the Soviet Union met heavy resistance among most peasants (particularly in Ukraine and the Don), who did not want to work for either a kolkhoz (collective), or sovkhoz (state) farm, but preferred to manage their farms independently. The Bolsheviks had been quite clear from the very beginning that they considered private property to be socially undesirable, and had no intention of indefinitely allowing peasants to own their land. According to Bolshevik ideology (see Marxism, Leninism, Communism), private property and private enterprise were capitalist, and hence both exploitative and inefficient. Collective property and socialized economies were propagandized to be far superior, both from the perspective of social justice as well as economic efficiency.

Agriculture was to be centrally planned, like the rest of the economy, and produce exactly what the state needed. Agriculture was also to be mechanized on a grand scale, and thus be made more productive.

As a result, the urban population grew rapidly, while due to the speed of the process, administrative mismanagement, inappropriate planning, disregard for natural constraints, as well as the serious resistance among the rural population, there were severe disruptions in agricultural output (see also collectivization), which threatened the supply of the cities.

Furthermore, the Soviet government financed a significant portion of its industrialization campaign through revenues from grain exports. The government believed that it would be politically safer to give preferential treatment to the urban population over the rural: the Soviets had come to power with the support of the urban proletariat and soldiers, while the rural population had remained quite passive throughout the revolution, as well as the Russian Civil War.

As a result, the government agricultural tax meant severe hardships for the peasants.

When it had eventually become clear that the 1932 harvest was not going to meet the expectations of the government, the decreased agricultural output was blamed on the ‘kulaks' — allegedly well-to-do farmers who opposed the regime and withheld grain — and measures were undertaken to persecute upon the withholding or bargaining of grain. This was done frequently with the aid of shock brigades, which raided farms to collect grain. This was done regardless of whether the peasants retained enough grain to feed themselves, or whether they had enough seed left to plant the next harvest.

The result was disastrous: within a few months, the Ukrainian countryside, one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world, was the scene of a general famine. The Soviet government denied initial reports of the famine, and prevented foreign journalists from traveling in the region. The Politburo and regional Party committees insisted that immediate and decisive action be taken in response to the famine such that 'conscientious farmers' not suffer, while district Party committees were instructed to supply every child with milk and decreed that those who failed to mobilize resources to feed the hungry or denied hospitalization to famine victims be prosecuted. These measures were, however, hopelessly inadequate (see Davies and Wheatcroft, 'The Years of Hunger', pp. 424-5). In fact, while Ukrainian villages died from hunger, the USSR has increased its exports of grain. According to multiple witness accounts, the masses of children fleeing from hunger by trains, were arrested by the Soviet authorities and were deported either to orphanages or back to their villages, where they soon died of malnutrition.

To further prevent the spread of information about the famine, the travel from the Don, Ukraine, North Caucasus, and Kuban was forbidden by directives of January 22, 1933 (signed by Molotov and Stalin) and of January 23, 1933 (joint directive VKP(b) Central Committee and Sovnarkom). The directives stated that the travels "for bread" from these areas were organized by enemies of the Soviet power with the purpose of agitation in northern areas of the USSR against kolkhozes. Therefore railway tickets were to be sold only by ispolkom permits, and those who managed to travel northwards should be arrested. This travel ban aggravated the disaster.

Seed grain stocks as a result of limited famine relief were low for the 1933 planting, but due to normalized climactic conditions for 1933, the 1932-33 harvest proved adequate to avoid famine.

In the spring of 1933, grain requisitions were stepped up even more, since the supply of grain to the cities had become precariously low. At the same time, grain exports continued as well, albeit at lower levels. Exports were seen as necessary by the Soviet government to provide hard currency for continued industrialization. The population responded to the situation with intense political resistance. However, due to the low population density, as well as the widespread illiteracy of the rural population, this resistance never succeeded in coalescing into an organized anti-government movement. Furthermore, the Soviets responded quite brutally to signs of dissent, often deporting whole communities.

By the end of 1933, between five and ten million people had starved to death or had otherwise died unnaturally in Russia and Ukraine. The exact number of the killed is unknown due to the Soviet Union covering up the details and the relevant NKVD (later: KGB) archives never having been fully disclosed.

Was the Holodomor genocide?

Many historians (such as Robert Conquest), see the famine of 1932–33 as artificial—that is as a deliberate mass murder, if not genocide, committed as part of Joseph Stalin's collectivization program under the Soviet Union. Some historians maintain, however, that the famine was an unintentional consequence of collectivization, and that the associated resistance to it by the Ukrainian peasantry exacerbated an already-poor harvest.

Some researchers state that while the term Ukrainian Genocide is often used in application to the event, technically, the use of the term 'genocide' is inapplicable. They argue that since the Holodomor did not affect urban areas within Ukraine, and was limited to rural areas of Ukraine, it is not plausible to argue that the government tried to destroy the Ukrainian people as such. It has been suggested that the Holodomor be classified not as genocide, but as democide.

In controversy, the term democide, introduced by R.J. Rummel is "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder".[11]. Moreover, arguments that rural population (in 1932 75% to 85% of Ukrainians resided in willages) does not represent the whole nation, also what terminology to use for the designation of an event that led to extermination of roughly one quarter of population of former Soviet republic of Ukraine in 1932-1933, as well as the dispute to what extent the Soviet government deliberately aggravated the famine is rather unreasonable and often used for confrontation and politicization of the tragedy as described below.

Politicization of the Holodomor

The Holodomor issue remains politically charged and hence heated debates are likely to continue for a long time. Until around 1990, the debates largely were between Stalin apologists, who denied the Holodomor either in toto or claimed that it was unintentional, historians, who accepted the reality of the Holodomor but denied that it was intentional, and those who claim that it was intentional. Nowadays, the Holodomor issue is politicized within the framework of uneasy relations between Russia and Ukraine (and also between various regional and social groups within Ukraine). The anti-Russian factions in Ukraine have vested interest in advancing the interpretation that the Holodomor was a genocide, perpertrated by Russia-centric interests within the Soviet government. Russian poltical interests and their supporters in Ukraine have reasons to deny the deliberate character of the disaster and play down its scale, moreover one must remember that it was not only Ukranians that suffered.

Some criticize Ukrainian communities as using the term Holodomor, or sometimes Ukrainian Genocide, or even Ukrainian Holocaust, to appropriate the larger-scale tragedy of collectivization as their own national terror-famine, thus exploiting it for political purposes.

On May 15, 2003, the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of Ukraine passed a resolution declaring the famine of 1932–1933 an act of genocide, deliberately organized by the Soviet government against the Ukrainian nation.

While the course of the events as well as their underlying reasons are still a matter of debate, the decrease in population in Ukraine between 1927 and 1939 by four million is confirmed even by the official Soviet statistics. Taking an estimate of natural population growth of one to two percent, the calculated loss of population in Ukraine was over ten million during these years. When considering this number, one must also take into account the numbers involved in migration (including forced resettlement) and the purges of 1933, factors difficult to quantify.

Objections to the mainstream account of the Holodomor

While the famine was well documented at the time, its reality has been disputed by some for reasons of ideology, such as the Soviet government and its spokespeople (as well as sincere apologists of the Soviet regime), by others due to being deliberately misled by the Soviet government (such as George Bernard Shaw), and in at least one case, Walter Duranty, for personal gain.

Somewhat exceptional example of a late-era Holodomor revisionist is the Canadian Journalist Douglas Tottle who in 1987 published a book titled Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. The author claims that while there was severe economic hardships in Ukraine at that time, the idea of the Holodomor was fabricated for propaganda purposes by Nazi Germany and William Hearst, to justify the future German invasion. However, within the community of professional historians, Tottle’s book and thesis were almost entirely ignored, and the documents from the Soviet archives, available from the 1990s, clearly demonstrated that a large-scale famine did take place in Ukraine as well as other areas in the USSR.

References

Dana G. Dalrymple, "The Soviet famine of 1932-1934" in Soviet Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Jan., 1964). Pages 250-284.
R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-33", Palgrave 2004.

External links

Etymology

Causes and outcomes

Was the Holodomor genocide?

Politicization of the Holodomor

Objections to the mainstream account of the Holodomor

See also

References

External links

Declarations and legal acts

Books

Links and sources