The Holodomor—Non-Event or Genocide by Starvation?
What happened in the winter of 1932–1933 in Ukraine?
For more than 50 years, the official Russian line was that snow fell and potatoes got frozen in the ground. There had been two years of drought and poor harvests, but that is what happens in the countryside.
Yes, many nomadic Kazakhs and Ukrainian peasants died as a result, which is sad, but not unusual. The new collectivist approach to farming was still being resisted by reactionary kulaks, and was not yet able to produce food as efficiently as it could. The worst that could be said is that Stalin’s five-year plan met with a few administrative hitches.Gareth Jones was the only reporter among the international press contingent in Moscow at the time who reported on the deaths of peasants in Ukraine. He was banned, and subsequently “disappeared” while on assignment in Mongolia in 1935. The journalistic community has always assumed it was a Soviet secret police hit.
It was only in the fallout of the Soviet white-wash attempt of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power station melt-down, that Ukrainian writers were able to mention the Holodomor. By then, the Soviet propaganda machine was leaking all sorts of stories that it had buried. It was no surprise to Ukrainians. If four million people die in a single winter, too many millions of people carry memories.
A Ukrainian would never classify the Holodomor as an obscure seasonal tragedy. It is a hot memory of generation-crossing grievance that has become part of the universal Ukrainian consciousness.