What was the Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933), and was it genocide?
As one of the Soviet Union's main grain-producing areas, the Ukrainian SSR suffered particularly badly during the forced collectivization campaign of 1929-1932. The Soviet state was determined to extract from the republic the maximum amount of grain for sale abroad, in order to fund the Kremlin's mammoth industrial projects.
Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization by concealing grain, slaughtering draft animals rather than surrendering them to collective farms, and sometimes rebelling openly. Soviet policies in the Ukrainian countryside were also distinguished by their unusual harshness. Famine in some parts of Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan had begun already in 1931, yet the Soviet leadership refused to reduce grain-requisition targets.The situation escalated during 1932, when the party's high expectations clashed with a much poorer harvest. Ukrainian officials requested that the quota be lowered considerably, but Stalin and his emissaries instead blamed the Ukrainian peasants for allegedly hoarding the grain out of hatred for the Soviet power as well as local officials for abetting them. As villages descended into mass starvation in the fall of 1932, army units and gangs of party activists searched rural households, confiscating every scrap of food. Early in 1933 armed guards were posted at the Ukrainian-Russian border to prevent Ukrainian peasants from crossing it in search of food. Entire villages and districts died out in the winter of 1932-1933; numerous cases of cannibalism were recorded. All the while the Soviet government officially denied the existence of the famine. Only in February 1933 did Moscow finally allow the release of seeding stock in Ukraine for limited famine relief, targeting the children and families of Red Army servicemen.
The government did not maintain official data on famine-related mortalities in Ukraine or Union-wide; moreover, it suppressed the results of the 1937 census and had its organizers executed as “enemies.” Today Ukrainian historians estimate direct population losses in the republic at between 3 and 3.5 million famine deaths; an overall population loss as calculated by demographers (with the unborn children) was higher still, up to 4.8 million.6 Overall famine deaths in the Soviet Union are estimated at up to 7 million people.
The famine broke the peasantry's back, resulting in the establishment of Stalinist order in the countryside.
It also inflicted irreparable damage on the Ukrainian people, who remember it as their greatest national catastrophe. The famine was felt in all of the Soviet Union's grain-producing areas, but it particularly ravaged Ukraine and the southern Russian region of Kuban, which had a majority Ukrainian population. An American historian has shown how, by 1932, Stalin connected peasant resistance to an alleged nationalist conspiracy in Ukraine and linked both to the Ukrainization campaign. The Soviet dictator ordered the harshest measures against the Ukrainian farmers at the same time as he was decreeing the scaling back of Ukrainization and plotting the purging of the Communist Party ranks in Ukraine.7Seeing the man-made famine as part of a broader attack against the Ukrainian nation, in the 2000s the Ukrainian authorities initiated an international campaign to have the Holodomor (the Ukrainian term meaning “extermination through starvation”) recognized as genocide. A number of countries passed legislative acts to this effect, including Canada and the United States, while Russia protested against such a definition. It did so not only as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, potentially liable to answer for this crime against humanity, but also because the Russian authorities saw defining the Holodomor as genocide as a move to distance modern Ukraine from its Soviet past—and from historical ties with Russia.
Although not presenting a clear-cut case for ethnic genocide of Ukrainians, the Holodomor was definitely an intentional murder of the peasant population in the Ukrainian SSR—overwhelmingly Ukrainian, but also including among its victims Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews living in the countryside. As such, it was definitely aimed at undermining the Ukrainian nation, a point reinforced by the simultaneous campaign of political terror against the Ukrainian political and cultural elites conducted during and immediately after the famine.