Where Did They Die?

Contemporary accounts indicate that Oleksandra Radchen­ko, whose diary was cited above, lived in one of the regions of Ukraine most severely affected by the Famine of 1932-33. Not­withstanding that, the rumor she recorded in her diary designat­ed southern Ukraine as a region that suffered even more than her own.

The famine of 1921-23 affected the southern parts of the re­public, as did the famine of 1928, which was caused by a severe winter, massive loss of winter crops, and Soviet agricultural mis­management.⁶ Decades later, the famine of 1946-47 also ravaged the south more than any other part of Ukraine. While conditions of revolution and civil war and, later, government policies contrib­uted to all three famines, the underlying factors were poor weath­er conditions and the resulting poor harvests in the black-earth steppe regions of Ukraine. For those who had lived through or knew of the famines of 1921-23 and 1928, it would be only natural to assume in 1932-33 that, whatever was happening in Kharkiv and other central regions of Ukraine, the situation was much worse in the south.⁷

This is not the picture that emerges from the maps produced by our project.

Let us start with a summary of the demographic data pro­vided by Wolowyna and his group. Direct losses or total excess deaths, estimated as the difference between actual deaths and “regular” deaths during the non-crisis years, in Kyiv Oblast for 1932-34 have been estimated at ι.ι million; in Kharkiv Oblast, the estimate is 1.0 million. In southern Ukraine, by contrast, the estimates are considerably lower: 368,000 in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and 327,000 in Odesa Oblast. The same applies if we look at direct losses calculated per thousand of population during all three years in which the effects of the Great Famine were felt. In 1933, the year that accounts for more than 90 percent of all losses, there were approximately 184 deaths per thousand in Kyiv Oblast and 176 per thousand in Kharkiv Oblast, while in Dnipro­petrovsk and Odesa Oblasts the death toll was roughly half that level: 96 per thousand in Odesa Oblast and 90 per thousand in Dnipropetrovsk.

A comparison of the maps of the 1921-23, 1928, and 1932-33 famines suggests that the Great Famine had a different “foot­print” than the two previous famines and cannot be considered to have been caused primarily by environmental factors or, at least, the same set of environmental factors. This cautious conclusion is supported by the prevailing trend in the historiography of the Great Famine, which emphasizes the human factor, especially government policies, as having caused the famine. It also puts the Famine into the category of “man-made” or, to use Oleksandra Radchenko’s term, “artificial” famines.

Does this mean that environmental factors should be dis­missed altogether in explaining the causes of the Great Famine? Our research demonstrates that it would be premature to do so. It also shows that environment did matter, but not in the same way as in the famines of the 1920s. On the eve of and during the Holodomor, environmental factors influenced human actions, particularly government policies that eventually contributed to the death toll of the famine.