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File:Holodomor4.jpg
Victims of the Holodomor

Holodomor (Template:Lang-ua) is a term derived from the Ukrainian expression moryty holodom (Морити голодом), which means "to inflict death by hunger". The term refers to the 1932–1933 famine on the territory of today's Ukraine, as well as some regions of Russia. The famine was caused by the Soviet authorities seizing the 1932 crop (see collectivisation in the USSR). Some scholars have argued that poor weather and the military and economic goals of Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin were additional factors precipitating the famine. The Soviet government admitted the famine's existence only in the late 1980s.

At the height of the famine, while confiscating crops from the starving peasants, the USSR exported 1.70 million tons of grain in 1932 and 1.84 million tons in 1933 (close to a quarter of a ton per each victim in each year). The Soviet authorities also banned travel out of the famine affected areas under the pretext that people travelling for food spread "anti-kolkhoz agitation".

The death toll of the famine is estimated at between five and ten million people. The rationale behind the famine as well as the exact number of casualties is unknown due to the fact that the pertinent archives of the NKVD (later KGB, and today FSB) remain closed to historians in general.

In some accounts the famine, often referred to as a "man-made" , is called the Ukrainian Genocide . Ukrainian émigré historians were among the first to argue that the famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Today, the governments or parliaments of 26 countries including Ukraine, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, United States, and Vatican City classified the 1932-1933 famine as an act of genocide. The fourth Saturday of November is the official day of commemoration of the Holodomor victims in Ukraine. Still the Holodomor remains a politically charged topic for many parties, especially in Russia. Many Russian authors continue claiming that the Holodomor was not an act of genocide but a "mere famine".

Causes and outcomes

In the early 1920s, when the Soviet Russia needed to win the sympathy of other nations to the newly-born communist state, Ukraine enjoyed a short period of revival of its national culture under the policy of Korenizatsiya. This was however ended and replaced with the return to Russification, as soon as Ukrainian strong national identity started to become an obstacle for Stalin's plans. Simultaneously, a policy of collectivization of agriculture was introduced, which primarily hit Ukraine, having the strongest agriculture in the country and a long tradition of individual farms (over 50% of Russian wheat originated from Ukraine in the beginning of 20th century). Since 1929 Stalin did not hesitate to use secret police or regular troops to confiscate Ukrainian land and food. Many Ukrainians resisted, and a desperate struggle of the peasantry against the Soviet authorities ensued: tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps or murdered. Soviet authorities soon drastically increased Ukraine's crop production quotas (by 44% in 1932), ensuring that they could not be met. On August 7, 1932, the Moscow government imposed death penalty in Ukraine for any theft of public property . Hundreds of peasants were executed each month under the new law. Still, until October 25, Moscow received only 39% of the demanded grain supplies. A special commission headed by Vyacheslav Molotov was sent to Ukraine in order to execute the grain contingent. On November 9, a secret decree urged Ukrainian militia and repression forces to increase their "effectiveness". Molotov ordered that if no grain remained in Ukrainian villages, all beets, potatoes, vegetables and anything else found growing were to be confiscated. On December 6, a new regulation was issued that imposed the following sanctions on Ukrainian villages: ban on supply of any goods or food to the villages, requisition of any food or grain found on site, ban of any trade, and, lastly, the confiscation of all financial resources. These, combined with the ban on travel, further aggravated the famine.

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

File:Holodomor1.jpg
Passers-by no longer pay attention to the corpses of starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933.

Stalin’s policy of collectivization in the rural areas of the Soviet Union met heavy resistance amongst most peasants (particularly in Ukraine and the Don), who did not want to work for either a kolkhoz (collective), or sovkhoz (state) farm, and preferred to manage their farms independently. Although the productive privately-owned farms had been initially been tolerated, and even encouraged, the Bolsheviks had been quite clear that they considered private property to be socially undesirable. Furthermore, they stated that they had no intention of allowing peasants to indefinitely own their land. According to Bolshevik ideology (see Marxism, Leninism, Communism), private property and private enterprise were capitalist economic activities, and hence both exploitative and inefficient. Collective property and socialized economies were promoted as being far superior in comparison to capitalist systems, 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, in theory, to be made more productive. At the same time, the rural population was initially encouraged to move to the cities in order to work in construction and industry.

As a result, the population of urban areas grew rapidly. The rate of this process, administrative mismanagement, inadequate planning, a disregard for natural constraints, as well as serious resistance in the rural population, all contributed toward severe disruptions in agricultural output (see also collectivization), which threatened the supply of food and other raw resources to 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. In 1929–1930 tens of thousands of officials were sent into the countryside to organize collectivization. At the same time, the "Twenty-Five Thousanders", industrial workers, mostly devoted Bolsheviks, were sent to help run the farms and assist in "dekulakization".

File:Holodomor3.jpg
Victim of the Holodomor

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. Peasants slaughtered their draft cattle rather than turn them over to the collective farms. The volume of arable works because of shortage of draft cattle was sharply reduced (see also Collectivisation in the USSR).

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. Some authors claim that "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."

The reality was different according to thousands of eyewitness accounts. The masses of children fleeing the countryside were arrested by the Soviet authorities and were deported to orphanages, where they soon died of malnutrition. Here is a typical description: "The government converted this building into a so-called "collector" for homeless children caught on the streets, and who, after sanitary inspection, were sent to orphanages. When leaving my home, I would often see how trucks would pull up there and the police would take out the filthy, bedraggled children who had been caught on the streets. A guard stood at the entrance and no one was permitted inside. During the winter of 1932-33, I often saw, five or six times, how in the early morning they took out of the building the bodies of half-naked children, covered them with filthy tarpaulins, and piled them onto trucks."

File:Holodomor2.jpg
Child victim of the Holodomor

To further prevent the spread of information about the famine, 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.

Meanwhile, Stalin was also centralizing political power over Ukraine. In January 1933, in response to CP(b)U complaints about the disastrous effects of forced collectivization, Stalin sent Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine as Second Secretary in Ukraine, along with thousands of Russian officials. Postyshev purged Ukrainian officials who opposed collectivization or had supported Ukrainization in the 1920s, although some survived, including Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar. He took control over the collectivization effort, and organized the confiscation of grain.

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, this resistance never became organized on a wide scale owing to the scattered, low-density nature of the Ukrainian rural population. Furthermore, the Soviet authorities responded harshly to signs of dissent, often breaking up and deporting whole communities.

Death toll

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 victims remains unknown; the Soviet Union long denied that the famine had ever existed, and the NKVD (and later KGB) archives on the Holodomor period have never been fully disclosed. While the course of the events as well as their underlying reasons are still a matter of debate, even the official Soviet statistics show a decrease of roughly four million people in the population of Ukraine between 1927 and 1932. ().

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. The premeditation of the mass murder can also 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 (), almost a quarter of a ton in each year per each dead in the Holodomor. The Soviet authorities made sure to prevent the starving Ukrainians from traveling to areas where food was more available. It is estimated that about 81.3% of the victims were ethnic Ukrainians, 4.5% Russians, 1.4% Jews and 1.1% were Poles. Altogether, Ukraine lost 25-50% of its rural population. Since the peasantry constituted the foundation of the national identity of Ukraine, the tragedy deeply affected all the Ukrainian nation beyond recovery for many forthcoming years.

Elimination of Ukrainian cultural elite

The artificial famine of 1932-33 fit well into the politics of assault on Ukrainian national culture. The events of 1932-33 in Ukraine were seen by the Soviet Communist leaders as an instrument against possible Ukrainian self-determination. At the 12th Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Moscow's plenipotentiary Postyshev declared that "1933 was the year of the defeat of Ukrainian nationalist counter-revolution." This "defeat" encompassed not just physical extermination of a significant portion of Ukrainian peasantry, but also virtual elimination of Ukrainian clergy, mass imprisonment and executions of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers and artists.

By the end of 1930s, approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite had been "eliminated". Some, like Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy, committed suicide. One of the leaders of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Mykola Skrypnyk, witnessing the results of his cooperation with Moscow, shot himself in the summer of 1933. The Communist Party of Ukraine, under the guidance of state officials like Kaganovich, Kosior, and Postyshev, boasted in early 1934 of the elimination of "counter-revolutionaries, nationalists, spies and class enemies". Whole academic organizations, such as the Bahaliy Institute of History and Culture, were shut down following the arrests.

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church had gained a significant following amongst the Ukrainian peasants. Mass arrests of the hierarchy and clergy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930. Thousands of priests were tortured, executed and sent to labor camps in Siberia and the Far North.

Was the Holodomor genocide?

Cover of the Soviet magazine Kolhospnytsia Ukrayiny ("Collective Farm Woman of Ukraine") dating December 1932

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.

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".. Moreover, arguments that the rural population (in 1932 75% to 85% of Ukrainians resided in villages) does not represent the whole nation, also what terminology to use for the designation of an event that led to the extermination of roughly one quarter of the population of the former Soviet republic of the 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.

Although the famine went outside Ukraine's borders into the Volga Basin and the Don and Kuban steppes of Russia, yet the full extensiveness of Stalin's intervention in crop seizure was seen only in Ukraine and Kuban - a region in Russia whose significant rural population was Kuban Cossacks - 18th century descendants from the Zaporozhian Host, and thus with potentially significant Ukrainian lineage.

According to the US Government Commission on the Ukrainian Famine () which investigated over 200 witnesses as well as documented data, the Holodomor was caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities. The commission testified 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 Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus" (also , ). This was also confirmed by foreign observers in 1933. 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. Governments and parliaments of other countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, United States, Vatican have also officially recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

Politicization of the Holodomor

The Holodomor remains a politically charged topic for many parties, especially in Russia 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. Many Russian authors continue claiming that the Holodomor was not an act of genocide but a "mere famine". Some scholars denied the existence of the famine, attributed it to Nazi popaganda, poor weather conditions, post-traumatic stress or "military needs". While generally rejected, these claims are still being disputed in some academic circles.

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 political interests and their supporters in Ukraine have reasons to deny the deliberate character of the disaster and play down its scale.

Some criticize Ukrainian communities for 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.

One of the biggest arguments is that the famine was preceded by the onslaught on the Ukrainian national culture, a common historical detail preceding all known mass killings.

Nationwide the political repressions of 1937 under the guidance of Nikolay Yezhov were known for their ferocity and ruthlessness, but Lev Kopelev wrote, "In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933", referring to the comparatively early beginning of the Soviet crackdown in Ukraine. .

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 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.

An example of a late-era Holodomor objector is Canadian journalist Douglas Tottle, author of Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (1987). Tottle claims that while there were severe economic hardships in Ukraine, the idea of the Holodomor was fabricated as propaganda by Nazi Germany and William Randolph Hearst, to justify a German invasion. Tottle is not a professional historian and his work did not receive any serious attention in the historiography of the subject.

See also

Notes

  1. Potocki, p. 320.
  2. ibid, p. 321.
  3. Serczyk, p. 311.
  4. E.g. Encyclopedia Britannica, "History of Ukraine" article.
  5. Rajca, p. 77.
  6. Davies, Wheatcroft, pp. 424-5
  7. Tauger 1991 and the acrimonious exchange between Tauger and Conquest .

References

  1. US House of Representatives Authorizes Construction of Ukrainian Genocide Monument
  2. Statement by Pope John Paul II on the 70th anniversary of the Famine
  3. HR356 "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine in 1932-1933", U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., October 21, 2003
  4. U.S. Congress Library Exhibit on Ukrainian Famine, "Resolution Of The Council Of People's Commissars Of The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic And Of The Central Committee Of The Communist Party (Bolshevik) Of Ukraine On Blacklisting Villages That Maliciously Sabotage The Collection Of Grain", December 6, 1932.
  5. Dana G. Dalrymple, "The Soviet famine of 1932-1934" in Soviet Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Jan., 1964). Pages 250-284.
  6. Robert Conquest, "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine" (Chapter 16: "The Death Roll" ), University of Alberta Press, 1986.
  7. Template:Ru icon Several articles from the Russian Единая Русь (Unified Rus') web site, e.g. , , .
  8. Template:En icon Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933" in Slavic Review 50 No 1, Spring 1991, pp. 70-89
  9. Template:En icon Letters of Mark Tauger and Robert Conquest in Slavic Review 51 No 1, pp. 192-4
  10. Template:En icon Letters of Mark Tauger and Robert Conquest in Slavic Review 53 No 1, pp. 318-9
  11. Template:En icon David Marples, "Debating the undebatable? Ukraine Famine of 1932-1933" in Edmonton Journal, June 28, 2002.
  12. Robert Potocki, "Polityka państwa polskiego wobec zagadnienia ukraińskiego w latach 1930-1939" (in Polish, English summary), Lublin 2003, ISBN 8391761541
  13. Template:Pl icon Władysław A. Serczyk, "Historia Ukrainy", 3rd ed., Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 2001, ISBN 8304045303
  14. Andrew Gregorovich, "Genocide in Ukraine 1933", part 4: "How Did Stalin Organize the Genocide?" , Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre, Toronto 1998.
  15. U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, "Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine" , Report to Congress, Washington, D.C., April 19 1988
  16. Dr. Otto Schiller, "Famine's Return to Russia, Death and Depopulation in Wide Areas of the Grain Country" , The Daily Telegraph, 25 August, 1933, as well as British Diplomatic Reports on the Ukrainian Famine.
  17. "12th Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, Stenograph Record", Kharkiv 1934.
  18. Miron Dolot, "Execution by Hunger. A Hidden Holocaust", New York 1985, ISBN 0393018865
  19. Sergei Maksudov, "Losses Suffered by the Population of the USSR 1918–1958", in The Samizdat Register II, ed R. Medvedev (London–New York 1981)
  20. R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-33", Palgrave 2004.
  21. Orest Subtelny, "Ukraine: A History", 1st edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1988 ISBN 0802083900
  22. Czesław Rajca, "Głód na Ukrainie", Werset, Lublin/Toronto 2005, ISBN 8360133042
  23. James Mace, "The Man-Made Famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine" in "Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933", p. 1-14, Edmonton 1986
  24. Ярослав Грицак (Jarosław Hrycak), "Historia Ukrainy 1772-1999. Narodziny nowoczesnego narodu", Lublin 2000, ISBN 8385854509, available online in Ukrainian language
  25. Yuri Shapoval, "The famine-genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine", Kashtan Press, Ontario 2005, ISBN 1896354386 (a collection of source documents)

External links

Declarations and legal acts

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