The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine, was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
While scholars agree the famine was primarily man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of collectivization of agriculture and actions taken to industrialize the Soviet economy. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized, and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish them for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.
Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR in 1930. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in November 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million people died. More recent scholarship has estimated a lower range of between 3.5 and 5 million victims.
Public discussion of the famine period was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".
Etymology
The Ukrainian word holodomor means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger", "killing by starvation", or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation." It is a compound of the Ukrainian holod, 'hunger' and mor, 'plague'. The modern Ukrainian verb moryty (морити) means "to poison, to drive to exhaustion, or to torment", and the expression holodom moryty means "to inflict death by hunger." The perfective form of moryty is zamoryty, 'kill or drive to death'. Similar words can be found in other Slavic languages, for example, the Polish głodomór, 'hungry person' and the Czech hladomor, 'famine'. In English, the Holodomor has also been referred to as the "artificial famine", "terror-genocide", the "Ukrainian Holocaust" and the "great famine".
Before it became synonymous with Soviet famines in Ukraine, holodomor was used as a referent or occupational adjective. Until the 1970s, Ukrainian papers almost unanimously used the word in a similar manner to the Polish głodomór, that is, to refer to either a person or group of people who were starving, a person or group responsible for starvation or a person whose occupation involved starving themselves for a freak show. Mimicking their Czech colleagues' writings on the famine, Ukrainian dissidents living in 1930s Prague would often use the aforementioned hladomor to refer to the famine, but only when writing in the Czech language, not in Ukrainian. It is not fully known if, or how much, the Czech word influenced the later Ukrainian definition.
Ukrainian historians have named two different books from the 1960s as being possible originators of holodomor's modern definition. The first is Vasyl Barka's memoir novel Zhovtyi kniaz (The Yellow Prince, 1963); the second is Pavel Shtepa's political essay Moskovstvo (1968), which uses the word to mean a deliberate policy of starvation (in relation to Soviet policy). Whatever the case, Ukrainian diaspora publications from the 1970s began using holodomor more and more, alongside holodomorstvo and narodovbyvstvo, to refer to the famine or policies that led to the famine. By the 1980s, holodomor had become the standard phrase within the Ukrainian diaspora to refer to the genocidal interpretation of the 1932-33 famine.
In the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a constituent republic, any references to the famine were dismissed as anti-Soviet propaganda, even after de-Stalinization in 1956, until the declassification and publication of historical documents in the late 1980s made continued denial of the catastrophe unsustainable. Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet glasnost ("openness") policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine, holodomor was first used by Ivan Drach, in his speech to the IX Congress of Writers in the summer of 1986. The first Ukrainian official to use the word 'famine' openly in relation to the Holodomor was Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who used it in a December 1987 speech on the occasion of the republic's 70th anniversary. Another early public usage in the Soviet Union was in a February 1988 speech by Oleksiy Musiyenko, Deputy Secretary for ideological matters of the party organisation of the Kyiv branch of the Union of Soviet Writers in Ukraine.
The term holodomor may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, when Musiyenko's article on the topic was published. Ukrainian historian Georgiy Kasianov believes that the capitalised form, Holodomor, was first used in a March 2003 publication from a Ukrainian parliamentary committee, followed by a similar reference later that year in the United Nations joint statement. An entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, published in 2004, described holodomor as "artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country's population."
Controversies
Historians Stanislav Kulchytsky and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe have harshly criticised the use of the phrase "Ukrainian Holocaust", first coined by Vasyl Hryshko in 1978, to refer to the Holodomor. Kulchytsky has written that Ukraine "does not have the moral right to employ the concept", and that the phrase conflates Jewish and Ukrainian suffering, ultimately over-politicising the Holodomor. Rossoliński-Liebe, on the other hand, has accused those who use the term of attempting to downplay the Holocaust and distract from Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. According to Liebe, articles on the famine from Ukrainian publications, often referring to the "Ukrainian Holocaust", began to appear more and more after the 1978 broadcast of the Holocaust miniseries in the US.
According to Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, the reason why Holodomor, a word that shares the first four letters of holocaust, has been so widely adopted is because influential Ukrainian anti-communists wanted to draw parallels from the 1932-33 famine to the Holocaust. The term has been criticized by these and other academics, as the Holocaust was a heavily documented, coordinated effort by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to eliminate certain ethnic groups such as Jews. By contrast, there is no definitive documentation that Stalin directly ordered the mass murder of Ukrainians. Barkan et al. state that the term Holodomor was "introduced and popularized by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America before Ukraine became independent" and that the term 'Holocaust' in reference to the famine "is not explained at all."
History
Scope and duration
The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR, including the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), which was a part of it, in spring 1932 and from February to July 1933, with the most victims recorded in spring 1933. In 1929 and 1930, over 3,000 peasant households had been nationalised with their goods confiscated. The authorities deliberately continued the grain requisitions, leaving the population without means of subsistence. Due to starvation, approximately 20,000 people died in the MASSR during the 1932–1933 period. The consequences are evident in demographic statistics: between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by only 6.6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16.9% and 11.7% respectively. The number of Ukrainians by ethnicity decreased by 10%.
From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons of grain, as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in towns were drastically cut back, and in winter 1932–1933 and spring 1933, people in many urban areas starved. Urban workers were supplied by a rationing system and therefore could occasionally assist their starving relatives in the countryside, but rations were gradually cut. By spring 1933, urban residents also faced starvation. It is estimated 70% to 80% of all famine deaths during the Holodomor in eight analyzed Oblasts in the Soviet Union occurred in the first seven months of 1933.
The first reports of mass malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kyiv oblasts. By mid-January 1933, there were reports about mass "difficulties" with food in urban areas, which had been undersupplied through the rationing system, and deaths from starvation among people who were refused rations, according to the December 1932 decree of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. By the beginning of February 1933, according to reports from local authorities and Ukrainian GPU (secret police), the most affected area was Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which also suffered from epidemics of typhus and malaria. Odesa and Kyiv oblasts were second and third respectively. By mid-March, most of the reports of starvation originated from Kyiv Oblast.
By mid-April 1933, Kharkiv Oblast reached the top of the most affected list, while Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Vinnytsia, and Donetsk oblasts, and Moldavian SSR were next on the list. Reports about mass deaths from starvation, dated mid-May through the beginning of June 1933, originated from raions in Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts. The "less affected" list noted Chernihiv Oblast and northern parts of Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts. The Central Committee of the CP(b) of Ukraine Decree of 8 February 1933 said no hunger cases should have remained untreated. The Ukrainian Weekly, which was tracking the situation in 1933, reported the difficulties in communications and the appalling situation in Ukraine.
Local authorities had to submit reports about the numbers suffering from hunger, the reasons for hunger, number of deaths from hunger, food aid provided from local sources, and centrally provided food aid required. The GPU managed parallel reporting and food assistance in the Ukrainian SSR. Many regional reports and most of the central summary reports are available from present-day central and regional Ukrainian archives.
Causes
Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made. The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes", though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies. Among contemporary historians it is debated whether the famine was an intended result of such policies, whether the Holodomor was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position, held for example by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.
Some scholars suggest that the famine was a consequence of human-made and natural factors. The most prevalent man-made factor was changes made to agriculture because of rapid industrialisation during the First Five Year Plan. There are also those who blame a systematic set of policies perpetrated by the Soviet government under Stalin designed to exterminate the Ukrainians.
Low harvest
According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, the grain yield for the Soviet Union preceding the famine was a low harvest of between 55 and 60 million tons, likely in part caused by damp weather and low traction power, yet official statistics mistakenly reported a yield of 68.9 million tons. (A single ton of grain is enough to provide a good bread ration containing c. 2350 kCal per person for three people for one year.) Historian Mark Tauger has suggested that drought and damp weather were causes of the low harvest. Mark Tauger suggested that heavy rains would help the harvest while Stephen Wheatcroft suggested it would hurt it, which Natalya Naumenko notes as a disagreement in scholarship. Another factor which reduced the harvest suggested by Tauger included endemic plant rust. However, in regard to plant disease, Stephen Wheatcroft notes that the Soviet extension of sown area combined with lack of crop rotation may have exacerbated the problem, which Tauger also acknowledges in regard to the latter.