Holodomor
THE HOLODOMOR (UKRAINE)
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933. (Wikipedia)
Passers-by and the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, 1932 (Wikipedia)
Children struggle to dig through the frozen earth for potatoes, Udachny, Ukraine. 1933 (Wikimedia commons)
The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine, Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, or the Ukranian Genocide of 1932–33, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, a compound of the Ukranian words “holod” (hunger) and “mor”(plague), millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukranians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in Ukraine’s history. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukranian people carried out by the Soviet government. However, it should be noted, some notable historians dispute its characterization as a genocide. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.
The reasons for the famine are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some scholars suggest that the man-made famine was a consequence of the economic problems associated with changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization. There are also those who blame a systematic set of policies perpetrated by the Soviet government under Stalin designed to exterminate the Ukrainians.
Soviet famine of 1932–33 : Areas of most disastrous famine shaded black.
The collectivisation policy was enforced, entailing extreme crisis and contributing to the famine. In 1929–30, peasants were induced to transfer land and livestock to state-owned farms, on which they would work as day-labourers for payment in kind. Collectivization in the Soviet Union, including the Ukranian SSR, was not popular among the peasantry and forced collectivisation led to numerous peasant revolts. The Soviet Union’s first five-year plan changed the output expected from Ukrainian farms, from the familiar crop of grain to unfamiliar crops like sugar beets and cotton. In addition, the situation was exacerbated by poor administration of the plan and the lack of relevant general management. Significant amounts of grain remained unharvested, and – even when harvested – a significant percentage was lost during processing, transportation, or storage.
A string of carts with bread confiscated from peasants. During the Holodmor, these brigades were part of the Soviet Government’s policy of taking away food from the peasants.
Soviet guards take crops from Ukranian farmers. The food they grew will be redistributed to other parts of the Soviet Union. Odessa, Ukraine. November 1932.(Wikimedia Commons)
A starving mother holds her child at the height of Holodmor. USSR. Circa 1933. (Wikimedia Commons)
In the summer of 1930, the government instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. According to Stephen Norris, a professor of Russian history at Miami University in Ohio, “The Famine of 1932–33 stemmed from later decisions made by the Stalinist government, after it became clear the 1929 plan had not gone as well as hoped for, causing a food crisis and hunger” Subsequently, in 1932, food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years imprisonment. It has been proposed that the Soviet leadership used the man-made famine to attack Ukranian nationalism, and thus it could fall under the legal definition of genocide. For example, special and particularly lethal policies were adopted in and largely limited to Soviet Ukraine at the end of 1932 and 1933. According to Snyder: "[E]ach of them may seem like an anodyne administrative measure, and each of them was certainly presented as such at the time, and yet each had to kill. Under the collectivism policy, for example, farmers were not only deprived of their properties but a large swath of these were also exiled in Siberia with no means of survival.
Those who were left behind and attempted to escape the zones of famine were ordered shot. There were foreign individuals who witnessed this atrocity or its effects. For example, there was the account of Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British journalist, which described the peak years of Holodomor in these words:
At every [train] station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering ikons and linen in exchange against a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows – infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks
The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR as well as the Moldovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (a part of the Ukrainian SSR at the time) in spring 1932 and from February to July 1933, with the most victims recorded in spring 1933. 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. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in towns were drastically cut back, and in winter 1932–33 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; and by spring 1933, urban residents also faced starvation. At the same time, workers were shown agitprop movies depicting peasants as counterrevolutionaries who hid grain and potatoes at a time when workers, who were constructing the "bright future" of socialism, were starving.
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 Kiev oblasts. By mid-January 1933, there were reports about mass "difficulties" with food in urban areas, which had been under-supplied through the rationing system, and deaths from starvation among people who were refused rations, according to the Ukraine Central Committee's Decree of December 1932. By the beginning of February 1933, according to reports from local authorities and Ukrainian GPU, the most affected area was Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which also suffered from epidemics of typhus and malaria. Odessa and Kiev oblasts were second and third, respectively. By mid-March, most of the reports of starvation originated from Kiev Oblast.
By mid-April 1933, Kharkiv Oblast reached the top of the most affected list, while Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, 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 Kiev and Kharkiv oblasts. The "less affected" list noted Chernihiv Oblast and northern parts of Kiev 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. 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.) The Ukranian Weekly, which was tracking the situation in 1933, reported the difficulties in communications and the appalling situation in Ukraine.
Evidence of widespread cannibalism was documented during the Holodomor:
Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.
The Soviet regime printed posters declaring: "To eat your own children is a barbarian act." More than 2,500 people were convicted of cannibalism during the Holodomor.
By the end of 1933 millions of people had starved to death or otherwise died unnaturally in the Soviet republics. Total population loss (including stillbirth) across the union is estimated at 6–7 million. The Soviet Union long denied that the famine had taken place. The NKVD (and later KGB) controlled the archives for the Holodomor period and made relevant records available very slowly. The exact number of the victims remains unknown and is probably impossible to estimate, even within a margin of error of a hundred thousand.
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