The Holodomor was a famine which killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933 when it was under the control of the Soviet Union.
The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement
A debate rages whether the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by Josef Stalin to eliminate any possible chances of a local Ukrainian uprising against Soviet Rule or was a result of policy failures with collectivisation being a major cause.
This article about Holodomor is a featured topic in the World History segment of the IAS Exam.
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What does the term Holodomor mean?
The word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means “death by hunger”, “killing by hunger, killing by starvation”, or sometimes “murder by hunger or starvation”. It is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’; and more, ‘plague’. The expression moryty holodom means “to inflict death by hunger”.
Background of Holodomor
When Joseph Stalin came to power following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, he sought to do away with Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP-21) as it was insufficient to realise his vision of rapid industrialization. To this end, Stalin wanted to industrialise agriculture by imposing collectivization.
Collectivization meant replacing individually owned and operated farms with state-run collectives. Ukraine would be Stalin’s focus as it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
The problem was, Ukraine’s subsistence farmers were not keen on giving up their land and livelihoods for Stalin’s experiment. Stalin was equally stubborn in making collectivisation take off and was prepared to go to any means necessary, even employing violence to do so.
Resisting farmers were labelled as “kulaks” – as in well-to-do peasants. As far as the Soviet state ideology was concerned, such well-to-do peasants were enemies of the state. As a result, they drove such peasants off their lands, deporting up to 50,000 peasants to Siberia. At any cost, Stalin was determined to transform Ukraine into a modern, socialist nation.
But the collectivization drive did not go very well. By 1932 it was apparent that the Soviet planners targeted 60%. Moreover, there was enough food to go around for peasants to survive, but Joseph Stalin confiscated most of it as punishment to the peasants for not meeting quotas. A massive food crisis was underway.
By the summer of 1933, some collective farms had only a third of their households left, and prisons and labour camps were jammed to capacity. With hardly anyone left to raise crops, Stalin’s regime resettled Russian peasants from other parts of the Soviet Union in Ukraine to cope with the labour shortage. Faced with the prospect of an even wider food catastrophe, Stalin’s regime in the fall of 1933 started easing off collections.
Toll of the Holodomor
Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A United Nations joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished. Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3.3 and 7.5 million.
According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv 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.
Despite attempts by the Soviet authorities to hide the scale of the disaster, it became known abroad thanks to the publications of journalists Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ewald Ammende, Rhea Clyman, photographs made by engineer Alexander Wienerberger, etc. In response, the Soviet Union launched a counter-propaganda campaign, whereby celebrities such as Bernard Shaw, Edouard Herriot, and several others traveled to the USSR, and then made statements that they had not seen hunger.
During the German occupation of Ukraine in World War II, the occupation authorities allowed the publication of articles in local newspapers about Holodomor and other communist crimes, but they also did not want to pay too much attention to this issue in order to avoid stirring national sentiment.
Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. The Soviet Union continued to deny the scale and death toll of the Holodomor and when it dissolved in 1991, the new Russian state still continued the legacy of denial.
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