Holodomor

File:Holodomor4.jpg

Victims of the Holodomor

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор), also known as Ukrainian Genocide,^{[1] [2] [3]} is the 1932–1933 man-made^[4] famine on the territory of today's Ukraine, as well as some regions of Russia populated by ethnic Ukrainians. As confirmed by hundreds of witnesses' testimonies to U.S. Congress Commission,^[5] the Holodomor was caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities. It was also confirmed 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". This was also confirmed by foreign observers in 1933.^[6] The Soviet Government admitted 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.^[7] 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 between five and ten million people^[8]. The exact number of casualties is unknown due the fact that the pertinent archives of the NKVD (later KGB, and today FSB) remain closed to historians in general.

The governments or parliaments of 26 countries recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide of Ukrainian people. Among them: Ukraine, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, United States, Vatican, still the Holodomor remains a politically charged topic for many parties. Every last Saturday of November is the official day of commemoration of the Holodomor victims in Ukraine.

Etymology

Holodomor is the noun derived from the Ukrainian expression moryty holodom, (Морити голодом) "to inflict death by hunger".

Elimination of Ukrainian Cultural Elite

The artificial famine of 1932-33 was preceded by the onset of the assault on Ukrainian national culture. This has set the environment of hate commonly leading almost every known mass killing in history. The events of 1932-33 in Ukraine were seen by the Soviet Communist leaders as a kind of "final solution" 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."^[9] 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".^[10] 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 has 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 Far North.

Causes and outcomes

On August 7, 1932, the Moscow government imposed the death penalty in Ukraine for any theft of public property. Until October 25, Moscow received only 39% of the demanded grain supplies from Ukraine. 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". On December 6, a new regulation was issued that imposed the following sanctions on Ukrainian villages: bans on supplying any goods or food to the villages, requisition of any food or grain found on site, any trade, and, lastly, the confiscation of all financial resources.^[11] The ban on travel combined with the other bans had consequences that were easy to predict.

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 [12]).

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 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. (source: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. 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. These measures were, however, hopelessly inadequate (see Davies and Wheatcroft, 'The Years of Hunger', pp. 424-5). While Ukrainian villages died from hunger, the USSR increased its exports of grain. According to multiple witness accounts, the masses of children fleeing from hunger by trains, were arrested by the Soviet authorities and were deported either to orphanages or back to their villages, where they soon died of malnutrition.

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Child victim of the Holodomor

To further prevent the spread of information about the famine, the 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, due to the low population density, as well as the widespread political illiteracy of the rural population, this resistance never succeeded in coalescing into an organized anti-government movement. Furthermore, the Soviets responded quite brutally to signs of dissent, often deporting whole communities.

Estimation of the numbers of killed

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 due to the Soviet Union's denial of the famine's existance, and the NKVD (and later KGB) archives on the Holodomor have never been fully disclosed. While the course of the events as well as their underlying reasons are still a matter of debate, the decrease in population in Ukraine between 1927 and 1939 by four million is confirmed even by the official Soviet statistics ([13]). 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 ([14]), 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.^[15] Altogether, Ukraine lost 25-50% of its rural population. Since the peasantry constituted the foundation of the national identity of Ukraine,^[16] the tragedy deeply affected all the Ukrainian nation beyond recovery for many forthcoming years.

Was the Holodomor genocide?

Cover 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. They argue that since the Holodomor did not affect urban areas within Ukraine, and was limited to rural areas of Ukraine, it is not plausible to argue that the government tried to destroy the Ukrainian people as such. It has been suggested that the Holodomor be classified not as genocide, but as democide.

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".[17]. Moreover, arguments that 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 extermination of roughly one quarter of population of former Soviet republic of 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 ([18]) 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 commision 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 [19], [20]). 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, Hungary, Lithuania, United States, Vatican have also officially recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

Politicization of the Holodomor

The Holodomor issue remains politically charged 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.

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, moreover one must remember that it was not only Ukranians that suffered.

Some criticize Ukrainian communities as 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 for the factions was that the famine was preceded by an onslaugt 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 as noted by Lev Kopelev In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933 ^[21].

Objections to the mainstream account of the Holodomor

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.

Somewhat exceptional example of a late-era Holodomor revisionist is the Canadian Journalist Douglas Tottle who in 1987 published a book titled Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. The author claims that while there was severe economic hardships in Ukraine at that time, the idea of the Holodomor was fabricated for propaganda purposes by Nazi Germany and William Randolph Hearst, to justify the future German invasion. However, within the community of professional historians, Tottle’s book and thesis were almost entirely ignored, and the documents from the Soviet archives, available from the 1990s, clearly demonstrated that a large-scale famine did take place in Ukraine as well as other areas in the USSR.

See also

• Famines in Russia and USSR
• Russian famine of 1921
• Walter Duranty
• Robert 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. ^ U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, "Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine" [22], Report to Congress, Washington, D.C., April 19 1988
6. ^ Dr. Otto Schiller, "Famine's Return to Russia, Death and Depopulation in Wide Areas of the Grain Country" [23], The Daily Telegraph, 25 August, 1933, as well as British Diplomatic Reports on the Ukrainian Famine.
7. ^ Dana G. Dalrymple, "The Soviet famine of 1932-1934" [24] in Soviet Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Jan., 1964). Pages 250-284.
8. ^ Robert Conquest, "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine" (Chapter 16: "The Death Roll" [25]), University of Alberta Press, 1986.
9. ^ "12th Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, Stenograph Record", Kharkiv 1934.
10. ^ E.g. Encyclopedia Britannica, "History of Ukraine" article.
11. ^ Robert Potocki, "Polityka państwa polskiego wobec zagdnienia ukraińskiego w latach 1930-1939" (in Polish, English summary), p. 320-321, Lublin 2003, ISBN 8391761541
12. ^ Miron Dolot, "Execution by Hunger. A Hidden Holocaust", New York 1985, ISBN 0393018865
13. ^ Sergei Maksudov, "Losses Suffered by the Population of the USSR 1918–1958", in The Samizdat Register II, ed R. Medvedev (London–New York 1981)
14. ^ R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft, "The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-33", Palgrave 2004.
15. ^ Władysław A. Serczyk, Historia Ukrainy (in Polish language), 3rd ed., Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wrocław 2001, ISBN 8304045303
16. ^ Orest Subtelny. Ukraine: A History, 1st edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1988 ISBN 0-8020-8390-0

External links

Declarations and legal acts

• Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Report to Congress. Adopted by the Commission, April 19 1988
• Joint declaration at the United Nations in connection with 70th anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933
• Address of the Verkhovna Rada to the Ukrainian nation on commemorating the victims of Holodomor 1932-1933 (in Ukrainian)

Books

• Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
• Douglas Tottle, Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard

Links and sources

• Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, Ukrainian and Russian translations
• Gareth Jones' international exposure of the Holodomor, plus many related background articles
• Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933 at the Central State Archive of Ukraine (photos, links, in Ukrainian)
• Lessons of History. Holodomor 1932-33 (in Ukrainian)
• 1932-34 Great Famine: documented view by Dr. Dana Dalrymple
• The Holodomor Memorial Website
• Testimony by Robert Conquest to the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine
• Collection of analytical articles and photos (in Ukrainian and Hungarian)
• Six part series from Den by Dr. Stanislav Kulchytsky, Why did Stalin exterminate the Ukrainians? Comprehending the Holodomor. The position of Soviet historians: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6