In 1932–1933, a
famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, Demographic trap, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an Financial crisis, economic catastrophe or government policies. Th ...
known as the
Holodomor
The Holodomor ( uk, Голодомо́р, Holodomor, ; derived from uk, морити голодом, lit=to kill by starvation, translit=moryty holodom, label=none), also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a man-made famin ...
killed 3.3–5 million people in the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
,
included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader
Soviet famine of 1932–1933
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
.
At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
. Scholars debate "whether the man-made Soviet famine was a central act in a campaign of
genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
," or whether it was intended to drive Ukrainian peasants into "collectives and ensure a steady supply of grain for
Soviet industrialization
Industrialisation in the Soviet Union was a process of accelerated building-up of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union to reduce the economy's lag behind the developed capitalist states, which was carried out from May 1929 to June 1941.
...
."
According to historian
Simon Payaslian
Simon Payaslian is an Armenian-American historian, author, editor, who has held the Charles K. and Elizabeth M. Kenosian Chair in Modern Armenian History and Literature at Boston University since 2007. From 2002 to 2007 he held the Kaloosdian/Muga ...
, the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide,
whereas historian
J. Arch Getty
John Archibald Getty III (born November 30, 1950) is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union.
Life and career
Getty was ...
had stated in 2000 that the scholarly consensus classified the Holodomor as the result of bungling and rigidity rather than a genocidal plan. Other scholars say it remains a significant issue in modern politics and dispute whether Soviet policies would fall under the
legal definition of genocide
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was ...
.
Scholars who reject the argument that state policy in regard to the famine was genocide do not absolve
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...
or any other parts of the Soviet regime as a whole from guilt for the famine deaths, and may still view such policies as being ultimately criminal in nature.
Since 2006, political campaigns have sought recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, and, as of 2022, over 20 countries and the European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
have recognised the Holodomor as a genocide.
Publications before the dissolution of the USSR
James Mace
Professor of political science James Mace
James E. Mace (February 18, 1952 – May 3, 2004) was an American historian, professor, and researcher of the Holodomor.
Biography
Born in Muscogee, Oklahoma, Mace did his undergraduate studies at the Oklahoma State University, graduatin ...
helped British historian Robert Conquest
George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet.
A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...
complete the book ''The Harvest of Sorrow
''The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine'' is a 1986 book by British historian Robert Conquest published by the Oxford University Press. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow a ...
'', and after that he was the only U.S. historian working on the Ukrainian famine, and the first to categorically name it as a genocide, while Soviet archives remained closed and without direct evidence of the authorities' intent. In his 1986 article "The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine" written before the archives were opened in 1987, Mace wrote:For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.
Mace, staff director for the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine
The US Commission on the Ukraine Famine was a commission to study the Holodomor, a 1932–33 man-made famine that killed millions in Ukraine.
The Commission's final report to Congress concluded that the man-made famine was an act of genocide agai ...
, compiled a 1988 ''Report to Congress'', he stated that, based on anecdotal evidence, the Soviets had purposely prevented Ukrainians from leaving famine-struck regions; this was later confirmed by the discovery of Stalin's January 1933 secret decree "Preventing the Mass Exodus of Peasants who are Starving", restricting travel by peasants after "in the Kuban and Ukraine a massive outflow of peasants 'for bread' has begun", that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power." Roman Serbyn called this document one of the "smoking gun revelations about the genocide." One of the nineteen main conclusions of the Report to Congress was that "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933."
Robert Conquest
In 1986, British historian Robert Conquest
George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet.
A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...
published '' The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine'', dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Stalin's direction in 1929–1931 and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation
Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy intake, below the level needed to maintain an organism's life. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage and eventually, dea ...
, deportation
Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term ''expulsion'' is often used as a synonym for deportation, though expulsion is more often used in the context of international law, while deportation ...
to labor camp
A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especi ...
s, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft
Stephen George Wheatcroft (born 1 June 1947) is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as ...
and R. W. Davies
Robert William Davies (23 April 1925 – 13 April 2021), better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Obtaining his PhD in 1954, Davies w ...
, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." Wheatcroft, a rival of Conquest, claims that in unpublished 2003 correspondence Conquest recanted his view that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put 'Soviet interest' other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it." This assertion about Conquest from his scholarly opponent contradicts published statements Conquest made just 4 years prior directly disputing Wheatcroft's views, writing, "Wheatcroft takes it that Stalin did not 'consciously plan' the famine. 'Plan' is a slippery word: what we are saying is that he consciously inflicted it."
John Archibald Getty
Historian John Archibald Getty, in a critique of ''The Harvest of Sorrow'', which asserted Conquest's original claim that the famine constituted a genocide, states that the conclusion of the famine being engineered is a tempting one but that it is poorly supported by and requires a highly stretched interpretation of the evidence, but that Stalin nonetheless was the entity most responsible for the disaster, citing his role as the prime-backer of hardline collectivisation and excessive demands on the peasantry.
Firstly, Getty calls into question the estimate of the death toll at around five million Ukrainians presented in ''The Harvest of Sorrow'' as being much too high, citing much lower demographic estimates from Stephen Wheatcroft, Barbara Anderson, and Brian Silver, and notes that the severity of the famine varied greatly between local regions of Ukraine. Secondly, Getty says that the book fails to provide a convincing motive for genocide, and that other explanations for the famine better fit the evidence than the intentional genocide thesis. Getty points to the fact that Stalin's power was not absolute during these years of his rule, and that he had limited de facto control over local bureaucrats, with many of the Kremlin's orders regarding collectivisation during this time being subverted or ignored at lower levels of the chain of command; in some regions, local bureaucrats exceeded Stalin's demands for expropriation of kulaks, whereas in others, Stalin's demands for expropriation were disregarded and contravened. Moreover, even Stalin's own plans during this time period were frequently unclear and subject to constant change, furthering confusion among the lower bureaucracy and the peasantry; in some districts, farms were collectivised, then decollectivised, and then collectivised yet again within the span of less than a year. Getty also attributes the failure of Soviet authorities to relieve the famine once they realised it was going on to Stalin's paranoia and chaotic decision-making, and that as with his reaction to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...
, the delays by the central government to adequately respond to the crisis stemmed from Stalin's intense distrust even of his own advisors rather than a calculated, deliberate effort to prolong the starvation.
Publications after the dissolution of the USSR
Famine as a genocide
Rafael Lemkin
Rafael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin ( pl, Rafał Lemkin; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish lawyer who is best known for coining the term ''genocide'' and initiating the Genocide Convention, an interest spurred on after learning about the Armenian genocid ...
, who coined the term "genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
" and initiated the Genocide Convention
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was ...
, claimed that Holodomor "is a classic example of the Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification
Russification (russian: русификация, rusifikatsiya), or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian cultur ...
, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation". Lemkin stated that, because Ukrainian nation was very sensitive to the racial murder of its people and far too populous, this extermination could not follow the pattern of the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
. It instead consisted of four steps:
# Extermination of the Ukrainian national elite, "the brain of the nation", which took place in 1920, 1926 and 1930-1933
# Liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church
The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC; uk, Українська автокефальна православна церква (УАПЦ), Ukrayinska avtokefalna pravoslavna tserkva (UAPC)) was one of the three major Eastern Orthod ...
, "the soul of the nation", which occurred between 1926 and 1932 and during which 10 thousand of its priests were killed
# Extermination of a significant part of the Ukrainian peasantry as "custodians of traditions, folklore and music, national language and literature, and the national spirit" (the Holodomor itself)
# Populating the territory with other nationalities with intent of mixing Ukrainians with them, which would eventually lead to the dissolvance of the Ukrainian nation.
Norman Naimark
Professor of East European studies Norman Naimark
Norman M. Naimark (; born 1944, New York City) is an American historian. He is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He writes on modern Easte ...
states that the Holodomor's deaths were intentional and thus were genocide. In his 2010 book ''Stalin's Genocides'', Naimark wrote:
The Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide. There is enough evidence—if not overwhelming evidence—to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.
Timothy Snyder
Professor of history Timothy Snyder
Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute f ...
stated that the starvation was "deliberate" and that several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. In his 2010 book ''Bloodlands'', Snyder stated:[
]In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine.... It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.
In a 2017 Q&A, Snyder said that he believed the famine was genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
but refrained from using the term because it might confuse people, explaining:
If you asked me, is the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide? Yes, in my view, it is. In my view, it meets the criteria of the law of genocide of 1948, the Convention – it meets the ideas that Raphael Lemkin laid down. Is Armenia genocide? Yes, I believe legally it very easily meets that qualification. I just don't think that means what people think it means. Because there are people who hear the word "genocide" and they think it means the attempt to kill every man woman and child, and the Armenian genocide is closer to the Holocaust than most other cases, right, but it's not the same thing. So, I hesitate to use "genocide" because I think every time the word "genocide" is used it provokes misunderstanding.
Andrea Graziosi
According to Italian historian and professor , the Holodomor constituted a genocide. And was, "the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment"
Graziosi noted that even under the most restrictive definitions of genocide, "deliberately inflicting on members of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is listed as a genocidal act. He also cited the time Lemkin had commented that, “generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation…It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.”.
Graziosi also emphazized the root of the genocide was "unquestionably a subjective act" which was to use the famine in an "anti-Ukrainian sense on the basis of the 'national interpretation'". Without this, Graziosi said, the death toll would have been at most in the hundreds of thousands.
Nancy Qian
According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research
The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) is an independent, non‐partisan, pan‐European non‐profit organisation. Its mission is to enhance the quality of policy decisions through providing policy‐relevant research, based soundly in e ...
paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian
Nancy Qian (born in Shanghai, China) is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor in the Kellogg School of Management Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and a Professor by Courtesy at the Departmen ...
, regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine such as increased procurement rate, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which the paper argues demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians. Nancy Qian notes in a lecture about the paper that these results are entirely consistent "with a model of ethnic bias and mass killing" for the famine presented by other authors.
Famine as a crime but not genocide
Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft
Professors R. W. Davies
Robert William Davies (23 April 1925 – 13 April 2021), better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Obtaining his PhD in 1954, Davies w ...
and Stephen G. Wheatcroft
Stephen George Wheatcroft (born 1 June 1947) is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as ...
state the famine was man-made but unintentional. They believe that a combination of rapid industrialization and two successive bad harvests (1931 and 1932) were the primary reason of the famine.[ Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies towards the peasants were brutal and ruthless and do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the massive famine deaths; Wheatcroft says that the Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide.] Wheatcroft comments that nomadic and peasant culture was destroyed by Soviet collectivization, which complies with Raphael Lemkin's older concept of genocide, which included cultural destruction as an aspect of the crime, such as that of North American Indians and Australian Aborigines.
In his 2018 article "The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines", Wheatcroft wrote:
We all agreed that Stalin's policy was brutal and ruthless and that its cover up was criminal, but we do not believe that it was done on purpose to kill people and cannot therefore be described as murder or genocide.... Davies and I have (2004) produced the most detailed account of the grain crisis in these years, showing the uncertainties in the data and the mistakes carried out by a generally ill-informed, and excessively ambitious, government. The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding were evident.... But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the 'man-made on purpose' side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the 'famine as a genocide'. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.
Michael Ellman
Michael John Ellman (born 27 July 1942, Ripley, Surrey) has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He is now an ''emeritus professor''. He has written on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, ...
critiqued Davies and Wheatcroft's view of intent as too narrow, stating:
According to them avies and Wheatcroft only taking an action whose sole objective is to cause deaths among the peasantry counts as intent. Taking an action with some other goal (e.g. exporting grain to import machinery) but which the actor ''certainly knows'' will also cause peasants to starve does not count as intentionally starving the peasants. However, this is an interpretation of 'intent' which flies in the face of the general legal interpretation.
Robert Conquest
Wheatcroft and Davies noted that Conquest (the author of ''The Harvest of Sorrow'') would later go on to walk back much of the claims made in his earlier book. In a 2003 letter, Conquest clarified to them that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put "Soviet interest" other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it." In a 2008 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East where it says tha ...
, Conquest further stated of the famine that "I don't think the word genocide as such is a very useful one... the trouble is it implies that somebody, some other nation, or a large part of it were doing it... But I don't think this is true – it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people."
Michael Ellman
Professor of economics Michael Ellman
Michael John Ellman (born 27 July 1942, Ripley, Surrey) has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He is now an ''emeritus professor''. He has written on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, ...
states that Stalin clearly committed crimes against humanity
Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
but whether he committed genocide
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...
depends on the definition of the term. In his 2007 article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited", he wrote:
Team-Stalin's behaviour in 1930 – 34 clearly constitutes a crime against humanity (or a series of crimes against humanity) as that is defined in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court article 7, subsection 1 (d) and (h) .. Was Team-Stalin also guilty of genocide? That depends on how 'genocide' is defined.... The first physical element is the export of grain during a famine.... The second physical element was the ban on migration from Ukraine and the North Caucasus.... The third physical element is that 'Stalin made no effort to secure grain assistance from abroad ... If the present author were a member of the jury trying this case he would support a verdict of not guilty (or possibly the Scottish verdict of not proven
Not proven (, ) is a verdict available to a Courts of Scotland, court of law in Scotland. Under Scots law, a Criminal procedure, criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction ("guilty") and two of acquittal ("not proven" and ...
). The reasons for this are as follows. First, the three physical elements in the alleged crime can all be given non-genocidal interpretations. Secondly, the two mental elements are not unambiguous evidence of genocide. Suspicion of an ethnic group may lead to genocide, but by itself is not evidence of genocide. Hence it would seem that the necessary proof of specific intent is lacking.
Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide
Genocide definitions include many scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide,Based on a list by Adam Jones . a word coined with ''genos'' (Greek: "birth", "kind", or "race") and an English suffix ''-cide'' by Raphael Lemkin in 194 ...
and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then " ny other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of any Western countries,[ such as the ]Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...
, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the onl ...
, and the sanctions against Iraq
The sanctions against Iraq were a comprehensive financial and trade embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Iraq. They began August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, stayed largely in force until May 22, ...
in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive.
Hiroaki Kuromiya
Hiroaki Kuromiya states that although the famine was man-made and much of the deaths could have been avoided had it not been for Stalin's agricultural policies, he finds the evidence for the charge of genocide to be insufficient, and states that it is unlikely that Stalin intentionally caused the famine to kill millions, that he used famine as an alternative to the ethnic deportations that were commonly used as collective punishment under Stalin's rule, or that the famine was specifically engineered to target Ukrainians.
Noting that Stalin had few qualms with killing opponents of his rule and directly ordered several episodes of mass murder, Kuromiya finds the absence of an order to engineer a famine as punishment as unusual, in contrast to the Great Purge and the various deportations and 'national operations' which he personally ordered, and as pointing to the unlikelihood of Stalin deliberately orchestrating mass starvation. He also cites several measures taken by the Soviet government that, although ineffective, provide evidence against the intentionalist thesis, such as nine occasions of curtailing grain exports from different famine-stricken regions and clandestinely purchasing foreign aid to help alleviate the famine. He goes on to suggest that the prioritisation of military food stockpiles over the peasantry was likely motivated by Stalin's paranoia about what he believed to be an impending war with Japan and/or Poland rather than a desire to deliberately starve Ukrainians to death.
Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny (born September 25, 1940) is an American historian and political scientist. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg In ...
contrasts the intentions and motivation for the Holodomor and other Soviet mass killings with those of the Armenian genocide
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was ...
. He states that "although on moral grounds one form of mass killing is as reprehensible as another", for social scientists and historians "there is utility in restricting the term 'genocide' to what might more accurately be referred to as 'ethnocide
Ethnocide is the extermination of cultures.
Reviewing the legal and the academic history of the usage of the terms genocide and ethnocide, Bartolomé Clavero differentiates them by stating that "Genocide kills people while ethnocide kills social ...
,' that is, the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group." His definition of genocide, it "involves both the physical and the cultural extermination of a people."
Suny states that "Stalin's intentions and actions during the Ukrainian famine, no matter what sensationalist claims are made by nationalists and anti-Communists, were not the extermination of the Ukrainian people", and "a different set of explanations is required" for the Holodomor
The Holodomor ( uk, Голодомо́р, Holodomor, ; derived from uk, морити голодом, lit=to kill by starvation, translit=moryty holodom, label=none), also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a man-made famin ...
as well as for the Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Nikolay Yezhov, Yezhov'), was General ...
s, the Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in ...
, and the Soviet ethnic cleansings of minority ethnic groups.[
*]
Stephen Kotkin
According to Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959) is an American historian, academic, and author. He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he is also co-director of the pro ...
, while "there is no question of Stalin's responsibility for the famine" and many deaths could have been prevented if not for the "insufficient" and counterproductive Soviet measures, there is no evidence for Stalin's intention to kill the Ukrainians deliberately. According to Kotkin, the Holodomor "was a foreseeable byproduct of the collectivization campaign that Stalin forcibly imposed, but not an intentional murder. He needed the peasants to produce more grain, and to export the grain to buy the industrial machinery for the industrialization. Peasant output and peasant production was critical for Stalin's industrialization."
Viktor Kondrashin
Historian Viktor Kondrashin asserts that Stalin's forced collectivisation programme drastically decreased peasants' quality of life and that it was the leading catalyst of the famine, and that although a notable drought did occur in 1931, it and other natural factors were not the primary causes of the famine. However, he rejects the claim that the famine was a targeted genocide of Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in the Soviet Union. According to Kondrashin, in some aspects, conditions for peasants were actually even worse and oppressive laws concerning agriculture even harsher in the Russian regions of the Kuban and Lower Volga, making the genocide thesis untenable in his view. While dismissing the notion that the famine was a genocide, Kondrashin does note, however, that Stalin took advantage of the famine crisis to neutralise the Ukrainian intelligentsia on the pretexts that they were a subversive force behind anti-Soviet uprisings by peasants. Kondrashin also assigns part of the blame for the famine to foreign governments that continued to trade with and buy food from the Soviet Union, in particular the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
, which imported approximately two million tonnes of Soviet grain during the famine years of 1932 and 1933.
Famine as a result of natural factors
Mark Tauger
Mark Tauger, professor of history at West Virginia University
West Virginia University (WVU) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Morgantown, West Virginia. Its other campuses are those of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Beckley, Potomac State College ...
, stated that the 1932 harvest was 30–40% smaller than official statistics and that the famine was "the result of a failure of economic policy, of the 'revolution from above'", not "a 'successful' nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups." In his 1991 article "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Tauger wrote:
Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as "man-made" or "artificial."... Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population.... New Soviet archival data show that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than has been assumed and call for revision of the genocide interpretation. The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.... Thus for Ukraine, the official sown area (18.1 million hectares) reduced by the share of sown area actually harvested (93.8 percent) to a harvested area of 17 million hectares and multiplied by the average yield (approximately 5 centners) gives a total harvest of 8.5 million tons, or a little less than 60 percent of the official 14.6 million tons.
Tauger stated that "the harsh 1932–1933 procurements only displaced the famine from urban areas" but the low harvest "made a famine inevitable." Tauger stated that it is difficult to accept the famine "as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide" but that "the regime was still responsible for the deprivation and suffering of the Soviet population in the early 1930s", and "if anything, these data show that the effects of ollectivization and forced industrializationwere worse than has been assumed."
Davies and Wheatcroft criticized Tauger's methodology in the 2004 edition of ''The Years of Hunger''. Tauger criticized Davies and Wheatcroft's methodology in a 2006 article. In the 2009 edition of their book, Davies and Wheatcroft apologized for "an error in our calculations of the 1932 rain
Rain is water droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then fall under gravity. Rain is a major component of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on the Earth. It provides water f ...
yield" and stated grain yield was "between 55 and 60 million tons, a low harvest, but substantially higher than Tauger's 50 million." While they disagree on the exact tonnage of the harvest, they reach a similar conclusion as Tauger in their book's most recent edition and state that "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions", and "in our own work we, like V.P. Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a programme of genocide against Ukraine.... We do not think it appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of a policy as 'organised' by the policy-makers."
In a 2002 article for ''The Ukrainian Weekly
''The Ukrainian Weekly'' is the oldest English-language newspaper of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States, and North America.
Founded by the Ukrainian National Association, and published continuously since October 6, 1933, archived copies ...
'', David R. Marples
David Roger Marples (born October 17, 1952) is a British-born Canadian historian and Distinguished University Professor at the Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta. He specializes in history and contemporary politics of Belarus, ...
criticized Tauger's choice of rejecting state figures in favour of those from collective farms, where there was an incentive to underestimate yields, and he argued that Tauger's conclusion is incorrect because in his view "there is no such thing as a 'natural' famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input." Marples criticized Tauger and other scholars for failing "to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine", commenting that people died in the millions in Ukraine but not in Russia because "the 'massive program of rationing and relief' was selective."
Government recognition
After campaigns from the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine ( uk, Міністерство закордонних справ України) is the ministry of the Ukrainian government that oversees the foreign relations of Ukraine. The head of the ministry is the ...
for the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, the governments of various countries have issued statements recognizing the Holodomor as genocide including Ukraine and 14 other countries, , including Australia, Canada, Colombia, Georgia, Mexico, Peru and Poland.
In November 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by Germany, Ireland, Moldova, Romania, and the Belarusian opposition in exile. Pope Francis
Pope Francis ( la, Franciscus; it, Francesco; es, link=, Francisco; born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 17 December 1936) is the head of the Catholic Church. He has been the bishop of Rome and sovereign of the Vatican City State since 13 March 2013. ...
compared the Russian war in Ukraine with its targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure to the "terrible Holodomor Genocide", during an address at St. Peter's Square.
Countries recognising Holodomor as a genocide:
Other political bodies
* (European Parliament
The European Parliament (EP) is one of the legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts ...
), 15 December 2022
See also
* Assessment of the Kazakh famine of 1931–1933
* Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union
Throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common feature, often resulting in humanitarian crises traceable to political or economic instability, poor policy, environmental issues and war. Droughts and famines in the Russian Empir ...
* Functionalism–intentionalism debate
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the origins of the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. The debate on the origins of the Holocaust centres on essentially two ...
* Law of Spikelets
The Law of Spikelets or Law of Three Spikelets (russian: Закон о трёх колосках, Закон о пяти колосках, Закон семь-восемь) was a decree in the Soviet Union to protect state property of kolkhozes (So ...
* Mass killings under communist regimes
* Outline of Genocide studies
Below is an outline of articles on Genocide studies and closely related subjects; it is not an outline of acts or events related to genocide. The Event outlines section contains links to outlines of acts of genocide.
Subjects
* Acculturation
...
Notes
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
* Boriak, H. (2001)
The Publication of Sources on the History of the 1932–1933 Famine-Genocide: History, Current State, and Prospects
''Harvard Ukrainian Studies'', ''25''(3/4), 167–186.
* Collins, Laura C. "Book Review: The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine," ''Genocide Studies and Prevention'' (2015) 9#1: 114–11
online
* Klid, Bohdan and Alexander J. Motyl, eds. ''The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine'' (2012).
* Kulʹchytsʹkyi, Stanislav. "The Holodomor of 1932–33: How and Why?." ''East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies'' 2.1 (2015): 93–116
online
* Moore, Rebekah. "'A Crime Against Humanity Arguably Without Parallel in European History': Genocide and the 'Politics' of Victimhood in Western Narratives of the Ukrainian Holodomor." ''Australian Journal of Politics & History'' 58#3 (2012): 367–379.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Holodomor genocide question
Holodomor
20th-century famines
Famines in Russia
Famines in the Soviet Union
Genocide studies
Joseph Stalin