Holodomor

In 1932 and 1933 millions of people starved to death in Soviet Ukraine in a famine that scholars agree was largely caused by government policy. Known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor, "death by hunger", it was part of a wider Soviet famine that also struck Kazakhstan, the Kuban and other grain-growing regions of the Soviet Union. Recent scholarly estimates put the number of deaths in Ukraine at roughly 3.5 to 5 million. Whether the famine was deliberately directed at Ukrainians, and whether it should be called a genocide, remains debated.

From 1929 Joseph Stalin's government forced peasants across the Soviet Union into collective farms and drove out or deported the better-off peasants it called kulaks. Grain was to be extracted from the countryside to feed the cities and pay for rapid industrialisation. In Ukraine, one of the country's main granaries, the quotas were especially high. Collectivisation disrupted farming: draught animals were lost, sown areas were overextended, and demoralised workers cultivated poorly. Historians disagree on how far bad weather and plant disease also reduced the 1932 harvest, but the state's demands were not cut to match.

Hunger appeared in the spring of 1932, but the worst mortality came between February and July 1933, when most of the deaths occurred. The state procured only 4.3 million tonnes from the 1932 harvest against 7.2 million the year before, and it responded by searching homes and confiscating food. Grain exports continued, if at a reduced rate: Michael Ellman calculated that the 1.8 million tonnes exported in 1932–33 could have fed 5 million people for a year. The government also kept large reserves untouched and refused foreign aid, while publicly denying that any famine existed.

A law of 7 August 1932 on the protection of collective-farm property, nicknamed the "law of spikelets", allowed people to be prosecuted for gleaning leftover grain; more than 200,000 were sentenced. From November 1932 villages and districts that failed to meet quotas could be blacklisted, which cut them off from trade and supplies. An internal passport system introduced in December 1932, and a secret decree of 22 January 1933, prevented starving peasants from leaving Ukraine and the Kuban to look for food. These measures came alongside campaigns against Ukrainian intellectuals, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and, in 1933, a sweeping purge of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

Because the Soviet authorities hid the famine and suppressed death statistics, the exact toll cannot be known. Estimates made before the archives opened ranged from 2.5 million to 5 million, the latter figure from Robert Conquest. A joint statement signed by 25 countries at the United Nations in 2003 spoke of 7 to 10 million deaths, but more recent research suggests 3.5 to 5 million. Ukrainians elsewhere also suffered: the Ukrainian population of Kazakhstan fell by more than a third between 1926 and 1937.

Historians remain divided. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide, described the famine as part of a Soviet effort to destroy the Ukrainian nation, and scholars such as Norman Naimark and Stanislav Kulchytsky regard it as genocide. Others, including R. W. Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft and Stephen Kotkin, reject the view that Stalin set out to kill Ukrainians, attributing the famine to brutal policies and incompetence. Michael Ellman calls it a crime against humanity. A middle view holds that a famine caused by collectivisation was then deliberately intensified against Ukraine to break resistance.

Discussion of the famine was forbidden in the Soviet Union until the glasnost era of the late 1980s, although it had been reported abroad by journalists such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge. Since 1998 Ukraine has marked a memorial day on the fourth Saturday of November. Since 2006, Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament and 35 US states have recognised the Holodomor as genocide. In 2008 Russia's State Duma condemned the Soviet regime for neglecting people's lives in pursuit of economic and political goals.

Our 1930 and 1938 maps show the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainian SSR, in the years around the famine.