HOLODOMOR - THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE GENOCIDE OF 1932-1933

As many as ten million Ukrainians died in Soviet Ukraine from hunger and accompanying diseases during the Great Famine of 1932-1933. There was no drought or floods, and the crops were good; the destruction of human life was man-made, conscious and deliberate. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ethnic Ukrainians also died in the adjacent regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), especially the Kuban province of the Northern Caucasus region. Ukrainians have appropriately named this catastrophe "the Holodomor" or "extermination by famine", and today it is considered a genocide against the Ukrainian people as such.

Ukrainians suffered three major famines under the Communist regime: in 1921-1923, 1932-1933 and 1946-1947; but it was the second tragedy, the most costly in terms of human life and the one which threatened the very survival of the Ukrainian nation, that is now considered the main component of the Ukrainian genocide. The Ukrainian rural population, which at that time made up over 80% of Ukraine's inhabitants, and constituted the backbone of the Ukrainian nation, was the main target of the regime's ire which led to starvation. However, the Ukrainian genocide extended to the whole of the Ukrainian nation for, concurrently with the destruction of the Ukrainian farmers, Stalin's regime decimated the Ukrainian cultural, social and political elites. Even Ukrainian communists were not trusted and many of them were persecuted and eliminated. The Ukrainian nation was crippled and stunted in all spheres of its collective life.

The famine came on the heels of collectivization and dekulakization of the countryside. The so-called kulaks ("kurkuli" in Ukrainian) - the more prosperous and better educated farmers, who were also the natural leaders of any opposition in the countryside against the predatory policies of the Soviet state- were deprived of their property and either executed or sent away from their villages. The most "feared" were sent into exile to Siberia or Kazakhstan. While Ukraine was thus losing hundreds of thousands of its best farmers, the rest of the cultivators were forced to join the collective farms (called kolhospy in Ukrainian; kolkhozy in Russian), where they became modern-day serfs of the totalitarian Soviet state. By early 1932, three quarters of the Ukrainian farmers were already collectivized. It was at that point that widespread famine began. This fact proves that the famine was not organized to force the farmers into their kolhospy (most were already collectivized) as some historians claim, but for destruction.

Stalin's motives, the policies which led to the famine, and the ways of their implementation are well known. Having triumphed over his competitors, Stalin decided to transform his backward empire into a modern industrial and military superpower so as to be able to resume Lenin's interrupted world revolution. Industrialization would be paid for by grain exports. Collectivization of agriculture would give the Soviet state direct control over, and easier access to, the whole harvest. As Stalin set exorbitant state procurement quotas for Ukraine, his loyal henchmen, Molotov and Kaganovich, assured their approval by the Party and State authorities in Moscow, and their implementation in Ukraine. Ukrainian cereals (grains) and other products were shipped to Moscow and various other industrial centres to be exported abroad. When the grain producers balked at quotas for obligatory grain deliveries, which they could not possibly meet, they were punished with confiscation of all the foodstuffs uncovered by thorough searches.

Half a million people died in Ukraine from famine in the winter of 1932; the summer brought some relief, as people scoured the countryside for berries, nuts, mushrooms and various surrogates. The famine returned in the fall and the most intensive period was the winter and spring of 1933. Learning about the famine, the West offered to help the starving population, but this aid was cynically rejected by Moscow, and any mention of the famine was denounced as anti-Soviet propaganda. Dishonest Western journalists (Walter Duranty), intellectuals (Bernard Shaw) and politicians (Edouard Herriot) parroted Moscow's lies and silenced the rare testimony of such honest journalists as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge.

Stalin had a special reason for crushing the Ukrainians. The Communist Party's policy of "setting roots" (korenizatsiia) or "indegenization" of the communist regime in the non-Russian regions of the USSR took the shape of "Ukrainianization" in the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian regions of the RSFSR. Formerly Russified Ukrainian cities were slowly becoming Ukrainian again, with the help of the influx of Ukrainian rural population. By the early 1930s, Stalin sensed in this national revival a threat to the integrity of his empire and decided to crush it. The result was the destruction of Ukrainian elites and the famine, which destroyed the base for Ukrainian national revival.

Two recently revealed documents poignantly testify to the anti-Ukrainian nature of the enforced starvation in Ukraine and the Ukrainian regions of the RSFSR. On December 14 and 15 of 1932, the Soviet authorities blamed the Ukrainianization policies for allowing Ukrainian nationalists to penetrate Soviet state and party institutions in Ukraine and the RSFSR, control educational and publishing establishments, and sabotage the state grain procurements. Ukrainianization was completely stopped in the RSFSR and the 8,000,000 Ukrainians living there were deprived of the Ukrainian language in all hitherto local administrative institutions, schools and printing facilities. On 22 January 1933, Stalin and Molotov sent directives to the authorities of Ukraine and Belarus, and the administrations of regions of the RSFSR bordering on Ukraine, with instructions to prevent collective and independent farmers from Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus from going in search of food to the other regions of the USSR. Within six weeks, over 200,000 people were arrested, some punished on the spot, the rest sent back to their villages to starve.

*Prepared by the League of Ukrainian Canadians, with special thanks to Roman Serbyn, 2006.