The Holodomor

The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by hunger”, from holod “hunger” and mor “extermination”) was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban in 1932–1933 in which millions of people died. It was not a natural disaster but the result of Stalin's policy — forced collectivisation, impossible grain quotas, and the confiscation of all food.

How the famine was engineered

The famine was man-made. Stalin's forced collectivisation and the “liquidation of the kulaks” shattered rural Ukraine. The state set impossible grain-procurement quotas, and when they could not be met it confiscated not only grain but all food. Villages and collective farms that fell short were put on “blacklists” and cut off from all goods. The law of 7 August 1932 (the “law of spikelets”) prescribed death or ten years in a camp for a starving peasant who gleaned a few ears of grain. In January 1933 Ukraine's borders were sealed so that starving peasants could not flee to seek food. Those who could bought bread at the Torgsin shops, where food was sold only for gold and hard currency.

The death toll

The exact number of victims is unknown, because the occupation authorities destroyed and falsified the records. The Ukrainian demographers (Rudnytskyi et al.) estimate about 3.9 million direct excess deaths in Ukraine; the historians R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft put famine deaths across the USSR at 5.5–6.5 million; other estimates run up to about five million in Ukraine, and higher still for the famine across the whole Soviet Union. What is certain is that the dead numbered in the millions.

Genocide

The Holodomor was a genocide: a deliberate destruction directed against the Ukrainian people. The famine was not accidental — Ukraine's borders were sealed, food was seized, and the people were knowingly left to die. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide, called the Soviet actions in Ukraine a classic example of Soviet genocide (1953). Historians such as Robert Conquest (The Harvest of Sorrow), Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and Anne Applebaum (Red Famine) hold the same view.

Denial and cover-up

The Soviet regime denied the famine entirely. By the Soviet (occupation) authorities' official account there was no famine at all: the 1937 census, which would have exposed the loss, was suppressed and its organisers shot. In the West the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty denied the famine, while the British journalist Gareth Jones bore eyewitness witness to the starvation in 1933. The truth was acknowledged more widely only during the glasnost of the late 1980s and after.

Recognition — Estonia was the first

The international recognition of the Holodomor was begun by Estonia: the Riigikogu was, on 20 October 1993, the first parliament in the world to recognise the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people. It has since been recognised as genocide by Ukraine (2006), the European Parliament (2022), the United States, Germany (2022) and several dozen states in all.

Connection to our story

The Holodomor belongs among the Soviet crimes against nations — alongside the Crimean Tatars' Sürgün, the Katyn massacre, the other punished peoples, and the Baltic deportations under the occupation. The common pattern is the collective punishment of a whole people. That it was Estonia that first named this crime against the Ukrainians a genocide is no accident — as a country that lived through occupation, Estonia recognises the pattern.

Sources

National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide (Kyiv); Wikipedia (Holodomor; Holodomor in modern politics); R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (2004); Raphael Lemkin, Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine (1953); Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands; Anne Applebaum, Red Famine. Estonia's recognition: the Riigikogu statement of 20 October 1993.