ROPS Week 20- Ukraine: The Holodomor (Death by Hunger)
Estimated 7-10 million died
Agreement- deaths caused by soviet government policies
Ukraine government and diaspora groups- ‘a famine engineered by the Soviet Union as part of a series of actions, including mass executions, designed to destroy the Ukrainian nation’
Russian Government
Famine affected all rural areas of the USSR
Ukraine suffered because it had a large rural population
Ukraine not specifically targeted
UN definition of genocide- need to prove intent
Imperial Russia, Revolution and USSR in 1920s
Became a republic within the USSR (Union of Socialist Republics)
USSR wasn’t to be an Imperial Russian Empire
Ukraine had 10 different regimes during civil war
Stress on literacy, publishing, cultural development
Civil War, 1918-21
Soviet policy of indigenisation
Oct/Nov 1917- Bolshevik revolution
Bolsheviks even encouraged the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church
Feb/March 1917- Revolution ended Tsarist Autocracy
Soviet Economic Policies
Throughout USSR
Ukraine
Liquidation of ‘Kulaks’ rich famers- deportations
Grain requisitioned- not just quotas
Nov 1929- collectivisation of agriculture- land, tools, livestock
Hunger used to force recalcitrants into collective farms, break private property mentality
Private farms- Socialism in One Country
Selling grain abroad to buy equipment
Early 1930s- 1 million Ukrainian farmers expropriated
About 850,000 deported
Argument- purpose of the famine-terror was social and national- genocide
Ukrainian National Communists and intelligentsia- wave of purges and repression
Stalin concerned by sense of independence of Ukrainian elite- including leading Communists
Stalin also wanted to destroy source of Ukrainian nationalism- the village
Attempting to flee in 1932- rural dwellers didn’t have (internal) passports- couldn’t go anywhere other than their own village
Cannibalism
Witnesses and reported famine
There is today a consensus in Ukraine that it constituted an act of genocide by Stalin’s government against Ukrainians, but no such agreement exists in the West- Western works tend to neglect the national issue altogether- (David R. Marples, ‘Debate, Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 61, no. 3 (May 2009), pp. 505-518)