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)