Holodomor
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
| Holodomor Голодомор | |
|---|---|
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933, Ukraine's capital at the time | |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Location | Soviet Ukraine, northern Kuban, Kazakhstan |
| Period | 1932–1933 |
| Total deaths | Around 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine; see death toll 62,000 to "hundreds of thousands" in the Kuban Over 300,000 Ukrainians in Kazakhstan dead or migrated |
| Causes |
|
| Relief | Foreign relief rejected by the state. 176,200 and 325,000 tons of grains provided by the state as food and seed aids between February and July 1933. |
| Effect on demographics | 10% of Ukraine's population perished Kuban Ukrainian population declined from 915,000 to 150,000 between 1926 and 1939 from various causes Over 35% of Ukrainians in Kazakhstan lost in the famine |
While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide remains in dispute. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position, held for example by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians to punish them for their rejection of the "new serfdom" and to break their nationalism.
Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million died. However, current scholarship estimates a range significantly lower with 3.5 to 5 million victims. The famine's widespread impact on Ukraine persists to this day.
Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.