DAY 275 OF THE WAR

DAY 275 OF THE WAR

At 16:00 on the fourth Saturday of November every year, Ukrainians traditionally commemorate the millions who died during the genocide of 1932-1933. Here, @uaexplainers digs deeper in what the Holodomor was and why it still has such resonance.

“What is the Holodomor?

“Holodomor” literally means “murder by starvation.” It refers to a state-managed famine of 1932-1933 when the USSR starved to death 4.5 million Ukrainians (though other researchers point to up to 7 million deaths).

The Holodomor is considered a genocide in Ukraine and is recognized as such in more than 20 other countries. This event had an enormous impact on Ukraine as a society: almost every family in Ukraine has its own story of death and survival from the Holodomor.

Today we remember the victims of the Holodomor and other man-made famines in Ukraine. Each household lights a candle near a window to remember those who didn’t survive the famine.

How Stalin started the Holodomor

In 1928, Stalin declared a five-year plan for the Soviet economy with two aims in mind: (1) massive extraction and export of the agricultural surplus, which would finance (2) rapid industrialization. Ukraine has always been “the breadbasket of Europe,” – and its rich soil and developed agriculture put it at the centre of Stalin’s plan.

In 1929, the USSR tried to increase the extraction rate further using collectivization – a forced reorganization of the peasant-owned farmland into a centralized, state-managed “kolkhoz” system. In reality, it meant violence and mass terror: the crops were taken away from the peasants by force, and those who resisted or hid their crops were sent to concentration camps in Siberia by tens of thousands.

Ukrainians resisted collectivization en masse: around 4000 mass demonstrations of farmers were recorded during the early 1930s. Moreover, the kolkhoz system itself turned out pretty ineffective. That’s why, when poor crop and peasant revolts led to the failure of 1931 targets, Stalin directly ordered to eliminate the “nationalist” and “counterrevolution” threats and “turn Ukraine into a model Soviet republic.”

From state-managed famine to genocide

Many Soviet southern lands experienced brutal state-managed famine in 1930-1932. And by the end of 1932, up to one million Ukrainians had already died from this deeply inhumane, totalitarian policy. But instead of reversing the catastrophic policy, the Soviet leadership doubled down specifically on Ukrainians.

At the beginning of 1933, the border from Ukraine to Belarus and Russia got closed. The cities – where there was at least some food – were also closed off for the peasants. The Ukrainians were locked out in their villages and couldn’t physically escape to places where food wasn’t taken away.

By the end of 1932, not only all of their crops were taken away at gunpoint, but even all of their livestock was taken away. The Soviets were going house to house in search of any hidden food. If people resisted the confiscation, they were shot dead. Entire villages were “blacklisted” and suffered from a continuous, targeted confiscation of all of their food. It was a calculated and carefully targeted mass slaughter of the Ukrainian peasantry.

By the end of 1933, at least 4 million Ukrainians died of starvation (plus 500,000 unborn).

How exactly millions of Ukrainians were starved to death

What started as a mass murder of peasants in parts of the Soviet Union turned into a targeted genocide of the Ukrainian nation aimed to tame the peasant class, crush national unity, and turn the surviving farmers into slaves of the Soviet state.

But it’s not enough to just count the number of deaths. You have to understand how exactly these people were dying. The genocide was happening for two years until people didn’t have a single crumb of bread to eat. Any scraps they found had to be eaten alone at night – not to be seen by the Soviets.

Entire villages would lie on the ground as lifeless swollen bodies until a scheduled truck arrived to pick up the dead (or still dying) and take them to a mass grave. Cases of cannibalism became common. Nobody was allowed to escape this hell, and nobody from the outside was allowed to come, help or just raise the issue. It was a slow, calculated, and torturous mass murder of the peasants, the bulk of the Ukrainian nation and culture.

Holodomor cover-up and denial by the USSR

During the Holodоmor, the Soviets did everything to keep the famine a secret: independent journalists and politicians weren’t allowed to Ukraine, and those who were invited to observe were presented with orchestrated guided tours that had nothing to do with reality. Any notions of “famine” were brushed off and downplayed: as the NYT’s Pulitzer prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty said, “Russia is hungry, but not starving.” He wrote this title in the spring of 1933. In 2003, the Pulitzer Board refused to withdraw his award, which was awarded initially for covering Soviet life under Stalin’s rule.

Gareth Jones was the only journalist who went to Ukraine under cover and then reported the true horrors of the Holodomor under his real name. The world didn’t hear him, and he was later murdered in 1935 in Mongolia in murky circumstances that bore some traces of the NKVD’s work.

The Soviets have done a lot to cover up all the traces of the genocide: the local officials at the time were given orders not to specify starvation as the cause of death, and the 1937 Soviet census was banned from publishing because it revealed the severely decreased population of Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

For decades, knowledge of the Holodomor survived mainly through oral history carried through the surviving generation. The Holodomor only became a publicly discussed issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The trauma of the Holodomor

It’s hard to communicate – let alone measure – the impact of the Holodomor on the Ukrainians.

Firstly, the inability to feed themselves on their land was deeply traumatic for the Ukrainian peasants who had developed a strong cultural bond with the black soil of Ukraine. In 1902, Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska wrote in her Zemlya (“Land”) novel:

“We are the people who only know soil. It is black, and our hands are black from it, but it is sacred.”

After the Holodomor, not only soil but also food became sacred. Throwing away any food is a painful act, even for young Ukrainians in 2022. My parents and I never experienced starvation in our lives, but the scarcity mentality about food was passed on through generations.

Social cohesion was also broken by the Holodomor: the prolonged, painful death from starvation meant that everybody was on their own to find enough calories to survive. Local communities fell apart, families were broken, and trust was destroyed. The social and political life of Ukraine was deeply scarred by the Holodomor.

A colonial and genocidal crime

Understanding the Holodomor requires an understanding of its genocidal and colonial aspects.

Some people who object to the genocide view of Holodomor will point to the fact that there was a USSR-wide famine and that a lot of people also died in Kuban (sidenote: Kuban’s peasantry consisted predominantly of ethnic Ukrainians who settled the area in the 18th and 19th centuries) and Kazakhstan. True, Stalin’s collectivization policy was partly about destroying a class of peasantry, but it had an additional focus on Ukrainian and Kazakh people, making the Holodomor and the Asharshylyk (the Kazakh term for the 1930s famine) not only acts of mass terror but also acts of genocide.

The Holodomor didn’t aim to murder every Ukrainian – it aimed to crush and wipe out the Ukrainian peasants who constituted the great majority of the Ukrainian population, leaving a subordinate working mass ready to follow the Soviet orders. Add to this the fact that at the same time, hundreds of Ukraine’s brightest writers, artists, and intellectuals (“the ‘Executed Renaissance’) were executed and sent to the Gulag. Ukraine was deboned and beheaded at the same time.

Rafal Lemkin, a lawyer and scholar who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, believed that the Holodomor was “the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”

The Holodomor was also a profoundly colonial crime. It was based on the ideology that viewed Ukraine and Ukrainians as resources that existed with the sole purpose of being extracted for the benefit of the metropole. Ukrainian peasants were treated as inferiors who deserved to be wiped out as soon as they stood in the way of this extraction.

Holodomor recognition and modern Russia

Since the mid-2000s, Ukraine has campaigned to raise awareness and gather global recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide. So far, multiple countries have officially labelled the Holodomor as genocide, including Poland, the Baltic states, Georgia, Hungary, Australia, Ireland,  Portugal, the USA, Canada, Mexico, and more.

Unsurprisingly, Russia has been the most vocal critic of this campaign. Russia, the successor state to the USSR, never recognized the Holodomor in separation from the Soviet-wide famine. Here’s what Russia’s parliament, the Duma, stated in 2008:

“The regions of the USSR (the Volga region, the Central Black Earth Region, the North Caucasus, the Urals, the Crimea, part of Western Siberia), Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus have suffered from the result of the famine caused by forced collectivization. This tragedy does not have and cannot have internationally established signs of genocide and should not be the subject of contemporary political speculation.”

Not only has Russia refused to take responsibility and apologize for the genocide enacted by one of the world’s most brutal dictators, but it has also done everything to keep the knowledge about the Holodomor unattainable. Official Soviet documents that could help us understand the events of the Holodomor remain hidden from the public behind the Kremlin walls.

Holodomor’s significance in 2022

Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine opened up the discussion about Russia’s colonial atrocities of the past. The viciousness and genocidal nature of the Russian invasion and occupation in Bucha, Irpin, Izium, Mariupol, and Kherson have sent waves of shock and horror across the entire globe. The invasion also serves as the window to many of the past atrocities committed by the Russian imperial project. The Holodomor is one of the cruellest of these atrocities.

Today, the best way to honour the 4.5 million Ukrainians who starved to death in 1932-1933 is to support Ukraine right now in its fight for independence and against Russian imperialism.

Finally, check if your country has legally recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide. If it hasn’t, then this weekend is the best time to raise the issue in your community and demand action at the level of your cities and governments.”