The Holodomor, a 1932–1933 man-made famine, killed 3.3–5 million ethnic Ukrainian people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (as part of the Soviet Union),; : "One demographic retrojection suggests a figure of 2.5 million famine deaths for Soviet Ukraine. This is too close to the recorded figure of excess deaths, which is about 2.4 million. The latter figure must be substantially low, since many deaths were not recorded. Another demographic calculation, carried out on behalf of the authorities of independent Ukraine, provides the figure of 3.9 million dead. The truth is probably in between these numbers, where most of the estimates of respectable scholars can be found. It seems reasonable to propose a figure of approximately 3.3 million deaths by starvation and hunger-related disease in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933"; ; ; ; : "Still, the researchers have been unable to come up with a firm figure of the number of victims. Conquest cites 5 million deaths; Werth from 4 to 5 million; and Kul'chyts'kyi 3.5 million."; : "The data of V. Tsaplin indicates 2.9 million deaths in 1933 alone."; included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million perished in the broader Soviet famine of 1930–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the USSR. Scholars debate whether there was an intent to starve millions of Ukrainians to death or not.
While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, the topic remains a significant issue in modern politics with historians disputing whether Soviet policies in the era constitute genocide. Specifically, scholarly debate of the question centres around whether or not the Holodomor was intentional and therefore constitutes a genocide under the Genocide Convention.: "Historians of Ukraine are no longer debating whether the Famine was the result of natural causes (and even then not exclusively by them). The academic debate appears to come down to the issue of intentions, to whether the special measures undertaken in Ukraine in the winter of 1932–33 that intensified starvation were aimed at Ukrainians as such." Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide. Western historians hold varying views. Most scholars who reject the argument that state policy in regard to the famine was genocidal do not absolve Joseph Stalin or the Soviet regime as a whole from guilt for the famine deaths and still view such policies as being ultimately criminal in nature.
Since 2006, the Ukrainian government has sought recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide,: "On 28 November 2006, the Parliament of Ukraine, with the president's support and in consultation with the National Academy of Sciences, voted to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people ("Zakon Ukrainy pro Holodomor"). A vigorous international campaign was subsequently initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to have the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and other governments do the same." and, as of 2023, 34 countries and the European Union had recognised the Holodomor as a genocide.
Scholarly positions
Raphael Lemkin Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" in the 1940s and initiated the Genocide Convention, wrote in 1953 that the destruction of the Ukrainian nation "is a classic example of the Soviet genocide, the longest and most extensive experiment in Russification, namely the extermination of the Ukrainian nation". Lemkin stated that it consisted of four steps: Extermination of the Ukrainian national elite, "the brain of the nation", which took place in 1920, 1926 and 1930–1933. Liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, "the soul of the nation", which occurred between 1926 and 1932 and during which 10,000 of its priests were killed. Lemkin highlighted that before liquidation, the Church was offered the opportunity to join the Russian Patriarchate, which Lemkin argues "indicates that the only goal of this action was Russification." Extermination of a significant part of the Ukrainian peasantry as "custodians of traditions, folklore and music, national language and literature, and the national spirit" (the Holodomor itself). Populating the territory with other nationalities with intent of mixing Ukrainians with them, which would eventually lead to the dissolution of the Ukrainian nation.
Robert Conquest In 1986, British historian Robert Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Stalin's direction in 1929–1931 and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake."
In a 2006 interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Conquest stated the Holodomor should be recognized as an attack on the Ukrainian people, but it should not be entirely blamed on Russian people. He said: "I don't think the word genocide as such is a very useful one. When I say if you want to use it you can, but it was invented for rather different purposes. I can see that the trouble is it implies that somebody, some other nation, or a large part of it were doing it, that the Nazis are more or less implicated, they are Germans. But I don't think this is true – it wasn't a Russian exercise, the attack on the Ukrainian people. But it was a definite attack on them as they were discriminated against as far as death went."
James Mace
Professor of political science James Mace helped British historian Robert Conquest complete the book The Harvest of Sorrow, and after that he was the only U.S. historian working on the Ukrainian famine, and the first to categorically name it as a genocide. In his 1986 article "The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine", Mace wrote:
For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.
Mace, staff director for the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, compiled a 1988 Report to Congress, he stated that, based on anecdotal evidence, the Soviets had purposely prevented Ukrainians from leaving famine-struck regions; this was later confirmed by the discovery of Stalin's January 1933 secret decree "Preventing the Mass Exodus of Peasants who are Starving", restricting travel by peasants after "in the Kuban and Ukraine a massive outflow of peasants 'for bread' has begun", that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power." Roman Serbyn called this document one of the "smoking gun" revelations about the genocide. One of the nineteen main conclusions of the Report to Congress was that "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933."
In his paper named "Is Ukrainian Genocide A Myth?", Mace further argued the Holodomor constituted a genocide. Among proof he cited a letter written by Stalin to Lazar Kaganovich on 11 September 1932, shortly before Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov were appointed heads of special commissions to oversee the grain procurements in Ukraine and Kuban (a region considered to be populated primarily by ethnic Ukrainians at the time), in which Stalin urged Kaghanovich to force Ukraine into absolute compliance.
John Archibald Getty Historian John Archibald Getty wrote a critique of The Harvest of Sorrow and of Robert Conquest's claim that the famine constituted a genocide. In this critique, Getty states that the conclusion of the famine being engineered is a tempting one but that it is poorly supported by the evidence. While Getty writes that the conclusion of genocide requires a highly stretched interpretation of the evidence, he also states that Stalin was nonetheless the entity most responsible for the disaster. Getty cites Stalin's role as the prime backer of both hardline collectivisation and excessive demands on the peasantry.
Getty calls into question the estimate of the death toll at around five million Ukrainians presented in The Harvest of Sorrow as being much too high, citing much lower demographic estimates from Stephen Wheatcroft, Barbara Anderson, and Brian Silver, and notes that the severity of the famine varied greatly between local regions of Ukraine. Getty additionally says that the book fails to provide a convincing motive for genocide, and that other explanations for the famine better fit the evidence than the intentional genocide thesis. Getty points to the fact that Stalin's power was not absolute during these years of his rule, and that he had limited de facto control over local bureaucrats, with many of the Kremlin's orders regarding collectivisation during this time being subverted or ignored at lower levels of the chain of command; in some regions, local bureaucrats exceeded Stalin's demands for expropriation of kulaks, whereas in others, Stalin's demands for expropriation were disregarded and contravened.
Moreover, even Stalin's own plans during this time period were frequently unclear and subject to constant change, furthering confusion among the lower bureaucracy and the peasantry. In some districts, farms were collectivised, then decollectivised, and then collectivised yet again within the span of less than a year. Getty also attributes the failure of Soviet authorities to relieve the famine, once they realised it was going on, to Stalin's paranoia and chaotic decision-making. Getty writes that Stalin's reaction to the famine between 1932 and 1933 resembles his reaction to the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. In Getty's view, both situations are marked by the delays by the central government to adequately respond to the crisis. Getty believes these delays stemmed from Stalin's intense distrust even of his own advisors rather than a calculated, deliberate effort to prolong the crises.
Mark Tauger Mark Tauger, associate professor of history at West Virginia University, stated that the 1932 harvest was 30–40% smaller than recorded in official statistics. He stated that it is difficult to accept the famine "as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide" but that "the regime was still responsible for the deprivation and suffering of the Soviet population in the early 1930s", and "if anything, these data show that the effects of [collectivization and forced industrialization] were worse than has been assumed."