The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.'Stalinism' was a collective responsibility - Kremlin papers, The News in Brief, University of Melbourne, 19 June 1998, Vol 7 No 22 Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine.С. Уиткрофт (Stephen G. Wheatcroft), "О демографических свидетельствах трагедии советской деревни в 1931—1933 гг." (On demographic evidence of the tragedy of the Soviet village in 1931-1833), "Трагедия советской деревни: Коллективизация и раскулачивание 1927-1939 гг.: Документы и материалы. Том 3. Конец 1930-1933 гг.", Российская политическая энциклопедия, 2001, , с. 885, Приложение № 2 Originally published in the Edmonton Journal, 30 November 2005.Stanislav Kulchytsky, "Holodomor of 1932–1933 as genocide: the gaps in the proof", Den, 17 February 2007, in Russian, in Ukrainian Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.Peter Finn, Aftermath of a Soviet Famine, The Washington Post, 27 April 2008, "There are no exact figures on how many died. Modern historians place the number between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. Yushchenko and others have said at least 10 million were killed."Stanislav Kulchytsky, "Holodomor-33: Why and how?", Zerkalo Nedeli, 25 November—1 December 2006, , in Ukrainian.
Raphael Lemkin, the co-author of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948, considered Holodomor an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation, not just Ukrainian farmers. Such a conclusion was made by him based on four factors:
the decimation of the Ukrainian national elites, the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the starvation of the Ukrainian farming population, and its replacement with non-Ukrainians from the RSFSR and elsewhere.
Debate on the harvest Encyclopædia Britannica states that there was no physical basis for famine in Ukraine, and that Soviet authorities set quotas for Ukraine at exceedingly high levels. According to historian Stanislav Kulchytsky, Ukraine produced more grain in 1930 than the Central Black Earth Oblast, Middle and Lower Volga and North Caucasus regions all together, which had never been done before, and on average gave 4.7 quintals of grain from every sown hectare to the statea record-breaking index of marketabilitybut was unable to fulfill the grain quota for 1930 until May 1931. Ukraine produced a similar amount of grain in 1931, but by the late spring of 1932 "many districts were left with no reserves of produce or fodder at all".
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According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions", within the Soviet Union; Wheatcroft estimates that the grain yield for the Soviet Union preceding the famine was a low harvest of between 55 and 60 million tons, likely in part caused by damp weather and low traction power, yet official statistics mistakenly (according to Wheatcroft and others) reported a yield of 68.9 million tons. (Note that a single ton of grain is enough to feed 3 people for one year. ) Mark Tauger has suggested an even lower harvest of 45 million tons based on data from 40% of collective farms which has been criticized by other scholars. Wheatcroft suggested that anthropologic hazards such as various agrotechnological failures may have exacerbated the low harvest. Tauger, in contrast, argues that human factors such as low traction power and an exhausted workforce were worse in 1933 than previous years yet that year there had been a higher harvest, so the cause of the low harvest was mostly due to various natural factors.
+ Famine losses by region Oblast Total deathsin thousands1932–1934 Deaths per 1000 1932 1933 1934 Kiev Oblast 1110.8 13.7 178.7 7 Kharkov Oblast 1037.6 7.8 178.9 4.2 Vinnitsia Oblast 545.5 5.9 114.6 5.2 Dnepropetrovsk Oblast 368.4 5.4 91.6 4.7 Odessa Oblast 326.9 6.1 98.8 2.4 Chernigov Oblast 254.2 6 75.7 11.9 Stalino Oblast 230.8 7 41.1 6.4 Tiraspol 68.3 9.6 102.4 8.1 The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses, being Kiev and Kharkov, produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country. A potential explanation for this was that Kharkov and Kiev fulfilled and over fulfilled their grain procurements in 1930 which led to raions in these Oblasts having their procurement quotas doubled in 1931 compared to the national average increase in procurement rate of 9%, in fact while Kharkov and Kiev had their quotas increased the Odesa oblast and some raions of Dnepropetrovsk oblast had their procurement quotas decreased. In addition according to Nataliia Levchuk of the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies "the distribution of the largely increased 1931 grain quotas in Kharkov and Kiev oblasts by raion was uneven and unjustified because it was done disproportionally to the percentage of wheat sown area and their potential grain capacity."
Soviet state policies that contributed to the Holodomor Dekulakization
During the 1930s, the Soviet Union was led by Joseph Stalin, who sought to reshape Soviet society from New Economic Policy toward stricter economic planning. As the leader of the Soviet Union, he constructed a state whose policies have been blamed for millions of deaths. A campaign of political repression, including arrests, deportations, and executions of people proclaimed traitors engaged in sabotaging collectivism, often targeted for belonging to specific demographic groups rather than as individuals, occurred from 1929 to 1932. The bourgeois were labelled kulaks and were class enemies. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931.Robert Conquest (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. .Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements Oxford University Press 2007, hardback, 320 pages This policy was accomplished simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union and effectively brought all agriculture in the Soviet Union under state control. The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and build socialism in the countryside.
The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" was announced by Stalin on 27 December 1929. The decision was formalized in a resolution, "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization", on 30 January 1930. The kulaks were divided into three categories: those to be executed for treason or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; those to be exiled for treason to Siberia, the north, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after determined to be traitors, the government's confiscation of their property occurred; and, those considered traitors or were guilty of terrorism were to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.
Blacklisting policy for “malicious bread keepers” was first tested in Ukraine as early as January 1928 as appear in the report of the Izium District Executive Committee in Kharkiv Oblast.
On September 26, 1930, Izvestia communicated a circular letter of the Labor Commissariat of the Highest Council of National Economy, and of the all-union council of trades-unions, which directed to take away from "those harmful bunglers, loafers, and tramp their pay book" - meaning deprive those, who left work on their own will and without acceptable reasons, of their right to work. In Ukraine, however, "harmful loafers and deserters of work" were deprived of the right to receive food products and other necessities from the state as was informed by Izvestia on 11 October 1930.
Fighting Ukrainian Nationalism During the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (B) during 26 January – 10 February 1934 the following statement was made:
"There is a controversy as to which deviation represents the chief danger: the deviation towards Great-Russian nationalism, or the deviation towards local nationalism. Under present conditions, this is a formal and, therefore, a pointless controversy. It would be foolish to attempt to give ready-made recipes suitable for all times and for all conditions as regards the chief and the lesser danger. Such recipes do not exist. The chief danger is the deviation against which we have ceased to fight, thereby allowing it to grow into a danger to the state.
In the Ukraine, only recently, the deviation towards Ukrainian nationalism did not represent the chief danger; but when the fight against it ceased and it was allowed to grow to such an extent that it linked up with the interventionists, this deviation became the chief danger. The question as to which is the chief danger in the sphere of the national question is determined not by futile, formal controversies, but by a Marxist analysis of the situation at the given moment, and by a study of the mistakes that have been committed in this sphere."
The role of the national question in the Soviet Union has been a source of a disagreement between Lenin and Stalin following the "Georgian Affair" in 1922. This has triggered the discussion on the "national deviations" (natsionalnyi uklon) of the communist party leadership (who in this case were referred as uklonisty) in non-Russian republics. There was also further tendency to derive the terms from the surname of the particular politicians that was considered an uklonist by the central government in Moscow, such as: "Sultangalievshchina" (rus. from Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev), "Shumskizm" (rus. from Alexander Shumsky), "Volobuevshchina “ (from Mykhailo Volobuiev), „Skripnikovshchina “ (rus. from Mykola Skrypnyk), "Khvylevizm“ (rus. from Mykola Khvylovy).
According to the letter written by Stalin to Lenin in 1922 his goal was the "replacement of fictitious independence by real internal autonomy of the republics in the sense of language, culture, justice, indoctrination, agriculture".
The discussion on Ukrainian culture is mainly known in the context of discussion about Mykola Khvylovy, who suggested that Ukrainian literature should be looking more towards Europe than towards Russia. As a reaction to the literature discussions organised by Khvylovy, Joseph Stalin has written the following in a letter to Kaganovich in 1926 : "Comrade Shumsky fails to see that, given the weakness of the indigenous communist cadres in Ukraine, this movement, led by a number of non-communist intellectuals, can in some places take on the character of a struggle for the alienation of Ukr. culture and public from the culture and public of the All-Soviet Union, the character of a struggle against "Moscow" in general, against Russians in general, against Russian culture and its highest achievement - against Leninism. I shall not prove that such a danger is becoming more and more real in Ukraine. I would only say that even some Ukrainian communists are not free from such defects".