Holodomor genocide question

This article is about the debate on whether the Holodomor was genocide. For historical negationism, see Denial of the Holodomor. For the opinions and beliefs about the Holodomor among nations, see Holodomor in modern politics.

In 1932–1933, a man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, killed 3.3–5 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (as part of the Soviet Union), included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by 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.

Whereas historian Simon Payaslian's overview of 20th century genocides in Oxford Bibliographies states that the scholarly consensus classifies the Holodomor as a genocide, historians David R. Marples and Ronald Grigor Suny earlier argued that most scholars had rejected this classification. The topic remains a significant issue in modern politics with historians disputing whether Soviet policies would fall under the legal definition of genocide. In her 2008 article, historian Liudmyla Grynevych shows how among Russian historians the general opinion is that the Holodomor does not constitute a genocide, among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it does constitute a genocide, and among western historians there are "varying views". Scholars who reject the argument that state policy in regard to the famine was genocide do not absolve Joseph Stalin or any other parts of the Soviet regime as a whole from guilt for the famine deaths, and may still view such policies as being ultimately criminal in nature.

Since 2006, political campaigns have sought recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, 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" and initiated the Genocide Convention, wrote 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:

1. Extermination of the Ukrainian national elite, "the brain of the nation", which took place in 1920, 1926 and 1930–1933
2. 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
3. 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)
4. 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, while Soviet archives remained closed and without direct evidence of the authorities' intent. In his 1986 article "The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine" written before the archives were opened in 1987, 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:

The main thing is now Ukraine. Matters in Ukraine are now extremely bad. Bad from the standpoint of the Party line. They say that there are two oblasts of Ukraine (Kyiv and Dnipropetrovs'k, it seems) where almost 50 raikomy [district Party committees] have come out against the plan of grain procurements, considering them unrealistic. In other raikomy, they confirm, the matter is no better. What does this look like? This is no party, but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. Instead of directing the districts, Kosior is always waffling between the directives of the CC VKP(b) and the demands of the district Party committees and waffled to the end. Lenin was right, when he said that a person who lacks the courage at the necessary moment to go against the current cannot be a real Bolshevik leader. Bad from the standpoint of the Soviet [state] line. Chubar is no leader. Bad from the standpoint of the GPU. Redens lacks the energy to direct the struggle with the counterrevolution in such a big and unique republic as Ukraine. If we do not now correct the situation in Ukraine, we could lose Ukraine. Consider that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are much stronger than Redens or Kosior imagine. Also consider that within the Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha, ha) there are not a few (yes, not a few!) rotten elements that are conscious or unconscious Petliura adherents and in the final analysis agents of Pilsudski. If the situation gets any worse, these elements won't hesitate to open a front within (and outside) the Party, against the Party. Worst of all, the Ukrainian leadership doesn't see these dangers.... Set yourself the task of turning Ukraine in the shortest possible time into a fortress of the USSR, into the most inalienable republic. Don't worry about money for this purpose.

John Archibald Getty

Historian John Archibald Getty, in a critique of The Harvest of Sorrow, which asserted Conquest's original claim that the famine constituted a genocide, states that the conclusion of the famine being engineered is a tempting one but that it is poorly supported by and requires a highly stretched interpretation of the evidence, but that Stalin nonetheless was the entity most responsible for the disaster, citing his role as the prime-backer of hardline collectivisation and excessive demands on the peasantry.

Firstly, 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. Secondly, Getty 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, and that as with his reaction to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, the delays by the central government to adequately respond to the crisis stemmed from Stalin's intense distrust even of his own advisors rather than a calculated, deliberate effort to prolong the starvation.

Mark Tauger

Mark Tauger, 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."

Davies and Wheatcroft criticized Tauger's methodology in the 2004 edition of The Years of Hunger. Tauger criticized Davies and Wheatcroft's methodology in a 2006 article. In the 2009 edition of their book, Davies and Wheatcroft apologized for "an error in our calculations of the 1932 [grain] yield" and stated grain yield was "between 55 and 60 million tons, a low harvest, but substantially higher than Tauger's 50 million." While they disagree on the exact tonnage of the harvest, they reach a similar conclusion as Tauger in their book's most recent edition and state that "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions [...] obvious fact that the famine was also to a considerable extent a result of the previous actions of Stalin and the Soviet leadership", and "in our own work we, like V.P. Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a programme of genocide against Ukraine. ... We do not think it appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of a policy as 'organised' by the policy-makers."

In a 2002 article for The Ukrainian Weekly, David R. Marples criticized Tauger's choice of rejecting state figures in favour of those from collective farms, which had an incentive to underestimate harvests, and he argued that Tauger's conclusion is incorrect because in his view "there is no such thing as a 'natural' famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input." Marples criticized Tauger and other scholars for failing "to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine", commenting that people died in the millions in Ukraine but not in Russia because "the 'massive program of rationing and relief' was selective."

Andrea Graziosi

According to Italian historian and professor Andrea Graziosi, the Holodomor constituted a genocide, and was "the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment". In his work, Graziosi noted that collectivization, which would give the Soviet government control over agricultural resources in Ukraine and force the farmers to give up their property to the state, was met with resistance, which, combined with the history of resistance from earlier years, prompted Stalin to view Ukraine as a threat to the Soviet rule. Graziosi also notes that rural farmers and villagers constituted approximately 80% of the population of Ukraine's SSR, and that same harsh policies were also applied to Kuban, another Soviet region predominantly populated by ethnic Ukrainians.

Graziosi noted that even under the most restrictive definitions of genocide, "deliberately inflicting on members of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is listed as a genocidal act. He also cited the time Lemkin had commented that, "generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation... It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups."

Graziosi also emphazized the root of the genocide was "unquestionably a subjective act" which was to use the famine in an "anti-Ukrainian sense on the basis of the 'national interpretation'". Without this, Graziosi said, the death toll would have been at most in the hundreds of thousands.

Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft

Professors R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft state the famine was man-made but unintentional. They believe that a combination of rapid industrialization and two successive bad harvests (1931 and 1932) were the primary causes of the famine. Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies towards the peasants were brutal and ruthless and do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the massive famine deaths; Wheatcroft says that the Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide. Wheatcroft stated that nomadic and peasant culture was destroyed by Soviet collectivization. This complies with Raphael Lemkin's older concept of genocide, which included cultural destruction as an aspect of the crime, such as that of North American Indians and Australian Aborigines. In addition while Wheatcroft rejects the genocide characterization of the famine, he states that "the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainisation."

In his 2018 article "The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines", Wheatcroft wrote:

We all agreed that Stalin's policy was brutal and ruthless and that its cover up was criminal, but we do not believe that it was done on purpose to kill people and cannot therefore be described as murder or genocide. ... Davies and I have (2004) produced the most detailed account of the grain crisis in these years, showing the uncertainties in the data and the mistakes carried out by a generally ill-informed, and excessively ambitious, government. The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding were evident. ... But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the 'man-made on purpose' side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the 'famine as a genocide'. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.

Michael Ellman criticized Davies and Wheatcroft's view of intent as too narrow, stating:

According to them [Davies and Wheatcroft], only taking an action whose sole objective is to cause deaths among the peasantry counts as intent. Taking an action with some other goal (e.g. exporting grain to import machinery) but which the actor certainly knows will also cause peasants to starve does not count as intentionally starving the peasants. However, this is an interpretation of 'intent' which flies in the face of the general legal interpretation.

Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, Nancy Qian

According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, Holodomor matches the legal definitions of a genocide.

In the paper, the researchers give credit to Davies and Wheatcroft for correcting official production data at the aggregate Soviet level, but criticize them for ignoring other data, such as disaggregated data for mortality, production or procurement, and failing to "empirically evaluate their hypotheses or estimate regressions". In the work, it is also argued that out of a total 7 million deaths caused by the famine in the Soviet Union, approximately 40% of them were ethnic Ukrainians. They also point out that during non-famine years, mortality rate in Ukraine was lower than in the rest of the Soviet Union (18 per 1,000 compared to 22 per 1,000), however in 1933, when mortality in Belarus and Russia increased to 30 per 1,000, in Ukraine it jumped to 60 per 1,000, while famine mortality rate was four to six times higher in Ukraine than in Russia. Regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine such as increased procurement rate and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which the paper argues demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned.

The analysis notes that according to 1926 and 1939 census, the overall number of ethnic Russians increased by 28%, while Belarussian population increased by almost 13%; meanwhile, number of ethnic Ukrainians decreased by 10%, and its share in the overall Soviet population dropped from 21.3% to 16.5%. When comparing population in the areas designated by the government as "grain-producing" areas, overall number of ethnic Russians increased by 20% and Tatar population grew by 31%, while Ukrainian population decreased by almost 12%; the Russian share also increased from 41.9% to 48.1%, while Ukrainian dropped from 43.8% to 37.1%, meaning Russians overtook Ukrainians as the largest ethnic group in those areas. The analysis also comes to conclusion that mortality across Soviet regions was significantly higher depending on the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians, regardless of the republic. Nancy Qian notes in a lecture about the paper that the statistics are entirely consistent "with a model of ethnic bias and mass killing" for the famine presented by other authors.

Mark Tauger criticized Natalya Naumenko's work as being based on: "major historical inaccuracies and falsehoods, omissions of essential evidence contained in her sources or easily available, and substantial misunderstandings of certain key topics". For example Naumenko ignored Tauger's findings of 8.94 million tons of the harvest that had been lost to crop "rust and smut", 4 reductions in grain procurement to Ukraine including a 39.5 million puds reduction in grain procurements ordered by Stalin, and that from Tauger's findings which are contrary to Naumenko's paper's claims the "per-capita grain procurements in Ukraine were less, often significantly less, than the per-capita procurements from the five other main grain-producing regions in the USSR in 1932". (However it may be noted that other scholars argue that in other years preceding the famine this was not the case. For example Stanislav Kulchytsky claims 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 state—a record-breaking index of marketability—but was unable to fullfill 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".) Ultimately Tauger states: "if the regime had not taken even that smaller amount grain from Ukrainian villages, the famine could have been greatly reduced or even eliminated" however (in his words) "if the regime had left that grain in Ukraine, then other parts of the USSR would have been even more deprived of food than they were, including Ukrainian cities and industrial sites, and the overall effect would still have been a major famine, even worse in “non-Ukrainian” regions." In fact in contrast to Naumenko's paper's claims the higher Ukrainian collectivization rates in Tauger's opinion actually indicate a pro-Ukrainian bias in Soviet policies rather than an anti-Ukrainian one: "[Soviet authorities] did not see collectivization as “discrimination” against Ukrainians; they saw it as a reflection of—in the leaders’ view—Ukraine’s relatively more advanced farming skills that made Ukraine better prepared for collectivization (Davies 1980a, 166, 187–188; Tauger 2006a)."

Naumenko responded to some of Tauger's criticisms in another paper. Naumenko criticizes Tauger's view of the efficacy of collective farms arguing Tauger's view goes against the consensus, she also states that the tenfold difference in death toll between the 1932–1933 Soviet famine and the Russian famine of 1891–1892 can only be explained by government policies, and that the infestations of pests and plant disease suggested by Tauger as a cause of the famine must also correspond such infestations to rates of collectivization due to deaths by area corresponding to this due Naumenko's findings that: "on average, if you compare two regions with similar pre-famine characteristics, one with zero collectivization rate and another with a 100 percent collectivization rate, the more collectivized region’s 1933 mortality rate increases by 58 per thousand relative to its 1927–1928 mortality rate". Naumenko believes the disagreement between her and Tauger is due to a "gulf in training and methods between quantitative fields like political science and economics and qualitative fields like history" noting that Tauger makes no comments on one of her paper's results section.

Michael Ellman

Professor of economics Michael Ellman states that Stalin clearly committed crimes against humanity but whether he committed genocide depends on the definition of the term. In his 2007 article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited", he wrote:

Team-Stalin's behaviour in 1930 – 34 clearly constitutes a crime against humanity (or a series of crimes against humanity) as that is defined in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court article 7, subsection 1 (d) and (h)[.] ... Was Team-Stalin also guilty of genocide? That depends on how 'genocide' is defined. ... The first physical element is the export of grain during a famine. ... The second physical element was the ban on migration from Ukraine and the North Caucasus. ... The third physical element is that 'Stalin made no effort to secure grain assistance from abroad[.]' ... If the present author were a member of the jury trying this case he would support a verdict of not guilty (or possibly the Scottish verdict of not proven). The reasons for this are as follows. First, the three physical elements in the alleged crime can all be given non-genocidal interpretations. Secondly, the two mental elements are not unambiguous evidence of genocide. Suspicion of an ethnic group may lead to genocide, but by itself is not evidence of genocide. Hence it would seem that the necessary proof of specific intent is lacking.

Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "[m]any other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of [many Western countries]", such as the Atlantic slave trade, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive.

Stanislav Kulchytsky

Stanislav Kulchytsky recognizes the Holodomor as a genocide of Ukrainians as a national group rather than an ethnic group. He criticizes scholars' approach to study the history of the USSR with a "standard toolbox", which in his opinion does not work in the case of a country whose system does not follow basic principles of a natural historical process and evolution and was born out of a concept that existed inside one person's mind. According to Kulchytsky, Holodomor requires a comprehensive study of the political, social, and national aspects of the socialist construction, which has to be approached with the realization that "appearance belied reality"; Kulchytsky believes that real intentions of some ideas and policies would not be put on paper.

In his analysis, Kulchytsky believes that before the second half of 1932, there was no intention to murder by starvation. He acknowledges that Stalin made some concessions in 1930 as a response to the disturbances and when the famine broke out at the beginning of 1932, Stalin actually sent some relief to the regions that were struck by the famine. However, the grain procurement in the second half of 1932 was still underdelivering and unrests did not die down – for the first half of 1932, OGPU recorded 932 disturbances in Ukraine, 173 in the North Caucasus, and only 43 in the Central Black Earth Oblast (out of 1,630 total). Reports two years prior recorded over 4,000 unrests in Ukraine, while in other agricultural regions – Central Black Earth, Middle Volga, Lower Volga, and North Caucasus – the numbers were slightly above 1,000. OGPU's summaries also cited public proclamations of Ukrainian insurgents to restore the independence of Ukraine, while reports by the Ukrainian officials included information about the declining popularity and authority of the party among peasants. According to Kulchytsky, these reports, combined with the overall economic crisis that weakened Stalin's positions within the party, the beginning of a national revival due to Ukrainization and distrust in Ukrainians in general, increased Stalin's fear of the possible "loss" of Ukraine; as proof he cites several letters sent by Stalin to highest-ranked officials, including a letter previously cited by James Mace.

A resolution of the central committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine published on November 18, combined with a telegram sent by Stalin to the Ukrainian officials on January 1, 1933, in which he demanded from the village councils to notify all farmers to deliver "previously stolen and hidden grain" to the state (against those who ignored the demand "harshest punitive measures" would be applied), essentially enabled mass blacklisting of Ukrainian villages followed by mass seizures of all food in those villages.

Analyzing mortality, he claims that it reflects the ethnic distribution of the rural population of Ukraine. Ethnic Ukrainian, Moldovan and Bulgarian people were disproportionately affected by the famine mainly because of their rural status. However, when comparing mortality among regions, Kulchytsky points out two territories which stood out significantly among others, even when taking into account the dependence of regions on agriculture and grain – Ukrainian SSR and Kuban, the two regions where at least (approximately) two-thirds of the population was Ukrainian. To further support his theory, Kulchytskyy compares Ukraine with Volga region and points out that in the Middle Volga region, cities suffered more from the famine while among the peasantry fertility actually exceeded mortality, as only grain was taken from them.

Kulchytsky also criticized Davies and Wheatcroft for the statement that procurements "were allocated among the republics, provinces, and districts with particular assignments for state farms, collective farms, and individual farmers" without adding any further information; he questioned why 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 state – "a record-breaking index of marketability", – but was unable to fullfill 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".

Hiroaki Kuromiya

Hiroaki Kuromiya states that although the famine was man-made and much of the deaths could have been avoided had it not been for Stalin's agricultural policies, he finds the evidence for the charge of genocide to be insufficient, and states that it is unlikely that Stalin intentionally caused the famine to kill millions, that he used famine as an alternative to the ethnic deportations that were commonly used as collective punishment under Stalin's rule, or that the famine was specifically engineered to target Ukrainians.

Noting that Stalin had few qualms with killing opponents of his rule and directly ordered several episodes of mass murder, Kuromiya finds the absence of an order to engineer a famine as punishment as unusual, in contrast to the Great Purge and the various deportations and 'national operations' which he personally ordered, and as pointing to the unlikelihood of Stalin deliberately orchestrating mass starvation. He also cites several measures taken by the Soviet government that, although ineffective, provide evidence against the intentionalist thesis, such as nine occasions of curtailing grain exports from different famine-stricken regions and clandestinely purchasing foreign aid to help alleviate the famine. He goes on to suggest that the prioritisation of military food stockpiles over the peasantry was likely motivated by Stalin's paranoia about what he believed to be an impending war with Japan and/or Poland rather than a desire to deliberately starve Ukrainians to death.

Norman Naimark

Norman Naimark in 2018

Professor of East European studies Norman Naimark states that the Holodomor's deaths were intentional and thus were genocide. In his 2010 book Stalin's Genocides, Naimark wrote:

The Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide. There is enough evidence—if not overwhelming evidence—to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.

Timothy Snyder

Professor of history Timothy Snyder stated that the starvation was "deliberate" and that several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. In his 2010 book Bloodlands, Snyder stated:

In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. ... It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.

In a 2017 Q&A, Snyder said that he believed the famine was genocide but refrained from using the term because it might confuse people, explaining:

If you asked me, is the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide? Yes, in my view, it is. In my view, it meets the criteria of the law of genocide of 1948, the Convention – it meets the ideas that Raphael Lemkin laid down. Is Armenia genocide? Yes, I believe legally it very easily meets that qualification. I just don't think that means what people think it means. Because there are people who hear the word "genocide" and they think it means the attempt to kill every man woman and child, and the Armenian genocide is closer to the Holocaust than most other cases, right, but it's not the same thing. So, I hesitate to use "genocide" because I think every time the word "genocide" is used it provokes misunderstanding.

Ronald Grigor Suny

Ronald Grigor Suny contrasts the intentions and motivation for the Holodomor and other Soviet mass killings with those of the Armenian genocide. He states that "although on moral grounds one form of mass killing is as reprehensible as another", for social scientists and historians "there is utility in restricting the term 'genocide' to what might more accurately be referred to as 'ethnocide,' that is, the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group." His definition of genocide, it "involves both the physical and the cultural extermination of a people."

Suny states that "Stalin's intentions and actions during the Ukrainian famine, no matter what sensationalist claims are made by nationalists and anti-Communists, were not the extermination of the Ukrainian people", and "a different set of explanations is required" for the Holodomor as well as for the Great Purges, the Gulag, and the Soviet ethnic cleansings of minority ethnic groups.

Stephen Kotkin

According to Stephen Kotkin, while "there is no question of Stalin's responsibility for the famine" and many deaths could have been prevented if not for the "insufficient" and counterproductive Soviet measures, there is no evidence for Stalin's intention to kill the Ukrainians deliberately. According to Kotkin, the Holodomor "was a foreseeable byproduct of the collectivization campaign that Stalin forcibly imposed, but not an intentional murder. He needed the peasants to produce more grain, and to export the grain to buy the industrial machinery for the industrialization. Peasant output and peasant production was critical for Stalin's industrialization."

Viktor Kondrashin

Historian Viktor Kondrashin asserts that Stalin's forced collectivisation programme drastically decreased peasants' quality of life and that it was the leading catalyst of the famine, and that although a notable drought did occur in 1931, it and other natural factors were not the primary causes of the famine. However, he rejects the claim that the famine was a targeted genocide of Ukrainians or any other ethnic group in the Soviet Union. According to Kondrashin, in some aspects, conditions for peasants were actually even worse and oppressive laws concerning agriculture even harsher in the Russian regions of the Kuban and Lower Volga, making the genocide thesis untenable in his view. While dismissing the notion that the famine was a genocide, Kondrashin does note, however, that Stalin took advantage of the famine crisis to neutralise the Ukrainian intelligentsia on the pretexts that they were a subversive force behind anti-Soviet uprisings by peasants. Kondrashin also assigns part of the blame for the famine to foreign governments that continued to trade with and buy food from the Soviet Union, in particular the United Kingdom, which imported approximately two million tonnes of Soviet grain during the famine years of 1932 and 1933.

Other issues in the discourse

Colonialism and imperialism

Most discourse over the question of the Holodomor as a genocide is based on the UN's Genocide Convention; however, numerous genocide definitions have been presented in genocide studies. For example, in discourse regarding the genocide of Indigenous Americans notions such as "structural genocide" have been presented to discuss the California genocide for example. Joseph Stalin, due to factional struggles with the Bukharin wing of the party, peasant resistance to the NEP under Lenin, and the need for industrialization declared a need to extract a "tribute" or "tax" from the peasantry. This idea was supported by most of the party in the 1920s. The tribute collected by the party took on the form of a virtual war against the peasantry that would lead to its cultural destruction and the relegating of the countryside to essentially a colony homogenized to the urban culture of the Soviet elite. This campaign of "colonizing" the peasantry had its roots both in old Russian Imperialism and modern social engineering of the nation state yet with key differences to the latter such as Soviet repression reflecting more the weakness of said state rather than its strength. In this vein some sources discuss the Soviet famine in relation to a project of imperialism or colonialism of Ukraine by the Soviet state and talk of colonial genocide often invokes a more nuanced and expansive discussions of genocidal processes including issues neglected in the UN definition such as cultural genocide.

Genocide as a cause or part of the famine

Another nuance to the genocide debate is whether genocide needs to be the sole or primary cause of the famine in order for it to be a genocide. For example Andrea Graziosi argues the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized against Ukrainians and the famine was "instrumentalized".

Government recognition

Further information: Holodomor in modern politics

Recognition of the Holodomor by country

After campaigns from the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide, the governments of various countries have issued statements recognizing the Holodomor as genocide including Ukraine and 14 other countries, as of 2006, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Georgia, Mexico, Peru and Poland.

In November 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by Germany, Ireland, Moldova, Romania, and the Belarusian opposition in exile. Pope Francis compared the Russian war in Ukraine with its targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure to the "terrible Holodomor Genocide", during an address at St. Peter's Square. As of October 2023, 34 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide.

Countries whose legislatures have passed a resolution recognizing Holodomor as a genocide:

• Australia, 28 October 1993
• Belgium, 10 March 2023
• Brazil, 26 April 2022
• Bulgaria, 1 February 2023
• Canada, 20 June 2003
• Colombia, 21 December 2007
• Croatia, moved 15 June 2023, approved 28 June 2023
• Czech Republic, 6 April 2022
• Ecuador, 30 October 2007
• Estonia, 20 October 1993
• France, 28 March 2023
• Georgia, 20 December 2005
• Germany, 30 November 2022
• Hungary, 26 November 2003
• Iceland, 22 March 2023
• Ireland, 24 November 2022 (resolution passed by the Seanad)
• Italy, 26 July 2023
• Latvia, 13 March 2008
• Lithuania, 24 November 2005
• Luxembourg, 13 June 2023
• Mexico, 19 February 2008
• Moldova, 24 November 2022
• Netherlands, 7 July 2023
• Paraguay, 25 October 2007
• Peru, 19 June 2007
• Poland, 4 December 2006
• Portugal, 2 March 2017
• Romania, 24 November 2022
• Slovakia, 20 June 2023
• Slovenia, 23 May 2023
• Ukraine, 28 November 2006
• United Kingdom, 25 May 2023 (resolution passed by the House of Commons)
  • Wales, 25 October 2023
• United States, 11 December 2018 (resolution passed by the House of Representatives; on 4 October 2018 resolution passed by the Senate)
• Vatican City, 2 April 2004

Other political bodies whose legislatures have passed a resolution recognizing Holodomor as a genocide:

• EU, 15 December 2022
• Council of Europe, 12 October 2023
• Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (government in exile), 19 April 2023

See also

• Assessment of the Kazakh famine of 1931–1933
• Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union
• Functionalism–intentionalism debate
• Law of Spikelets
• Mass killings under communist regimes
• Outline of genocide studies

References

Bibliography

• Conquest, Robert (1999). "Comment on Wheatcroft". Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (8): 1479–1483. doi:10.1080/09668139998426. JSTOR 153839.
• Davies, Robert; Wheatcroft, Stephen (2004). The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. Vol. 5. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230273979. ISBN 9780230273979. OCLC 1075104809.
• Ellman, Michael (June 2007). "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited". Europe-Asia Studies. 59 (4). Routledge: 663–693. doi:10.1080/09668130701291899. S2CID 53655536.
• Getty, J. Arch (2000). "The Future Did Not Work". The Atlantic. Retrieved 18 July 2020. Similarly, the overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives (including Courtois's co-editor Werth) is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan.
• Gorbunova, Viktoriia; Klymchuk, Vitalii (2020). "The Psychological Consequences of the Holodomor in Ukraine". East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. 7 (2): 33–68. doi:10.21226/ewjus609. S2CID 228999786.
• Grynevych, Liudmyla [in Ukrainian] (2008). "The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography on the Holodomor and Prospects for Its Development". The Harriman Review. 16 (2). Harriman Institute: 10–20. doi:10.7916/d8-enqm-hy61.
• Hiroaki, Kuromiya (June 2008). "The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Reconsidered". Europe-Asia Studies. 60 (4). Taylor & Francis: 663–675. doi:10.1080/09668130801999912. JSTOR 20451530. S2CID 143876370.
• Kulchytsky, Stanislav [in Ukrainian] (17 February 2007). "Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. yak henotsyd: prohalyny u dokazovii bazi" Голодомор 1932 — 1933 рр. як геноцид: прогалини у доказовій базі [Holodomor 1932–1933 as genocide: gaps in the evidence]. Den (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 19 January 2021. (English article)
• Kulchytsky, Stanislav [in Ukrainian] (2008). Holod 1932–1933 pp. v Ukrayini yak henotsyd: movoyu dokumentiv, ochyma svidkiv гoлoд 1932–1933 pp. в Україні як геноцид: мовою документів, очима свідків [Famine 1932–1933 pp. in Ukraine as genocide: in the language of documents, through the eyes of witnesses] (PDF) (in Ukrainian).
• Kulchytsky, Stanislav [in Ukrainian] (September 2017). "The Ukrainian Holodomor against the Background of the Communist Onslaught, 1929–1938" (PDF). Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. Translated by Kinsella, Ali; Olynyk, Marta D. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 January 2021.
• Kulchytsky, Stanislav [in Ukrainian] (27 November 2020). "Chomu vidbuvsya Holodomor – Stanislav Kulʹchytsʹkyy" Чому відбувся Голодомор – Станіслав Кульчицький [Why did the Holodomor happen – Stanislav Kulchytsky] (in Ukrainian). Archived from the original on 2 December 2021. Retrieved 27 April 2022.
• Marples, David R. (2007). Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. Central European University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-9637326981.
• Mendel, Iuliia (24 November 2018). "85 Years Later, Ukraine Marks Famine That Killed Millions". The New York Times. Gale A563244157.
• Suny, Ronald Grigor (2017). Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution. Verso Books. pp. 94–95. ISBN 978-1784785642. Most scholars rejected this claim, seeing the famine as following from a badly conceived and miscalculated policy of excessive requisitioning of grain, but not as directed specifically against ethnic Ukrainians.
• Wheatcroft, Stephen (2018). "The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines". Contemporary European History. 27 (3): 465–469. doi:10.1017/S0960777318000358. hdl:10536/DRO/DU:30116832.
• Ye, Kravchenko (2020). "The Concept of Demographic Losses in the Holodomor Studies". Vìsnik – Kiïvsʹkij Nacìonalʹnij Unìversitet Ìmenì Tarasa Ševčenka: Ìstorìâ. 144: 30–34.
• Yefimenko, Hennadiy (5 November 2021). "More is not better. The deleterious effects of artificially inflated Holodomor death tolls". Euromaidan Press. Translated by Chraibi, Christine.
• Zaxid (27 November 2020). "Vykhovannya holodom" Виховання голодом [Education by hunger]. Zaxid.net (in Ukrainian). Archived from the original on 9 December 2020. Retrieved 27 April 2022.

Further reading

• Boriak, H. (2001). The Publication of Sources on the History of the 1932–1933 Famine-Genocide: History, Current State, and Prospects. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 25(3/4), 167–186.
• Collins, Laura C. "Book Review: The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine," Genocide Studies and Prevention (2015) 9#1: 114–115 online.
• Bohdan, Klid; Motyl, Alexander J., eds. (2012). The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Toronto: CIUS Press.
• Kulchytsky, Stanislav [in Ukrainian] (2015). "The Holodomor of 1932–33: How and Why?". East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. 2 (1): 93–116. doi:10.21226/T23K51.
• Moore, Rebekah (2012). "'A Crime Against Humanity Arguably Without Parallel in European History': Genocide and the 'Politics' of Victimhood in Western Narratives of the Ukrainian Holodomor". Australian Journal of Politics & History. 58 (3): 367–379. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2012.01641.x.