Holodomor genocide question

The Holodomor genocide question consists of the attempts to determine whether the Holodomor, the disastrous famine in 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine that is recognized as a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, was an ethnic genocide, a natural catastrophe or democide. Currently, there is no international consensus among scholars or politicians on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide. As of April 2008, the parliament of Ukraine and the governments of 8 countries have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

Background: The Holodomor

See also: Holodomor

The Ukrainian famine (1932–1933), or Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор) (literally in Ukrainian, "death by hunger"), was one of the largest national catastrophes in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation.

The word comes from the Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’, and mor, ‘plague’, possibly from the expression moryty holodom, ‘to inflict death by hunger’. The Ukrainian verb "moryty" (морити) means "to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody". The perfect form of the verb "moryty" is "zamoryty"—"kill or drive to death by hunger, exhausting work". The neologism "Holodomor" is given in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language as "artificial hunger, organised in vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population". Sometimes the expression is translated into English as "murder by hunger."

The reasons of the famine are the subject of intense scholarly and political debate. Some historians claim the famine was purposely engineered by the Soviet authorities to attack Ukrainian nationalism, while others view it as an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during Soviet industrialization.

Lemkin in his work "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine", the last chapter of a monumental History of Genocide, written in the 1950s, applies the concept of genocide to the destruction of the Ukrainian nation and not just Ukrainian peasants during the Holodomor. In his work he speaks of: a) the decimation of the Ukrainian national elites, b) destruction of the Orthodox Church, c) the starvation of the Ukrainian farming population, and d) its replacement with non-Ukrainian population from the RSFSR as integral components of the same genocidal process. The only dimension not included in Lemkin’s analysis was the destruction of the 8,000,000 ethnic Ukrainians living on the eve of the genocide in the Russian Republic (RSFSR). Lemkin's individual capacity to make this judgement has been challenged by Weiss-Wendt, on the basis of Lemkin's transformation of his concept of genocide to meet the demands of Central and Eastern European emigre communities who, at that time, provided his funding support. In turn Professor Steven Jacob has disputed the Weiss-Wendt interpretation in his 2008 paper, "Raphael Lemkin and the Holodomor: Was it Genocide?"

Genocide debate: Ukrainian government position

On November 28, 2006, the Parliament of Ukraine passed (by a narrow majority of 233 out of 450 votes) a law classifying the Holodomor as genocide. Another bill was sought by Yuschenko's administration to criminalize those disputing that the Holodomor was genocide, but such a law has never been adopted by the Ukrainian parliament. The law would make denying that the Holodomor was "an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people" equal to denying the Holocaust an act of genocide against the Jews. The maximum punishment proposed would be 100–300 "gross salaries", and a prison sentence of up to two years.

On April 26, 2010, newly elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych told Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe members that Holodomor was a common tragedy that struck Ukrainians and other Soviet peoples, and that it would be wrong to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation. He stated that "The Holodomor was in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was the result of Stalin's totalitarian regime. But it would be wrong and unfair to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against one nation." In response to Yanukovych's statements, the Our Ukraine Party alleged that Yanukovych directly violated Ukrainian law which defines the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people and makes public denial of the Holodomor unlawful. Our Ukraine Party also asserted that Yanukovych "ignored a ruling of January 13, 2010 by Kyiv's Court of Appeal, which recognized the leaders of the totalitarian Bolshevik regime as those guilty of 'genocide against the Ukrainian national group in 1932-33 through the artificial creation of living conditions intended for its partial physical destruction.'"

Genocide debate: Russian government position

The Russian Federation accepts historic information about the Holodomor but rejects the argument that it was ethnic genocide by pointing out the fact that millions of non-Ukrainian Soviet citizens also died because of the famine. On 2 April 2008, a statement was voted by the Russian parliament stating there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide specifically against the Ukrainian people. This was in response to the 2006 Ukrainian parliament declaration that the Holodomor was an act of genocide by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian people. The resolution adopted by Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, condemned the Soviet regime's "disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals", along with "any attempts to revive totalitarian regimes that disregard the rights and lives of citizens in former Soviet states." yet stated that "there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds."

According to The Moscow Times article: "The Kremlin argues that genocide is the killing of a population based on their ethnicity, whereas Stalin's regime annihilated all kinds of people indiscriminately, regardless of their ethnicity. But if the Kremlin really believed in this argument, it would officially acknowledge that Stalin's actions constituted mass genocide against all the peoples of the Soviet Union."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature and historian, opined in Izvestia that Holodomor was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements. According to him the lie of the Holodomor being genocide was invented decades later after the event and Ukrainian effort to have the famine recognised as genocide is an act of historical revisionism that has now surpassed the level of Bolshevik agitprop. The writer cautions that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.

In November 2010 a leaked confidential U.S. diplomatic cable revealed that Russia had allegedly pressured its neighbors not to support the designation of Holodomor as a genocide at the United Nations.

Genocide debate: other countries and international organizations

Several countries and international organizations made public statements addressing the Holodomor and recognizing it as a tragedy. Some went further as to recognize it as genocide, or a crime against humanity.

In the framework of international organizations, resolution recognizing Holodomor as genocide was adopted by the Baltic Assembly.

A number of international organizations adopted resolutions recognizing Holodomor as tragedy or crime against humanity but did not use the word "genocide":

• European Parliament
• General Assembly of the United Nations
• Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
• Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
• United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture

Highlighted below are recognitions of Holodomor-Genocide as expressed by parliaments, Heads of Government and Heads of State of the following countries:

• Andorra
• Argentina
• Australia
• Canada
• Colombia
• Ecuador
• Slovakia
• United States

Scholarly debate

Yaroslav Bilinsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, writes in the Journal of Genocide Research (1999) in a review of Holodomor literature—he concludes:

Political usage should not override scholarly logic, especially political usage which is just being established in independent Ukraine, arguably seven years late. My argument, however, is that both logic and political usage in Ukraine point in one direction, that of the terror-famine being genocidal. Stalin hated the Ukrainians, as accepted as a fact by Sakharov, revealed in the telegram to Zatonsky and inferred from his polemics with the Yugoslav communist Semich. Stalin decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture and under the cover of collectivization teach the Ukrainians a bloody lesson. Had it not been for Stalinist hubris and the incorporation of the more nationalistically minded and less physically decimated Western Ukrainians after 1939, the Ukrainian nation might have never recovered from the Stalinist offensive against the main army of the Ukrainian national movement, the peasants.

James E. Mace, a Ukrainian historian of American-Irish origin, 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.

Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has contended that:

[T]he way Stalin dealt with the Ukrainian countryside lifted the events out of the category of merely a famine and into the realm of genocide. In the fall of 1932, on orders from Moscow, government troops came to villages requisitioning grain to meet Stalin’s unrealistic quotas. At gunpoint they took away grain, even when peasants did not have enough for themselves. Those peasants who had no grain were deprived of other food stocks. Those who resisted were shot. Then a Jan. 22nd, 1933 directive from Stalin and Molotov sealed off Ukrainian borders to prevent famished peasants from escaping.

Norman Naimark, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University, asserts that "the Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide." He explains:

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.

Historian Boris Borisov has called into question the methodology used to determine the number of lives lost in the Holodomor, arguing that the same method suggests that 7 million Americans died during the Great Depression. According to West Virginia University professor Dr Mark Tauger, to assert that the famine was a political measure intentionally imposed through excessive procurements is to take an uncritical approach to the official sources. Tauger writes that he is skeptical of Conquest's claims about the famine and of the accuracy of Conquest's book on the subject. He has argued that the 1932 harvest was smaller than the official estimate, and smaller than the harvest of 1933, which would suggest the famine was not "man-made."

Tauger's evidence, methodologies and conclusions in regard to the famine were criticized by Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft in their book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33, published in 2004. Wheatcroft additionally claims Tauger's view represents the opposite extreme in arguing the famine was totally accidental. Tauger, however, maintains that his harvest estimates are supported by evidence, and his conclusions are shared by a number of other scholars. In reply, Wheatcroft continues to maintain Tauger's use of the evidence is oversimplified, that his methodology is faulty, and that his conclusions overall are wrong. Tauger replied in kind, defending his work against Wheatcroft's criticisms.

Historian James Mace wrote that Mark Tauger's argument "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic." However, Robert Conquest himself admitted that "Mark B. Tauger has produced some interesting material on the 1932 which will doubtless contribute to debate among economists.". John-Paul Himka, professor at University of Alberta, wrote that "Tauger’s substantive argument, that the famine was in part generated by a change in the way Soviet authorities estimated harvest size, has not been confronted by diaspora scholars or publicists." But Dr. David Marples, professor of history at the University of Alberta, is critical of Tauger's claims, stating "Dr. Tauger and other scholars fail to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine. 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."

Professor Steven Rosefielde argues in his 2009 book Red Holocaust that "Grain supplies were sufficient enough to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly from terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling."

Yale Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that the starvation was "deliberate" as several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. He argues the Soviets themselves "made sure that the term genocide, contrary to Lemkin's intentions, excluded political and economic groups." Thus the Ukrainian famine can be presented as "somehow less genocidal because it targeted a class, kulaks, as well as a nation, Ukraine."

Professor Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam concludes that the actions of the Stalinist regime from 1930–34, from the standpoint of international criminal law, "clearly constitutes . . . a series of crimes against humanity." These include not only policies that exacerbated the starvation (exporting 1.8 million tonnes of grain during the height of the famine, banning migration from famine-stricken areas and refusing to secure humanitarian aid from abroad), but also mass shootings and deportations of alleged "kulaks," "counter-revolutionaries" and other "Anti-Soviet elements" around the same time. According to Ellman, whether the famine was genocidal in nature depends on which definition of genocide is applied. If a more relaxed definition is accepted, which is actually favored by some specialists in the field of genocide studies, then the Soviet government was not only guilty of genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-33, but also of several other genocides from 1917 to 1953. Ellman asserts that the "national operations" of the NKVD, particularly the "Polish operation", which occurred during the late 1930s during the great purges may qualify as genocide even under the strictest definition, but there has been no ruling on the matter.

A number of modern academics lean toward the definition of the Holodomor as a genocide, echoing Dr Raphael Lemkin's views. Their work is presented in the collection of essays, "Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine," printed in 2008.

See also

• Denial of the Holodomor

External links

• Documentary about the Holodomor, called Genocide Revealed (2011); preview available here (In Ukrainian)>