The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records,[8][13] but the number increases significantly when the deaths in the heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban region are included.[14] Older estimates are still often cited in political commentary.[15] In 2007, David Marples estimated that 7.5 million people died as a result of the famine in Soviet Ukraine, of which 4 million were ethnic Ukrainians.[16] According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficit.[8] Later in 2010, Timothy Snyder estimated that around 3.3 million people died in total in the Ukraine.[17] In 2013, it was argued that total excess deaths in the Ukraine could not have exceeded 2.9 million.[18]
Stalin and other party members had ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class"[19] and so they became a target for the state. The richer, land-owning peasants were labeled 'kulaks" and were portrayed by the Bolsheviks as class enemies, which culminated in a Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of large numbers of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929–1932.[20]
Major contributing factors to the famine include: The forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the Soviet first five-year plan, forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialisation, a decreasing agricultural workforce, and several bad droughts.
The famine is seen by some historians as a deliberate act of genocide against ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs while other critics dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation, as is frequently implied by that term, and focus instead on the class dynamics between land-owning peasants (Kulaks) with strong political interest in private property, and the ruling Communist Party's fundamental tenets which were diametrically opposed to those interests.[21]:507 In addition to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, these events saw Kazakhstan lose more than half of its population within 15 years due to the actions of the Soviet power. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in their own republic. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic's population were Kazakhs, but after the famine, only around 38% of the population were Kazakhs.[22][23]
Historian Mark B. Tauger of West Virginia University suggests that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, specifically low harvest due to natural disasters combined with increased demand for food caused by the industrialization and urbanization, and grain exports by the Soviet Union at the same time.[27] The industrialization became a starting mechanism of the famine. Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–33.[28]
A similar view was presented by Stephen Wheatcroft, who has given more weight to the "ill-conceived policies" of Soviet government and highlighted that while the policy was not targeted at Ukraine specifically, it was Ukraine who suffered most for "demographic reasons".[29]
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. The loss of life in the Ukrainian countryside is estimated at approximately 5 million people.[30]
The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property" – nicknamed by the farmers the Law of Spikelets – was enacted on August 7, 1932. The purpose of the law was to protect the property of the collective farms. It was nicknamed the Law of Spikelets because it allowed people to be prosecuted for gleaning leftover grain from the fields. There were more than 200,000 people sentenced under this law.[31]
There was a wave of migration due to starvation, and authorities responded by introducing a requirement that passports be used to go between republics, and banning travel by rail.[citation needed]
Soviet internal passports (identity cards) were introduced on 27 December 1932 to deal with the exodus of peasants from the countryside. Individuals not having such a document could not leave their homes on pain of administrative penalties, such as internment in Gulaglabor camps. The rural population had no right to freely keep passports and thus could not leave their villages without approval. The power to issue passports rested with the head of the kolkhoz, and identity documents were kept by the administration of the collective farms. This measure stayed in place until 1974.
The lack of passports could not completely stop peasants' leaving the countryside, but only a small percentage of those who illegally infiltrated into cities could improve their lot. Unable to find work or possibly buy or beg a little bread, farmers died in the streets of Kharkiv, Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and other major cities of Ukraine.
The Russian part of the inscription says "At this place will be a monument to famine victims of the years 1931-1933". In the center of Almaty, Kazakhstan. The upper half is in Kazakh language.
The famine of 1932–1933 was officially denied, so any discourse on this issue was classified as criminal "anti-Soviet propaganda" until Perestroika. The results of the 1937 census were kept secret as they revealed the demographic losses attributable to the Great Famine.
Some well-known journalists, most notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, downplayed the famine and its death toll.[32] In 1932, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his coverage of the Soviet Union's first five-year plan and thus, he was considered the most expert Western journalist to cover the famine.[32] In the article "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving", he responded to an account of starvation in Ukraine and, while acknowledging that there was widespread malnutrition in certain areas of the USSR (including parts of the North Caucasus and Lower Volga), generally disagreed with the scale of the starvation and claimed that there was no famine.[33] Duranty's coverage led directly to Franklin Roosevelt officially recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933 and thus revoked the United States' official recognition of an independent Ukraine.[34] A similar position was taken by the French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, who toured the territory of Ukraine during his stay in the Soviet Union. Other Western journalists, however, did report on the famine at the time, including Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, who both severely criticised Duranty's account and were later banned from returning to the Soviet Union.[35]
As a child, Mikhail Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine in Stavropol, Russia. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father."[36]
Members of the international community have denounced the USSR government for the events of the years 1932-1933. However, the classification of the Ukrainian famine as a genocide is a subject of debate. A comprehensive criticism is presented by Michael Ellman in the article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 Revisited" published in the journal Europe-Asia Studies.[38] The author refers to the UN Convention which specifies that genocide is the destruction 'in whole or in part' of a national group, "any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".[39] The reasons for the famine are claimed to have been rooted in the industrialization and widespread collectivization of farms that involved escalating taxes, grain-delivery quotas, and dispossession of all property. The latter was met with resistance that was answered by “imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.”[40] As people were left with insufficient amount of food after the procurement, the famine occurred. Therefore, the famine occurred largely due to the policies that favored the goals of collectivization and industrialization rather than the deliberate attempt to destroy the Kazakhs or Ukrainians as a people.[38]
In Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum argues that the UN definition of genocide is overly narrow, due to the USSR's influence on the Genocide Convention. Instead of a broad definition that would have included the Soviet crimes against kulaks and Ukrainians, genocide "came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust. The Holodomor does not meet that criterion ... This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide'".[citation needed] Applebaum thus concludes:
The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932-3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people ... That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.[41]
Lesa Melnyczuk Morgan concludes her in-depth study, 'Remember the peasantry: A study of genocide, famine, and the Stalinist
Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33' by stating that the "Holodomor was clearly an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s Soviet regime."[42]
At least three of Gorbachev's ethnic Russian relatives were victims of the 1932–33 famine in the Stavropol region
West Virginia University historian Mark Tauger, in his review of Applebaum's book Red Famine, says the book "leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources", and argues that causes of the famine are more complex:
While this review article does not allow for a full discussion of the issue of genocide and Stalin’s responsibility, we can at least note certain conclusions from the sources presented here. Stalin and other leaders made concessions to Ukraine in procurements and were clearly trying to balance the subsistence needs of Ukraine and other regions, especially people in towns and industrial sites who could not access the surrogate foods that some peasants relied on to survive (see for example Applebaum ch.12). Soviet leaders did not understand the 1932 crop failure: they thought that peasants were withholding food to drive up prices on the private market, as some of them had in 1928. They worried about the Japanese take-over of Manchuria in 1931-1932 and the Nazi victory in Germany in early 1933, and feared nationalist groups in Poland and Austria could inspire a nationalist rebellion in Ukraine. Faced with these “threats,” Soviet leaders were reluctant to make the USSR appear weak by admitting the famine and importing a lot of food, both of which they had done repeatedly earlier. The famine and the Soviets’ insufficient relief can be attributed to crop failure, and to leaders’ incompetence and paranoia regarding foreign threats and peasant speculators: a retaliatory version of the moral economy.[43]
The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.[44]
Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.[45] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area."[46]
Robert Conquest estimated at least 7 million peasants' deaths from hunger in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 (5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus, and 1 million elsewhere), and an additional 1 million deaths from hunger as a result of collectivization in Kazakh ASSR.[47]
Another study, by Michael Ellman using data given by Davies and Wheatcroft, estimates "‘about eight and a half million’ victims of famine and repression", combined, in the period 1930–33.[31]
In his 2010 book Stalin's Genocides, Norman Naimark estimates that 3 to 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine.[20]
^In November 2009, Gareth Jones' diaries recording the manmade genocide of the Great Soviet Famine of 1932-33 went on public display for the first time at Cambridge University.[24]
^Markoff, Dr. Alexandr Pavlovich (1933). professors of the Russian Commercial Institute (eds.). "Famine in the USSR"(pdf). Bulletin Economique Russe (in French). 9. Retrieved April 18, 2016.CS1 maint: uses editors parameter (link)
^Sabol, Steven (2017). "The Touch of Civilization": Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization. University Press of Colorado. p. 47. ISBN9781607325505.
^Snyder 2010, p. 53. "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".
^David R. Marples. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. p.50
^Snyder 2010, p. 53. "One demographic retrojection suggests a figure of 3.3 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".
^Graziosi, A, Hajda, Lubomyr, editor of compilation & Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, host institution 2013, After the Holodomor : the enduring impact of the great famine on Ukraine.
^Marples, David R. (May 2009). "Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine". Europe-Asia Studies. 61 (3): 505–518. doi:10.1080/09668130902753325. Geoffrey A. Hosking concluded that: Conquest’s research establishes beyond doubt, however, that the famine was deliberately inflicted there [in Ukraine] for ethnic reasons...Craig Whitney, however, disagreed with the theory of genocide
^Viktor Kondrashin [ru], Голод 1932—1933 годов. Трагедия российской деревни, Moscow, Росспэн, 2008, ISBN978-5-8243-0987-4., Chapter 6. "Голод 1932—1933 годов в контексте мировых голодных бедствий и голодных лет в истории России — СССР", p. 331.
^ abEllman, Michael (2007). "Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932 – 33 Revisited". Europe-Asia Studies. 59 (4): 663–693. doi:10.1080/09668130701291899.
Kondrashin, Viktor, ed. (2009), Famine in the Soviet Union 1929–1934(PDF) (slide stack), Katz, Nikita B transl. docs.; Dolgova, Alexandra transl. note from compilers; Glizchinskaya, Natalia design, RU: Russian Archives, archived from the original(PDF) on 2009-03-19.
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Stalinist Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin. He is known for helping Stalin seize power, for his role in organizing, planning and supervising the famine in Soviet Ukraine, and for his harsh treatment and execution of those deemed threats to Stalin's regime. He was project manager and led the original design team of the Moscow Metro, and Moscow's Metro was named after him until 1955.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union implemented the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into collectively-controlled and state-controlled farms: Kolkhozy and Sovkhozy accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food needed to be produced to keep up with urban demand.
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union
Throughout Russian history famines and droughts have been a common feature, often resulting in humanitarian crises traceable to political or economic instability, poor policy, environmental issues and war. Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union tended to occur fairly regularly, with famine occurring every 10–13 years and droughts every five to seven years. Golubev and Dronin distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central, Southern, and Eastern.
First five-year plan
The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, created by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of Socialism in One Country. The plan was implemented in 1928 and took effect until 1932.
Dekulakization
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of prosperous peasants and their families in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government portrayed kulaks as class enemies of the USSR.
Denial of the Holodomor
Denial of the Holodomor is the assertion that the 1932–1933 Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing the scale and significance of the famine.
This denial and suppression of information about the famine was made in official Soviet propaganda from the very beginning until the 1980s. It was supported by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including The New York Times' Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the man-made famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. According to Robert Conquest, it was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting the Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion, to be followed by similar campaigns over the Moscow Trials and denial of the Gulag labor camp system.
Holodomor genocide question
The Holodomor genocide question consists of the attempts to determine whether the Soviet famine of 1932–33 was mostly an ethnic genocide against Ukrainians and against Kazakhs or mostly an unintended result of the "Soviet regime's re-direction of drought-reduced grain supplies to attain economic and political goals." The famine killed about 5.5 to 6.5 million people in the USSR, including 1.3–1.5 million in Kazakhstan, and 3-4 million in Ukraine; 4 million ethnic Ukrainians are estimated to have perished as a result of the famine. The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records.
Collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Collectivization in Ukraine, officially the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was part of the policy of Collectivization in the USSR and dekulakization that was pursued between 1928 and 1933 with the purpose to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms called kolkhoz and to eliminate enemies of the working class. The idea of collective farms was seen by peasants as a revival of serfdom.
Causes of the Holodomor
The causes of the Holodomor, the name of the famine that ravaged Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 whose estimates for the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range between 2.2 million and 10 million, are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some historians theorize that the famine was an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization. Others claim that the Soviet policies that caused the famine were an engineered attack on Ukrainian nationalism, or more broadly, on all peasants, in order to prevent uprisings. Some suggest that the famine may fall under the legal definition of genocide.
Holodomor in modern politics
Whether the Holodomor was a genocide or ethnicity-blind, was man-made or natural, and was intentional or unintentional are issues of significant modern debate. The event is considered a genocide by Ukraine, a crime against humanity by the European Parliament, and merely part of the wider Soviet famine and famine relief effort by the Russian Federation.
Kazakh famine of 1932–33
The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933, known in Kazakhstan as the Goloshchekin genocide, also known as the Kazakh catastrophe, was a man-made famine where 1.5 million people died in Soviet Kazakhstan, of whom 1.3 million were ethnic Kazakhs; 38% of all Kazakhs died, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed in the Soviet famines of the early 1930s.
The Harvest of Sorrow
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine is a book by British historian Robert Conquest, published in 1986. It was written with the assistance of historian James Mace, a junior fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, who, following the advice of the director of the Institute, started doing research for the book.
Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
Estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin vary widely. Some scholars assert that record-keeping of the executions of political prisoners and ethnic minorities are neither reliable nor complete, others contend archival materials contain irrefutable data far superior to sources utilized prior to 1991, such as statements from emigres and other informants.
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