Holodomor genocide question
Encyclopedia
The Holodomor genocide question is 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
.
.
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?"
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.'"
, 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.
.
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":
Highlighted below are recognitions of Holodomor-Genocide as expressed by parliament
s, Heads of Government
and Heads of State
of the following countries:
James E. Mace
, a Ukrainian historian of American-Irish origin, wrote:
Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has contended that:
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:
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 or not 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.
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
, the disastrous famine
Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...
in 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
that is recognized as a crime against humanity
Crime against humanity
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...
by the European Parliament
European Parliament
The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...
, was an ethnic genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
, a natural catastrophe or democide
Democide
Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the...
.
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
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of...
. As of April 2008, the parliament of Ukraine
Verkhovna Rada
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is Ukraine's parliament. The Verkhovna Rada is a unicameral parliament composed of 450 deputies, which is presided over by a chairman...
and the governments of 8 countries have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
.
Background: The Holodomor
The Ukrainian famine (1932–1933), or Holodomor (literally in Ukrainian, "death by hunger"), was one of the largest national catastrophes in the modern history of the Ukrainian nationUkrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
.
The word comes from the Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
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
Ukrainian nationalism
Ukrainian nationalism refers to the Ukrainian version of nationalism.Although the current Ukrainian state emerged fairly recently, some historians, such as Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Orest Subtelny and Paul Magosci have cited the medieval state of Kievan Rus' as an early precedents of specifically...
, 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
Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych is a Ukrainian politician who has been the President of Ukraine since February 2010.Yanukovych served as the Governor of Donetsk Oblast from 1997 to 2002...
told Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe , which held its first session in Strasbourg on 10 August 1949, can be considered the oldest international parliamentary assembly with a pluralistic composition of democratically elected members of parliament established on the basis of an...
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 DumaState Duma
The State Duma , common abbreviation: Госду́ма ) in the Russian Federation is the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia , the upper house being the Federation Council of Russia. The Duma headquarters is located in central Moscow, a few steps from Manege Square. Its members are referred to...
, 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
The Moscow Times
The Moscow Times is an English-language daily newspaper published in Moscow, Russia since 1992. The circulation in 2008 stood at 35,000 copies and the newspaper is typically given out for free at places English-language "expats" attend, including hotels, cafés and restaurants, as well as by...
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
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
and historian, opined in Izvestia that Holodomor was no different from the Russian famine of 1921
Russian famine of 1921
The Russian famine of 1921, also known as Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922, was a severe famine that occurred in Bolshevik Russia...
as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
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
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
agitprop
Agitprop
Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....
. 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 humanityCrime against humanity
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...
.
In the framework of international organizations, resolution recognizing Holodomor as genocide was adopted by the Baltic Assembly
Baltic Assembly
The Baltic Assembly is an international organisation which aims to promote co-operation between the parliaments of the Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It attempts to find a common position in relation to many international issues, including economic, political and cultural issues...
.
A number of international organizations adopted resolutions recognizing Holodomor as tragedy or crime against humanity but did not use the word "genocide":
- European ParliamentEuropean ParliamentThe European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...
- General Assembly of the United Nations
- Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of EuropeCouncil of EuropeThe Council of Europe is an international organisation promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation...
- Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
- United Nations Organization for Education, Science and CultureUNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
Highlighted below are recognitions of Holodomor-Genocide as expressed by parliament
Parliament
A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French , the action of parler : a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which...
s, Heads of Government
Head of government
Head of government is the chief officer of the executive branch of a government, often presiding over a cabinet. In a parliamentary system, the head of government is often styled prime minister, chief minister, premier, etc...
and Heads of State
Head of State
A head of state is the individual that serves as the chief public representative of a monarchy, republic, federation, commonwealth or other kind of state. His or her role generally includes legitimizing the state and exercising the political powers, functions, and duties granted to the head of...
of the following countries:
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
James Mace
James E. Mace was an American historian, professor, and prominent researcher of the Holodomor.-Biography:...
, 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
Norman Naimark
Norman M. Naimark is an American historian, and author who specializes in modern Eastern European history, and genocide and ethnic cleansing in the region....
, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, 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
Great Depression in the United States
The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement...
. According to West Virginia University
West Virginia University
West Virginia University is a public research university in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA. Other campuses include: West Virginia University at Parkersburg in Parkersburg; West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Montgomery; Potomac State College of West Virginia University in Keyser;...
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
University of Alberta
The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...
, 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
University of Alberta
The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...
, 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
Steven Rosefielde
Steven Rosefielde is a Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.. He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.-Selected works:...
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
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
Historian Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder
Timothy D. Snyder is an American professor of history at Yale University, specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Holocaust...
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
Michael Ellman
Michael Ellman has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He has written extensively on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, Russia and comparative economic systems.- Prizes and honours :* Foreign member of the Russian Academy of Economic...
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
Dekulakization
Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929-1932. The richer peasants were labeled kulaks and considered class enemies...
of alleged "kulaks," "counter-revolutionaries" and other "Anti-Soviet elements" around the same time. According to Ellman, whether or not the famine was genocidal in nature depends on which definition of genocide is applied. If a more relaxed definition
Genocide definitions
This is a list of scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide, a word coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. While there are various definitions of the term, almost all international bodies of law officially adjudicate the crime of genocide pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and...
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
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
, particularly the "Polish operation"
Polish operation of the NKVD
The Genocide of Poles in the Soviet Union often referred to as, the Polish operation of the NKVD, was a coordinated action of the Soviet NKVD and the Communist Party in 1937–1938 against the entire Polish minority living in the Soviet Union, representing only 0.4 percent of Soviet citizens...
, which occurred during the late 1930s during the great purges
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
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.
External links
- Documentary about the Holodomor, called Genocide Revealed (2011); preview available here (In Ukrainian)>