Famine In Ukraine

The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.

Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR in 1930. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million people died. More recent scholarship has estimated a lower range of between 3.5 to 5 million victims.

Public discussion of the famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the ''glasnost'' period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".

Etymology

The Ukrainian word ''Holodomor'' means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation", or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation." It is a compound of the Ukrainian and . The Ukrainian verb () means "to poison, to drive to exhaustion, or to torment", and the expression means "to inflict death by hunger." The perfective form of is . In English, the Holodomor has also been referred to as the ''artificial famine'', ''terror-genocide'' and the ''great famine''.

The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as ''Haladamor'', and by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada by 1978; in the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a constituent republic, any references to the famine were dismissed as anti-Soviet propaganda, even after de-Stalinization in 1956, until the declassification and publication of historical documents in the late 1980s made continued denial of the catastrophe unsustainable.

Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet ''glasnost'' ("openness") policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine, the first official use of ''famine'' was in a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, on the occasion of the republic's 70th anniversary. Another early public usage in the Soviet Union was in a February 1988 speech by Oleksiy Musiyenko, Deputy Secretary for ideological matters of the party organisation of the Kyiv branch of the Union of Soviet Writers in Ukraine.

The term ''holodomor'' may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, when Musiyenko's article on the topic was published. ''Holodomor'' is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, published in 2004, described as "artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country's population."

According to Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, the Holodomor has been described as a "Ukrainian Holocaust". They assert that since the 1990s the term ''Holodomor'' has been widely adopted by anti-communists in order to draw parallels to the Holocaust. However this term has been criticized by some academics, as the Holocaust was a heavily documented, coordinated effort by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to eliminate certain ethnic groups such as Jews. By contrast, there is no definitive documentation that Stalin directly ordered the mass murder of Ukrainians. Barkan et al. state that the term ''Holodomor'' was "introduced and popularized by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America before Ukraine became independent" and that the term 'Holocaust' in reference to the famine "is not explained at all."

History

Scope and duration

The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR as well as the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (a part of the Ukrainian SSR at the time) in spring 1932, and from February to July 1933, with the most victims recorded in spring 1933. The consequences are evident in demographic statistics: between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by only 6.6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16.9% and 11.7% respectively. The number of Ukrainians as ethnicity decreased by 10%.

From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons of grain, as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in towns were drastically cut back, and in winter 1932–1933 and spring 1933, people in many urban areas starved. Urban workers were supplied by a rationing system and therefore could occasionally assist their starving relatives in the countryside, but rations were gradually cut. By spring 1933, urban residents also faced starvation. It is estimated 70% to 80% of all famine deaths during the Holodomor in eight analyzed Oblasts in the Soviet Union occurred in the first seven months of 1933.

The first reports of mass malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kyiv oblasts. By mid-January 1933, there were reports about mass "difficulties" with food in urban areas, which had been undersupplied through the rationing system, and deaths from starvation among people who were refused rations, according to the December 1932 decree of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. By the beginning of February 1933, according to reports from local authorities and Ukrainian GPU (secret police), the most affected area was Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which also suffered from epidemics of typhus and malaria. Odesa and Kyiv oblasts were second and third respectively. By mid-March, most of the reports of starvation originated from Kyiv Oblast.

By mid-April 1933, Kharkiv Oblast reached the top of the most affected list, while Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Vinnytsia, and Donetsk oblasts, and Moldavian SSR were next on the list. Reports about mass deaths from starvation, dated mid-May through the beginning of June 1933, originated from raions in Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts. The "less affected" list noted Chernihiv Oblast and northern parts of Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts. The Central Committee of the CP(b) of Ukraine Decree of 8 February 1933 said no hunger cases should have remained untreated. ''The Ukrainian Weekly'', which was tracking the situation in 1933, reported the difficulties in communications and the appalling situation in Ukraine.

Local authorities had to submit reports about the numbers suffering from hunger, the reasons for hunger, number of deaths from hunger, food aid provided from local sources, and centrally provided food aid required. The GPU managed parallel reporting and food assistance in the Ukrainian SSR. Many regional reports and most of the central summary reports are available from present-day central and regional Ukrainian archives.

Causes

Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made. The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of... natural causes", though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies. Among contemporary historians it is debated whether the famine was an intended result of such policies, whether the Holodomor was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position, held for example by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.

Some scholars suggest that the famine was a consequence of human-made and natural factors. The most prevalent man-made factor was changes made to agriculture because of rapid industrialisation during the First Five Year Plan. There are also those who blame a systematic set of policies perpetrated by the Soviet government under Stalin designed to exterminate the Ukrainians.

Low harvest

According to historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft, the grain yield for the Soviet Union preceding the famine was a low harvest of between 55 and 60 million tons, likely in part caused by damp weather and low traction power, yet official statistics mistakenly reported a yield of 68.9 million tons. (A single ton of grain is enough to provide a good bread ration containing kCal per person for three people for one year.) Historian Mark Tauger has suggested that drought and damp weather were causes of the low harvest. Mark Tauger suggested that heavy rains would help the harvest while Stephen Wheatcroft suggested it would hurt it which Natalya Naumenko notes as a disagreement in scholarship. Another factor which reduced the harvest suggested by Tauger included endemic plant rust. However, in regard to plant disease Stephen Wheatcroft notes that the Soviet extension of sown area combined with lack of crop rotation may have exacerbated the problem, which Tauger also acknowledges in regard to the latter.

Collectivization, procurements, and the export of grain

Due to factional struggles with Bukharin wing of the party, peasant resistance to the NEP under Lenin, and the need for industrialization, Joseph Stalin 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. Leon Trotsky, however, opposed the policy of forced collectivisation under Stalin and would have favoured a voluntary, gradual approach towards collective farming with greater tolerance for the rights of Soviet Ukrainians. 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 by the summer of 1930, the government instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. According to Natalya Naumenko, collectivization in the Soviet Union and lack of favored industries were primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows there was discrimination against ethnic Ukrainians and Germans. In Ukraine collectivisation policy was enforced, entailing extreme crisis and contributing to the famine. In 1929–1930, peasants were induced to transfer land and livestock to state-owned farms, on which they would work as day-labourers for payment in kind.

Food exports continued during the famine, albeit at a reduced rate. In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year. The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses were Kyiv and Kharkiv, which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country. Historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft lists four problems Soviet authorities ignored during collectivization that would hinder the advancement of agricultural technology and ultimately contributed to the famine:

* "Over-extension of the sown area" — Crops yields were reduced and likely some plant disease caused by the planting of future harvests across a wider area of land without rejuvenating soil leading to the reduction of fallow land.
* "Decline in draught power" — the over extraction of grain led to the loss of food for farm animals, which in turn reduced the effectiveness of agricultural operations.
* "Quality of cultivation" — the planting and extracting of the harvest, along with ploughing was done in a poor manner due to inexperienced and demoralized workers and the aforementioned lack of draught power.
* "The poor weather" — drought and other poor weather conditions were largely ignored by Soviet authorities who gambled on good weather and believed agricultural difficulties would be overcome.

Mark Tauger notes that Soviet and Western specialist at the time noted draught power shortages and lack of crop rotation contributed to intense weed infestations, with these both being also factors Stephen Wheatcroft lists as contributing to the famine. Natalya Naumenko calculated that reduced agriculture production in "collectivized" collective farms is responsible for up to 52% of Holodomor excess deaths.

Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians

It has been proposed that the Soviet leadership used the human-made famine to attack Ukrainian nationalism, and thus it could fall under the legal definition of genocide. For example, special and particularly lethal policies were adopted in and largely limited to Soviet Ukraine at the end of 1932 and 1933. According to Timothy Snyder, "each of them may seem like an anodyne administrative measure, and each of them was certainly presented as such at the time, and yet each had to kill." Other sources discuss the famine in relation to a project of imperialism or colonialism of Ukraine by the Soviet state.

According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, 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 numbers of tractors which the paper argues demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians. The paper found from its analysis that "the regime intended to take more grain from Ukrainian areas after conditioning for factors such as production capacity" and noting that "in areas that the Bolshevik regime marked as important for grain production, ethnic Russians replaced ethnic Ukrainians as the largest ethnic group".

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", four 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".

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 statea record-breaking index of marketabilitybut was unable to fulfill the grain quota for 1930 until May 1931. Ukraine produced a similar amount of grain in 1931; however, by the late spring of 1932 "many districts were left with no reserves of produce or fodder at all". Despite this, according to statistics gathered by Nataliia Levchuk, Ukraine and North Caucasus Krai delivered almost 100% of their grain procurement in 1931 versus 67% in two Russian Oblasts during the same period versus 1932 where three Russian regions delivered almost all of their procurements and Ukraine and North Caucasus did not. This can partially be explained by Ukrainian regions losing a third of their harvests and Russian regions losing by comparison only 15% of their harvest.

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: " oviet authoritiesdid 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.

Tauger made a counter-reply to this reply by Naumenko. Tauger argues in his counter reply that Naumenko's attempt to correspond collectivization rates to famine mortality fails because "there was no single level of collectivization anywhere in the USSR in 1930, especially in the Ukrainian Republic" and that "since collectivization changed significantly by 1932–1933, any connection between 1930 and 1933 omits those changes and is therefore invalid". Tauger also criticizes Naumenko's ignoring of statistics Tauger's presented where "in her reply she completely ignored the quantitative data augerpresented in isarticle" in which she against the evidence "denied that any famines took place in the later 1920s". To counter Naumenko's claim that collectivization explains the famine Tauger argues ( in his words) how agro-environmental disasters better explain the regional discrepancies: " aumenko'scalculations again omit any consideration of the agro-environmental disasters that harmed farm production in 1932. In her appendices, Table C3, she does the same calculation with collectivization data from 1932, which she argues shows a closer correlation between collectivization and famine mortality (Naumenko 2021b, 33). Yet, as I showed, those agroenvironmental disasters were much worse in the regions with higher collectivization—especially Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Volga River basin (and also in Kazakhstan)—than elsewhere in the USSR. As I documented in my article and other publications, these were regions that had a history of environmental disasters that caused crop failures and famines repeatedly in Russian history." Tauger notes: " aumenko'sassumption that collectivization subjected peasants to higher procurements, but in 1932 in Ukraine this was clearly not the case" as "grain procurements both total and per-capita were much lower in Ukraine than anywhere else in the USSR in 1932".

Peasant resistance

Collectivization in the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainian SSR, was not popular among the peasantry, and forced collectivisation led to numerous peasant revolts. The 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 sightly above 1,000. OGPU's summaries also cited public proclamations of Ukrainian insurgents to restore the independence of Ukraine

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