Holodomor:
Genocide by famine
WHERE AND WHEN:
The Great Famine (Holodomor in Ukrainian means "to starve to death")
was deliberately engineered by the Soviet regime and struck the Ukraine
from 1932 to 1933. According to the data collected by researchers,
the regions hardest hit by the famine were today's Poltava and the
Sumy, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions, with 52.8% of the
victims. In actual fact, the Holodomor stretched right through Central,
Southern, Eastern and Northern Ukraine.
SCALE OF THE KILLINGS:
Taking into account that in 1932 the Ukraine had a population of
32,680,000 people, different sources converge to put the estimated number
of victims at between 4.5 and 6 or 7 million. The journalist Paolo
Rumiz talks about "at least six million starved to death in the
Ukraine alone", which means "25 thousand a day", "17 every minute",
specifying further that "one out of every three deaths was that of a
child or a newborn baby". Andrei Gregorovich, the American specialist
of Ukrainian History, puts the death rate at 7 million Ukrainians and
quotes the testimony of Stalin himself to Churchill, according to
whom the number of dead in four years of collectivization was 10 million;
he states that "prudent estimates" believe that approximately 4.8 million
people died, whereas "numerous well-known scholars" estimated anything
between 5 and 8 million. In the "Black Book of Communism" Nicolas Werth
writes of "over 6 million victims" (pag.147) and Giovanni Gozzini,
in the book dedicated to the exhibition "Gulag - The lager system
in the USSR" recalls that "the most recent and accurate estimates
made on official demographic sources put the result of this use of
famine as a tool for normalizing the class structure in the
countryside at between 4 and 6 million dead" (p. 49),
referring to the research done by S.G.Wheatcroft and also
mentioning the documentation "put together by A. Graziosi
in Letters from Kharkov. Famine in the Ukraine and in the
orthern Caucasus in Italian diplomatic despatches 1932-1933.
By comparing the 1933 and 1926 censuses, it appears that the
population of the USSR had grown by 15.7%, while that of t
he Ukraine had fallen by 9.9%.
THE PERPETRATORS:
The archives of the time, which have only recently become accessible,
testify to the deliberate exploitation of famine by the
Soviet regime to strike the peasants by means of a new
"social engineering" plan (cfr. G. Gozzini, Gulag.
The lager system in the USSR, p. 49).
By keeping the truth secret, Soviet power hoped to
evade its own responsibilities. Today there is no
longer any doubt that the Holodomor was an act of genocide,
resulting from the political decisions of Stalin's totalitarian
regime to crush the Ukrainian people.
The Ukraine has recently made public numerous documents connected
with the Holodomor taken from the archives of the former KGB;
these have revealed the aims and the operative mechanisms of
the policy that caused the death of millions of Ukrainians.
Research on the Holodomor has been conducted in various
countries of the world and archive material has been published
in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, etc.
They bear witness to the fact that, in the case of the
Ukraine and its neighbouring regions, famine was
premeditated. Certainly responsibility for what
happened falls on Stalin's regime and its
far-reaching punitive apparatus.
PLANNING:
As a direct result of the repressive measures, which included:
- requisitioning enormous quotas of the grain harvest for State run stocks;
- confiscating all foodstuffs;
- banning food sales;
- deploying internal and border troops to prevent the
- starving from moving to other regions of the USSR in search of food;
the Ukrainian people found themselves in a ghetto in which survival
was not an option.
Already on 7 August 1932 collective ownership was declared
"sacred and untouchable" in the USSR so that anyone - including children
- who had stolen "socialist property" (even if they were just gleaning a
few ears of corn for their starving child), or had "wasted" it,
could expect sentences ranging between ten years' forced labour
in the gulag to the death penalty. The quotas to be requisitioned
(for the cities and for export) had absolute priority and could
not be reduced for any reasons; those imposed on the Ukraine were
untenable (in July 1932, 45% of the harvest was demanded,
in November a second requisition was announced and in January
1933 a third).
On 6 December 1932, by means of a circular letter from
the Politburo to the local authorities, Ukrainian
villages that were accused of not complying with the
established quotas were subjected to the following sanctions:
a ban on any supplies (of goods or food), forced requisitions,
ban on trade of any kind, confiscation of all financial resources;
in addition, special brigades raided all available grain, including
the seeds set aside for sowing the following year. On 27 December
1932 compulsory "passports" were imposed, effectively stopping the
starving in their desperate attempts to flee the areas affected by famine.
On 22 January 1933 another circular, signed by Stalin and Molotov,
prevented peasants from the Ukraine and from the north
Caucasus from leaving the districts in which there was n
othing left to eat. A quarter of the rural population, men,
women and children, were thus starved to death.
Their corpses often lay in the streets without their relatives
having the strength to bury them, since they too were exhausted
by lack of food. In spite of this, in 1933 the Soviet government
exported 18 million quintals of grain and other products,
continuing to officially deny the famine. Only on 15 March
1933 were grain requisitions stopped and in April grain from
the army's deposits were distributed among the villages.
The exhausted peasants had to be assisted with the sowing
that finally resulted in a harvest that put an end to this nightmare.
IDEOLOGICAL REASONS:
The Politburo's circular dated 27 December 1932 motivated the compulsory
internal passport as a means to "liquidate social parasitism
and prevent kulaks from infiltrating the cities", while the
circular dated 22 January 1933, signed by Stalin and Molotov,
referred to "the arrest of counter-revolutionary elements"
and explained that "the Central Committee and the government
have proof that this mass exodus of peasants [towards the city
to escape famine] is organized by the enemies of Soviet power,
by counter-revolutionaries and by Polish agents, for propaganda
purposes against collectivization in particular and Soviet power
in general" (p. 152 Black Book of Communism). On 6 May 1933 Stalin replied
with these words to the writer Mihail Solohov's request to send
food aid to the starving population:
"....the esteemed farmers of your district, and not only yours,
have been on strike and have committed acts of sabotage, and were ready to
leave the workers and the Red Army without bread! The fact that
this sabotage was silent and apparently peaceful (without blood being spilled)
does not change the substance of the matter one bit, in other words
that those esteemed farmers tried to undermine the power of the
Soviet. Declaring all-out war on it, dear comrade Solohov!" (p. 154
Black Book of Communism). As well as annihilating the peasants, the famine effectively exterminated the Ukraine's cultural, religious and intellectual elites, all categories considered "enemies of socialism".
On 29 November 2006 the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
signed a law defining the Holodomor as an event that was provoked,
and then exploited, according to a precise and demonstrable political decision.
The law proclaims the fourth Saturday of November a "Day of Remembrance"
for the innocent victims of the Holdomor.
On 23 October 2008 the European Parliament approved a
resolution condemning the Holodomor as a "terrible crime against
the Ukrainian people and against humanity".
In November 2008 the Holy Synod of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Patriarchate of
Moscow defined the Holodomor as an act of genocide.
At present, the Holodomor has been recognized as an act
of genocide by the parliaments of: Argentina, Australia,
Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and
the United States of America.
