The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine, was a massive man-made 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 scholars agree the famine was primarily 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 collectivization of agriculture and actions taken to industrialize the Soviet economy. 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 them 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 and 5 million victims. Public discussion of the famine period was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost reforms introduced 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. 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 holod, 'hunger' and mor, 'plague'. The Ukrainian verb moryty (морити) means "to poison, to drive to exhaustion, or to torment", and the expression holodom moryty means "to inflict death by hunger." The perfective form of moryty is zamoryty, 'kill or drive to death'. 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 the word "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
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