Holodomor

This article is about the claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved Ukrainians. For the description of events, see Soviet famine of 1931–1933.

Map of affected areas during the famine

The Holodomor is the name given to the claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved Ukrainians during the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. It's a propaganda campaign historically promoted by fascists against the Soviet Union to undermine its support both domestically and abroad. The propaganda still continues to this day, particularly circulated and promoted by Western media and Ukrainians who were affected by the famine.

The claim that the Soviet government deliberately starved their people was first published in 18 August 1933 by the Völkischer Beobachter, a newspaper organ of the Nazi Party. This claim was reproduced in a 6 August 1934 publication in the British tabloid London Daily Express, and in several articles published since 18 February 1935 by the Statesian newspapers Chicago American and New York Evening Journal, both owned by corporate press magnate William Randolph Hearst, the founder of sensationalist yellow journalism. By the time these articles were published, there were already no longer signs of famine in the USSR. These newspapers used fabrications to illustrate their articles by using photographs from a past famine in the Soviet Union caused by the Russian Civil War.

Etymology

The term Holodomor was first used in the 1980s by Ukrainian neo-Nazis, possibly as a way to link the word -- and famine -- to the earlier Holocaust. The word Holodomor was created from the Ukrainian words holod, hunger or famine, and mor, death. Thus the word means "death by hunger", despite the word holod already meaning the same thing.

Sources of claims

Ewald Ammende

Ewald Ammende published the book Muss Russland hungern? ("Must Russia starve?") in 1935 relying on sources from the Nazis, Italian fascists, and anonymous travellers. Many of his photos were from Ditloff, a member of the Nazi government, and some were found in books from 1922. Professor James E. Mace of Harvard republished Ammende's book in 1984 under the English title Human Life in Russia.

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest's 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow claimed that 14 million people died during the famine, while his earlier work The Great Terror claimed that 5–6 million died, half of which were Ukrainians. His book cites Black Deeds of the Kremlin 55 times.

James E. Mace

James E. Mace based a claimed death toll of 7.5 million on flawed calculations from census data from 1926 and 1939. He assumed that the birth rate stayed the same year after year despite the civil war and famine. In addition, 2–3 million Kuban Cossacks were classified as Ukrainian for the 1926 census and as Russian in 1939, which lowered the (official) number of Ukrainians. According to official figures, the population of Ukraine increased by 3,339,000 from 1926 to 1939. A similar analysis of the population of Saskatchewan, Canada, that assumed a constant birth rate from 1921 to 1941 suggested a death toll of over 228,000 or 25% of the province's population.

Thomas Walker

Thomas Walker, whose real name was Robert Green, supposedly entered the USSR in the spring of 1934 to photograph famine victims. Records show that he did not receive a visa until late September and entered the country on 12 October 1934 from Poland. He was in Moscow from 13 to 18 October and reached the Manchurian border by train on 25 October. It would have been physically impossible for him to visit all of the locations that he claimed in such a short amount of time. His photographs included pictures of a "frog-like" child from 1922 and an Austrian soldier in the First World War. After returning to the United States, Walker was arrested and admitted that he was never in Ukraine.

Black Deeds of the Kremlin

Ukrainian Nazi collaborators published the book Black Deeds of the Kremlin in 1953, followed by a second volume in 1955. One of the authors of volume one, Alexander Hay-Holowko, was a member of the Nazi SS and Minister of Propaganda for the OUN. The book glorifies Roman Shukhevych, leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the pogromist Symon Petliura who led the Ukrainian National Republic from 1918 to 1920. Soldiers from a photograph of a supposed execution of kulaks are wearing Tsarist uniforms.

Harvest of Despair

The 1983 movie Harvest of Despair relies on eyewitness accounts from German Nazis and their collaborators including Hans von Herwath, who recruited mercenaries for the Russian Liberation Army, and Nazi diplomat Andor Henke. The movie included footage from the Siege of Leningrad, parts of the movie Czar Hunger from the 1920s, and news footage from before 1917.

Anne Applebaum

In 2017, Anne Applebaum published Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a novel aimed at showcasing the deliberately imposed (by the USSR and Joseph Stalin) nature of the famine conditions in 1931-1933. In response, the historian Mark Tauger published a review in George Washington University's History News Network platform arguing that Applebaum had inaccurately portrayed the famine conditions by misdefining the etymology of the term Holodomor, misrepresenting the dynamics of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry, cherry picking or excluding sources, contradicting herself, and oversimplifying Soviet actions.

Western claims about famine

Bourgeois and Eurocentric historians typically focus on these main categories in order to 'rationalise' their liberal consensus on the famine:

Soviet leadership intentionally caused famine

Bourgeois historians and media such as Encyclopædia Britannica and the film Bitter Harvest claim that the Soviet leadership deliberately caused the famine. However, archival evidence from the Soviet Union demonstrates that Stalin was initially unaware of the famine in Ukraine.

Ukrainian nationalism

Bourgeois historians also claim that Stalin targeted the Ukrainians in order to eliminate Ukrainian nationalism. The areas which were affected by the famine were mostly areas where there was a significant Russian minority. The Ukrainians also considered Russians as their own, and they didn't advocate for an independent Ukraine. The area with the most Ukrainian nationalists was western Ukraine, which was under Polish rule at the time. In addition, Stalin considered Russian nationalism a bigger threat than Ukrainian nationalism.

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Holodomor is the term given to the early 1930’s famines in the Soviet Union. The popular anti-Soviet propaganda states that the famine was man-made, especially to orchestrate a genocide of the Ukrainian people. The supposed millions of deaths from the “famine-genocide” are usually counted in the deaths under communism. It is not only a popular anti-communist myth that is circulated around in capitalist circles but also one that is believed by a large sector of the socialist left.

Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” Below are some sources corroborating this claim in the hope that some of the misconceptions around this topic will be cleared.

It is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well.

It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”

— Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51

Stalin urged the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take appropriate measures to prevent a crop failure.

The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine. Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN

— From the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58. Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.

This is the response of Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist famous for reporting on the Soviet Union, to a question about the supposed genocide:

QUESTION: Is it true that during 1932-33 several million people were allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and North Caucasus because they were politically hostile to the Soviets?

ANSWER: Not true. I visited several places in those regions during that period. There was a serious grain shortage in the 1932 harvest due chiefly to inefficiencies of the organizational period of the new large-scale mechanized farming among peasants unaccustomed to machines. To this was added sabotage by dispossessed kulaks, the leaving of the farms by 11 million workers who went to new industries, the cumulative effect of the world crisis in depressing the value of Soviet farm exports, and a drought in five basic grain regions in 1931.

The harvest of 1932 was better than that of 1931 but was not all gathered; on account of overoptimistic promises from rural districts, Moscow discovered the actual situation only in December when a considerable amount of grain was under snow.

— Strong, Anna Louise. Searching Out the Soviets. New Republic: August 7, 1935, p. 356

The conquest of bread was achieved that summer, a victory snatched from a great disaster. The 1933 harvest surpassed that of 1930, which till then had held the record. This time, the new record was made not by a burst of half-organized enthusiasm, but by growing efficiency and permanent organization … This nationwide cooperation beat the 1934 drought, securing a total crop for the USSR equal to the all-time high of 1933.

— Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 44-45

From the Russian Archives:

Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested. The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.

— Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401

In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the (“special files,” the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time.

We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.

— Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G. Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.

There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as “The Holodomor” (lit. “to kill by starvation” in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:

1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.

The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country’s independence from Russia.

First Issue

The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, not just the USSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.

The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls “Holocaust Envy”, the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their “own” Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was “a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history.”

Second Issue

Calling it “man-made” implies that it was a deliberate famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.

Kulaks (“tight-fisted person”) were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, Poor harvest and national suffering, characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.

In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.

Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.

Quota Reduction

What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:

The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.

The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation… the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree… [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products…

Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as “largely bogus” and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree’s reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials’ appeals led to the reduction of the Ukrainian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.

— Mark Tauger. (1992). The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933

Rapid Industrialization

The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.

In 1931, during a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry, Stalin said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”

In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

By this time, the Soviet Union’s industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.

In Hitler’s own words, in 1942:

All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. They have railroads that aren’t even marked on the map.

— Werner Jochmann. (1980). Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.

Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:

The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.

As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.

— Anna Louise Strong. (1956). The Stalin Era

While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.

See also

• Soviet famine of 1931–1933