Remember the Holodomor

Starvation was the weapon, Stalin the wielder

Starvation was the weapon, Stalin the wielder.

Nine decades have come and gone since the Holodomor, the purposeful genocide of approximately four million Ukrainians by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Few are alive to remember it, but the nation remembers. It remembers 13% of its population being murdered by a vicious dictator who sought to destroy their will to resist his totalitarian authority.

Prior to World War I Ukrainian territories were divided between Russian and Austrian empires. After Russia quit the war in 1917 to have a revolution, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was declared. They fought on the side of the Bolshevik Red Army in the Russian Revolution that followed, but would lose their own independence, being incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Ukraine remained culturally autonomous, seeing themselves very much as Ukrainian and not part of the Soviet behemoth. Stalin didn’t like that, and sought to destroy any will to resist his dictatorial machinations.

Fresh off the classicide of the Kulaks, an extermination of “prosperous peasants” in Russia, the USSR began a forced collectivization of farms in Ukraine, a nation known as Europe’s “bread basket” where 86% of the population lived rurally. Collectivization was a primary cause of the Holodomor, which means “to kill by starvation.” A survivor, who was ten years old at the time of the deliberate famine, later described it to a U.S. congressional committee: “They evicted us and told us they needed our house as part of a new collective farm … they also confiscated 90% of everything we had … We had had this garden there, and we lost all of this.”

A Soviet official confiscates grain from a peasant household.

It wasn’t just collectivization Stalin imposed, but intimidation and imprisonment to prevent a “counterrevolution” against the glorious Soviet empire. Ukrainian intellectuals, religious and political leaders who favored pro-Ukrainian policies were executed.

The Ukrainian populace resisted collectivization, with several thousand local rebellions against its imposition. These were brutally repressed by the Soviet Red Army and the secret police. They were transformed from independent farmers into serfs, having everything of value taken from them including their land and livestock, and forced to labor on collective farms. Any who resisted were killed or sent to die in a labor camp.

Then, the terror by hunger began.

Stalin saw Ukraine as a threat to his regime; there was much resistance to collectivization, and he feared the growing independence movement. Ridiculous grain quotas were implemented; Stalin stole much of the food the people needed to survive. Any starving person who took food from a collective field was subject to execution for “stealing socialist property.”

As more and more starved, people fled the farms in search of food. Stalin then made that illegal, closing the nation’s borders to consolidate the starvation, even creating internal passports to forbid anyone from seeking food. Any region that didn’t meet the grain quota was blacklisted, surrounded by troops to prevent anyone from leaving or any supplies from entering. They were left to starve, with no way out and no way for help to get in.

People ate grass, they ate their pets, they sometimes even ate each other. Close to 30,000 people died every day. The amount of food taken from Ukraine by the Soviet Union was enough to feed three times as many as starved to death. And Russia didn’t even need it, as they had ample grain reserves. Stalin rejected foreign aid and went so far as to denounce any nations that offered to help. Much of the food stolen from Ukraine Stalin sold abroad, fattening his cash reserves.

The aforementioned ten-year old who had his family’s home stolen described the horror: “People were wandering about … hoping to find something left behind in the gardens; they would dig and dig and examine every clump of earth,” he said. “Some of the starving were in such a bad way they had begun to stink already. Their feet would swell up; their wounds would open and fester.” And still, they would walk, in search of any crumb of food. “You would see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went.”

The Soviet government denied there was a famine, and later denied it was a genocide. It was against the law to discuss the Holodomor in Ukraine until the late 1980s. Most historians assert that it was an intentional genocide, while some apologists downplay it to a “crime against humanity” but argue semantics to say it didn’t qualify as genocide. Holodomor denial is not about whether millions starved, but whether it was premeditated. Again, most historians assert it was an intentional genocide, and many nations recognize it as such. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer and Jewish man who coined the term “genocide” asserted that what happened in Ukraine was “not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”

Ukraine won its independence in 1991. But now, Russia is once again initiating imposing its autocratic will upon the nation via violence and terror.

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