Holodomor 1932-33. How the USSR deliberately starved 4.5 million Ukrainians and then tried to hide it
Live: UkraineWhat is Holodomor?
"Holodomor" literally means "murder by starvation".
It is about the state-organized famine of 1932-1933, when 4.5 million Ukrainians died of starvation in the USSR.
Ukrainians (some researchers point to 7 million deaths).
The Holodomor is considered genocide in Ukraine and recognized as such in more than twenty other countries.
Every year, on the fourth Saturday of November, we commemorate the victims of the Holodomor and other artificial famines in Ukraine. Each family lights a candle near the window in memory of our murdered ancestors.
How Stalin started the Holodomor
In the late 1920s, Stalin aimed to industrialize the USSR using the export of agricultural surplus. Ukraine,
"the breadbasket of Europe," played a central role.
Stalin also announced collectivization, a forced seizure of the farmland into a state-managed
"kolkhoz" system.
In reality, collectivization meant mass terror: crops and land were taken away, and tens of thousands of peasants were sent to concentration camps in Siberia.
Around 4,000 mass demonstrations of farmers were recorded in Ukraine during the early 1930s.
When poor crops and social resistance led to the failure of 1931 targets, Stalin ordered to eliminate the "nationalist" and "counterrevolution" threats and "turn Ukraine into a model Soviet republic.”
From state-managed famine to genocide
By the end of 1932, up to 1 million Ukrainians already died from starvation. Then, Stalin doubled down specifically on Ukraine.
At the end of 1932, not only the crops but even all livestock was taken away at gunpoint. The Soviets were going house to house in search of any hidden food. If people resisted the confiscation, they were shot dead.
In January of 1933, the border from Ukraine to Belarus and to Russia was closed. The cities were also closed off to the peasants. The Ukrainians were locked out and couldn't escape starvation.
By the end of 1933, at least 4 million Ukrainians starved to death (plus 500,000 unborn).
How Ukrainians Starved To Death
It's not enough to just count the number of deaths.
You have to understand how exactly these people were dying. The genocide was happening for 2 years until people didn't have a single crumb of bread to eat left.
Entire villages would lie on the ground as lifeless swollen bodies until a scheduled truck arrived to pick up the dead (or still dying) and take them to a mass grave. Cases of cannibalism became common.
Nobody was allowed to escape this hell, and nobody from the outside was allowed to come and help. It was a slow, targeted, and deliberate extermination of the Ukrainian peasantry.
The trauma of the Holodomor
Beyond the death rate, it's hard to measure or communicate the impact of the Holodomor.
In 1902, Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska wrote: "We are the people who only know soil. It is black, and our hands are black from it, but it is sacred." By breaking the Ukrainians' reliance on their land, Stalin broke the sense of security for Ukrainains for generations. Even in 2022, the scarcity mindset toward food still persists in Ukraine.
Social cohesion was also destroyed. Starvation meant that everybody was on their own to find enough calories to survive. Communities and families fell apart; trust was broken. The social and political life of Ukraine was deeply scarred by the Holodomor.
Colonial and genocidal crime
The Holodomor (along with the Kazakh Asharshylyk) was both a mass terror of the peasantry class and a genocide of the Ukrainian nation. Along with the Holodomor, hundreds of Ukraine's brightest intellectuals were executed and sent to the Gulag.
Ukraine was deboned and beheaded at the same time.
Rafal Lemkin, a scholar who coined the term genocide, believed that the Holodomor was "the classic example of Soviet genocide."
The Holodomor was also a colonial crime. The Soviets treated Ukraine as a resource that existed only to be extracted for the benefit of the metropole.
Ukrainians were treated as inferiors who had to be murdered if they stood in the way of this extraction.
Holodomor and modern Russia
Since the mid-2000s, Ukraine has campaigned to raise awareness of the Holodomor genocide. So far, multiple countries have recognized it as an act of genocide, including Poland, the Baltic states, Georgia, Czechia, Romania, Australia, Ireland, Portugal, the USA, Canada, Mexico, and more.
Unsurprisingly, Russia has been the most vocal critic of this campaign. Russia, the successor state to the USSR, claims that many regions of the USSR suffered from famine at the time, so there is nothing genocidal about Ukraine's famine.
Not only Russia refuses to take responsibility and apologize for the genocide, but it also hides the truth. Soviet archives related to the Holodomor remain hidden behind the Kremlin walls to this day.
Holodomor's significance in 2022
The genocidal nature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - especially evident in Bucha, Irpin, Izium, and Mariupol - has shocked and horrified the entire world.
This invasion serves as the window into the many crimes of the Russian imperial project. Holodomor is one of the worst of these atrocities.
Today, the best way to honor the 4.5 million Ukrainians who starved to death in 1932-1933 is to support Ukraine in its current fight for survival.
Source: armukrainenow
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