Holodomor and the Soviet famine of 1932 to 1933

The Holodomor, a Ukrainian word often rendered as 'death by hunger', is the name Ukrainians give to the famine of 1932 and 1933 that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine. It was part of a wider Soviet famine that also struck the Kuban, the North Caucasus and the Volga region, and in proportion to population hit Kazakhstan hardest, where about 1.5 million people died, most of them ethnic Kazakhs. Demographers estimate about 3.5 to 5 million deaths in Ukraine and 5 to 8 million across the Soviet Union. Villagers ate grass, bark and animals, and the bodies of the dead lay along roads and at railway stations.¹²⁴

The famine followed from Stalin's policies. The first Five-Year Plan needed grain to feed cities and to export for machinery, and forced collectivization put the farms under state control. Output fell, but quotas stayed high, and in 1932 officials seized grain, seed and often other food. Villages that failed to meet quotas were put on blacklists and cut off from goods. In August 1932 the Law of Spikelets made taking even small amounts of collective farm grain punishable by death or ten years in a camp. In December 1932 internal passports were introduced, and in January 1933 the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban were closed so that starving peasants could not leave to find food.¹²

Historians agree that state policy caused the deaths and that the authorities knew of the starvation, concealed it and refused to cut grain demands enough. They disagree on whether it was a genocide. Robert Conquest and others describe a deliberate terror-famine aimed at Ukrainians as a nation. R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft argue that Stalin's aim was grain and control of the peasantry, and that the famine was a Soviet-wide catastrophe rather than one planned against a nation, though policy in Ukraine was harsher. Ukraine recognizes the Holodomor as a genocide, as did the European Parliament in 2022 and the parliaments of at least 20 countries. The Soviet government denied the famine for decades, foreign reporting such as that of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones was attacked, and the full record emerged only after archives opened in 1991.²⁵³