Ten Things You Should Know About the Holodomor

By Walter Kish

This year marks the 75^th anniversary of the Holodomor, one of the greatest tragedies and crimes in all of recorded history.  Between 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians died within Ukraine, some border regions and the Kuban in Russia through deliberately imposed starvation. It was a premeditated and orchestrated policy of the Stalinist regime aimed at destroying a whole class of small independent farmers and landowners who were then resisting Soviet collectivization.  In recent years, Ukrainians everywhere have made a determined effort to have the Holodomor officially recognized as a crime of genocide.  As Ukrainians, we have a moral duty to all the countless victims of that genocide to not only be informed as to what happened, but to insure that the world knows and never forgets.  This was more than just a crime against Ukrainians; it was a crime against humanity.  The following are ten things you should know about the Holodomor.

1. The precise number of victims will likely never be known to any great degree of accuracy.  Recent analysis based on Soviet official statistics gives a range in the low end of about three to four million.  Of course, any official Soviet data is almost inherently suspect.  The more accepted number usually quoted by the current Ukrainian government and accepted by the UN and most Western nations is in the range of seven to ten million.

2. Most of the Holodomor’s victims came from Central and Eastern Ukraine.  During the peak in the Winter and Spring of 1933, an estimated 25,000 people a day were dying of starvation.  All told, the Holodomor claimed some 20% to 25% of the total population of Ukraine.

3. The current Russian government continues to deny and downplay the Holodomor as a crime of genocide, claiming among other things that it was not aimed at Ukrainians and that Russians died of starvation as well.  The best available statistics however show that some 81% of the victims of the 1932-33 famine were Ukrainians, while less than 5% were Russian.

4. Much of continuing Russian propaganda denying the facts of the Holodomor claims that the famine had natural causes, primarily drought in the grain growing regions.  However, even Soviet meteorological sources have shown that the drought that year was centered outside of Ukraine.  Further, there was a much more serious drought in 1936, without any even remotely comparable famine effect.

5. The word Holodomor is a constructed neologism formed from the Ukrainian words holod (hunger) and mor (plague), with the meaning of “murder by hunger” leading to starvation.

6. The word genocide was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish extraction who studied linguistics and law in Lviv in the 1920’s.  In 1933, he presented a proposal to the League of Nations to define crimes against humanity.  This evolved over time into the concept of genocide and through his efforts the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN in 1948.

7. The Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) passed a resolution on May 15, 2003, declaring the famine of 1932-33 to be an act of genocide deliberately organized by the Soviet government against the Ukrainian nation.  Unsurprisingly, the Russian State Duma passed a resolution in 2008 categorically stating that the famine was not genocide

8. Both the UN and the European Union recognize the Holodomor as both a great tragedy and a deliberate initiative of the then Soviet regime, but because of strong Russian lobbying and influence, stop short of officially calling it genocide.

9. Although the Russians now grudgingly admit that there may have been some Soviet government culpability in the Holodomor, diehard Ukrainian Communists still deny the facts.  As recently as a year ago, Petro Symonenko, head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, denied that there was any deliberate starvation and accused the Ukrainian government of using the Holodomor to stir up ethnic hatred.

10.  In May 2008, coinciding with Ukrainian President  Yushchenko’s visit to Canada, the Canadian Parliament passed Bill C-459 recognizing the Holodomor as an act of genocide perpetrated against the Ukrainian people by the brutal Communist dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.

Every nation has a collective soul.  The Holodomor of 1932-33 that took the lives of so many Ukrainians created a huge void in the Ukrainian soul.  It is one that can only be healed by remembrance and a dedication by all to ensure it can never happen again to anyone, anywhere.