The Kuban and the Holodomor

By Walter Kish

For the past several months, I’ve been involved with representatives of other Ukrainian organizations in Oshawa in organizing a Holodomor commemoration program in conjunction with the 75^th anniversary of the tragic artificial famine that killed so many millions of Ukrainians.  Of course, during Soviet times, the Communists strenuously denied that anything of the kind ever took place. 

Even today’s Russian government, while grudgingly acknowledging that large numbers may have perished, nonetheless still denies that it was a genocide aimed at the Ukrainian people.  It tries to deflect the egregiousness of the crime by painting it as an act of political excess that also included other geographic areas outside of Ukraine, and other races and ethnicities, including Russians.  Of course, archives and information now coming to light since the fall of the Soviet regime, are increasingly reinforcing what Ukrainians have been saying all along, namely that by far the vast majority, probably 80% - 90% of the victims, were indeed Ukrainian.

Even the largest area outside of Ukraine that was victimised by the Famine, the Kuban, needs to be looked at within an ethnic context.  The Kuban area lies along the Black Sea Coast, northwest of Georgia and south of the Russian Don River region. The population of the Kuban was predominantly Ukrainian at the time of the Famine. 

For most of history, this region of the southeastern Steppes was sparsely populated. During most of the past thousand years it was home primarily to the descendants of the Mongol Horde, as well as several native Caucasian tribes, such as the Cherkessians and Ossetians.  Subsequent to Russia’s taking control of most of Ukraine during the time of Catherine II (in the 1700s), the Kuban area became increasingly settled by the remnants of the Zaporizhian Kozaks.  The Russians offered the Kozaks land and limited autonomy in return for controlling the southern borders of the Russian Empire.  By the late 18^th Century, the Kuban area had been settled by some 25,000 Kozaks. 

Within a century, the population of the Kuban had grown to close to two million, a significant proportion of whom had fled strife, poverty or overcrowding in Eastern Ukraine.  A census conducted in 1897 indicates that some 49.1% of the population claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, while 41.8% claimed Russian.  A census almost thirty years later in 1926 showed that although the population had grown to three and a half million, the ethnic makeup remained relatively unchanged, with 47% identifying themselves as Ukrainians and 41% as Russians.

In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, all sides of the conflict sought the support of the militarily important Kuban Kozaks, who wound up splitting along political and ethnic lines.  Some fought with the White armies, some with the Bolsheviks, and a significant number sided with the newly formed Ukrainian nationalist Central Council (Rada).  Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks eventually took control in 1920, and quickly permanently disbanded the Kuban Kozaks as a military force.  Those that were unable to flee were persecuted mercilessly by the Communists, and those who didn’t flee or were exiled, became primary victims of the Famine a little over a decade later.

The Holodomor did indeed encompass areas outside of Ukraine proper, however it is important to note that a significant proportion of the victims outside the territorial boundaries of Ukraine, were also Ukrainians.  According to historian Robert Conquest’s estimations, the famine claimed some 5 million lives in Ukraine proper, 1 million in the northern Caucasus and another million in other regions of the USSR, primarily east of the Don River.  The northern Caucasus region consists mostly of the Kuban, and as the demographic statistics above indicate, this was predominantly settled by Ukrainian Kozaks and their descendants.  Even here most of the victims were Ukrainian.

Similarly, within Russia proper, the areas most affected by the Famine had significant populations of Ukrainians who had migrated or been exiled to Russia’s eastern Steppes.  They too died in the hundreds of thousands. 

The “bottom line” is, while it is true that not only Ukrainians died in the Holodomor, the evidence is now far too overwhelming to deny that Ukrainians were undoubtedly the primary intended victims.