Holodomor: Recognition after 75
years, but still without justice
By Andrew Wodoslawsky
War crimes and massacres are nothing new in our word’s history.
Very often this was (and is) done during wartime to destroy resistance.
However, very often, states will wage war on their own citizens, whether to
subdue opposition, or to eliminate “undesirable” cultural or ethnic groups.
Surprisingly, one of the largest such atrocities in the 20th century remains
largely unknown to the general populace. This was the Holodomor, or
Famine-Genocide, an artificial famine orchestrated by the Soviet government in
1932-33 against the Ukrainian S.S.R., and against minority populations in the
Kuban, Northern Caucasus, and
The setup of the Holodomor began with
events 25 years prior, when as the Russian (Tsarist) Empire collapsed under the
strain of the First World War, and the Ukrainian people declared independence
and formed the
The violence began with the liquidation of the
national leadership and the intellectual elite. More than 1,500 priests and
5,000 intellectuals were executed, and their institutions shut down (greater
than 90% of church buildings were destroyed). However, since most Ukrainians at
the time worked in agriculture, “decapitating” Ukrainian resistance meant that
the village leadership had to be destroyed as well, and so a policy of
“dekulakization” began. A “kulak” was first thought of as farmer who produced
surplus, but really applied to anyone presenting any resistance to Soviet
policy. The punishment for being a “kulak” was either execution or exile to
hard labour in Northern Siberia or the
The next phase in the Five Year Plan was
collectivization, or the process of concentrating all farmland and farming
technology into State owned collective farms. This centralized arrangement made
it easy for the Soviet authorities to collect quota of grain to sell to the
West for industrial technology. The grain quotas were set unrealistically high
from the very beginning, and the farms were not able to meet the State’s demand
for food. All reserves were drained and all personal stores of food were
confiscated by the State. The draconian “Five Stalks Law” was enacted making
everything imaginable “socialist property”. Historian Miron Dorlot writes: “to
glean the already harvested fields, to fish in the river, to pick up a fallen
dry twig in the forest, or even to collect dry weeds along the roads for fuel
was an unpardonable crime equal to State treason.” The age limit for the Death
Penalty was lowered to 12 years.
There have been many different estimates on the
casualties of the first Five Year Plan. In his memoirs, Winston Churchill
recalls a conversation with Joseph Stalin. When asked about opposition to the
“policies of collective farms”, Stalin replied ‘Ten millions.” The generally
accepted figures for the casualties of the Holodomor are between 7-10
million, making this among the largest atrocities of the century, comparable to
the Holocaust in Europe and the Cultural Revolution on
Unlike their Nazi counterparts after World War II,
Soviet officials who planned and organized the Holodomor were never
persecuted for their crimes against humanity. In actual fact, Lazar Kaganovich
and Vyacheslav Molotov, both close associates of Stalin and responsible for the
Holodomor in their assigned areas, each lived to 97 and 96 years old,
respectively. If there are to be no “Nuremberg Trials” for the Soviet
murderers, then let there at least be recognition, both among citizens and
governments, that 10 million lives were destroyed in a deliberate attack on the
Ukrainian People by Soviet authorities.