Holodomor in the Ukraine Написанных Тифф Дункан
Tiff Duncan
The Holodomor was part of the great famine that occurred from 1930 to 1933, which caused the deaths of millions of Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Was it the Stalinist policy of collectivization and economic exportation that caused this famine? Was it the result of a sever drought, or was it simply Stalinist genocide against the Ukrainian peoples? Though Ukraine did – according to Ukrainian and American scholars – suffer the most losses during this drastic time in history, many contend that The Holomodor was not simply aimed at them but a terrible tragedy that effected all those across the former U.S.S.R..
Holomodor can be translated to ‘murder by death’ and refers specifically to the famine suffered in the Ukraine in the beginning of 1933. This famine was part of the great famine suffered across the whole of the U.S.S.R. between 1930 and 1933. It was during the winter of 1932-33 that the Ukrainian people, over a period of just four months, suffered losses in the millions. The official report of the victims is 2.4 million, though that number is contested by the Ukrainian report which puts the number up to seven million. This unfortunate time in history saw not only the deaths of millions but also some extremely gruesome practices. There were so many deaths that bodies had to be collected daily by carts. People were so hungry that an estimated twenty-five thousand people resorted to cannibalism.[1]
In the first three years of the 1930s the Russian economic policy regarding agriculture was to export grain at all costs. So, although approximately seven million tons of grain was produced in 1931 none of it was afforded to the people. Then drought in 1932 caused less grain procurement which further depleted the available food stuffs to the local people. There was not enough food in the end of 1932 to make it to the next harvest and people began to starve.
Was the Holomodor really genocide against the Ukrainian people, or was it simply the effect of bad economic policies in the beginning of the Stalinist era? This is a question that is debated among many. In 1998 the Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma decreed that the third Saturday in November is a day of remembrance for the victims of the Holomodor and political repression. The current Ukrainian government does recognize the Holomodor as genocide, though that is not the official Russian position. [2]
Scholars such as Robert Conquest and Dr Raphael Lemkin do believe that this instance in history was a deliberate act of murder – genocide. In 2006, the Ukrainian government declassified the archive pages of the Holomodor. According to Robert Conquest, “these documents suggest that the Soviet regime singled out Ukraine by not giving it the same humanitarian aid given to regions outside it.” Lemkin described "the destruction of the Ukrainian nation" as the "classic example of genocide," for "...the 
Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different...to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism...the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed...a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order...if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated [then] Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation...This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation." [3]
Still this is hotly debated. Some historians do maintain that the famine was the unintentional consequence of the Soviet collectivization program. Also, that the resistance on the part of the Ukrainian peasantry furthered an already difficult issue. There was a drought that year that caused a poor harvest and Ukrainian refusal to properly go along with collectivization may have caused the demise of the Ukrainian people. [4]
You decide. Was the Holomodor simply a miscalculation on the part of the government that caused the accidental and tragic deaths of millions? Or was it a strategically planned plot from the central Soviet government designed specifically to take out the Ukrainian population? In many ways, it could very much have been both.
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