The Holodomor was a Soviet state-induced famine in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. For nearly two years, Joseph Stalin starved Ukraine in the name of feeding the Soviet Union. Literal tons of food went to waste, and millions of Ukrainians died as a result. The Holodomor, or "death by hunger," was a little-known genocide that struck right before the Holocaust.
Yet, just like with the Holocaust, there is a disturbing amount of Holodomor denial, even in modern times. Only 16 countries worldwide have formally acknowledged that the tragedy was indeed a genocide, and the US is not one of them. President Barack Obama made a memorial speech in 2016, acknowledging "one of the most horrific man-made tragedies in modern history." The US Senate and Congress have passed resolutions declaring that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-1933."
To this day, Russia denies that the government was behind the famine. But as Russia's tension with Ukraine shows, the relationship between the two countries has never been a peaceful one.
Soviet Authorities Forcibly Removed Food From The Kulaks, Ukrainian Farmers
The Kulaks, which literally translates to “fists” in Russian, were successful farmers who resisted Stalin’s collectivization policies, which they considered to be a return to serfdom. The Soviet authorities branded them as enemies of the working class, and set out to destroy them. "Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the kulaks, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their production with the production of kolkhozes and sovkhozes,” Stalin said. Kolkhozes and sovkhozes were the collective communist government farms.
By the 1930s, Stalin implemented his dekulakization policy, where Soviet authorities forcibly took land and food away from the farmers, and sent many of them off to Siberia. The rest were left to die of starvation.
The Ukrainian Borders Were Sealed After Their Food Was Stolen
After the Soviet authorities came in and took away the land and every last scrap of food from the kulaks, millions of Ukrainians were left starving. Many tried to find refuge in other countries, but the Soviet Union sealed the borders, not letting anyone in or out. “The government did everything it could to prevent peasants from entering other regions and looking for bread,” said Oleksandra Monetova, a representative from the Holodomor Memorial Museum.
During the famine, many Ukrainians turned to cannibalism out of desperation; starvation drove people to lose their humanity and turn on each other. It was all too common for parents to forsake their children and eat them, only to later die of starvation themselves, wrote Yale Historian Timothy Snyder in his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
Human flesh even became a commodity on the black market. Despite the desperate times, cannibalism was still punishable by law. Some 2,505 people were arrested and charged with cannibalism during the Holodomor.
Alternative Food Methods Included Loafs Made Of Nettles
People resorted to all sorts of alternatives in finding food during Holodomor. They resorted to making “weed loafs,” composed of nettle leaves and other weeds, to sustain themselves as best they could. People also boiled horse hides, and even ate manure. Children were even reported eating their own excrement out of desperation. Even worse, eventually the starving peasants turned on each other.
Stalin’s Collectivization Policy Was Meant To Destroy Ukrainian Nationalism
In 1928, Stalin introduced his policy of agricultural collectivization, which at first, particularly in the West, was thought to consolidate all privately-owned Ukrainian farmland and livestock under Soviet rule. With it, Stalin supposedly intended to feed the industrial workers in the city and sell grain abroad to finance industrialization.
But, as it was written in Proletarska Pravda in 1933, it was also meant to “destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism.” Indeed, after the Holodomor, one of its principal architects, Pavel Postyshev, said, “We have annihilated the nationalist counter-revolution during the past year, we have exposed and destroyed nationalist deviationism.”
Estimates Of The Holodomor Death Toll Range As High As 20 Million
How many people actually died in the Holodomor? Even today, it remains a contested question. Historian Timothy Snyder believes that about 3.3 million people died. In a statement from the Director General of the National Museum Memorial of Victims of the Holodomor, he claimed that historians agreed approximately seven million died within the Ukrainian border, and three million outside the border. Horrifyingly, past figures have estimated the total death toll upwards of around 20.6 million.
