Ukraine, 1932–1933
The Holodomor
Holodomor names the famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine. The word, from Ukrainian, means killing by hunger. The argument is not whether people starved. The argument is whether the starvation was a result Moscow chose, continued, and aimed.
What happened
Collectivization after 1929 broke independent farming. Grain quotas for Ukraine were set above what the 1932 harvest could pay. Brigades searched houses, yards, and chimneys. Peasants who gleaned leftover ears were prosecuted under the law of 7 August 1932 — the “law of spikelets” — which allowed the death penalty for theft of collective property. Villages that missed delivery were put on blackboards: no goods in the shop, no credit, no milling.
People tried to walk out, toward cities and toward Russia, where bread was short but not always lethal. On 22 January 1933 Stalin and Molotov ordered the roads closed. Peasants fleeing Ukraine and the North Caucasus were to be turned back. Internal passports, introduced in 1932, already made legal life in a city a privilege. The famine peaked in the spring and early summer of 1933. Whole villages went quiet. There are photographs, diaries, and the demographic hole that shows up between the censuses of 1926 and 1939.
Who gave the orders
Stalin set the line and refused to lower it when Ukrainian officials told him the quotas would kill. The working mail is the Stalin–Kaganovich correspondence, published in the Yale Annals of Communism. Vyacheslav Molotov carried the procurement campaign. Lazar Kaganovich enforced it in the party apparatus and in Ukraine. Pavel Postyshev was sent to break Ukrainian reluctance. Local secretaries who asked for seed grain back were the ones who lost their posts, and often, later, their lives.
This was not a secret kept from the top by cruel lieutenants. The lieutenants wrote to the top, and the top wrote back. Grain continued to be exported in 1932 and 1933. The state that had accepted American famine relief in 1921 refused to call this a famine and refused the outside in.
Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich are filed as people, not as symbols. Kaganovich was Jewish. The dead in Ukraine included Jews, and the policy was not a Jewish policy. It was a Stalin policy carried by whoever would carry it.
How many
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s population reconstruction — the MAPA project — estimates about 3.9 million excess deaths in Ukraine in 1932–34, about nine-tenths of them rural, about nine-tenths of them in 1933, plus roughly 600,000 births that did not happen. Relative to population, Ukraine’s loss was several times Russia’s in the same years. The USSR-wide excess for 1932–34 is larger. One figure tied to that research puts it near 8.7 million; R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, working from food balances, land nearer 5.5 to 6.5 million for the main famine. Both are serious. A textbook that prints “the difficulties of collectivization” and no number is not being careful. It is omitting.
Kazakhstan is part of the same policy decade and a different national catastrophe. Sedentarization and livestock seizure killed about 1.3 to 1.5 million people, on the order of 38 percent of Kazakhs. Sarah Cameron’s The Hungry Steppe is the English book. Do not fold that into a Ukrainian total, and do not leave it out.
Was it genocide?
The legal argument turns on intent: whether Stalin’s government meant to destroy Ukrainians, as such, in whole or in part. Anne Applebaum, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, and a large body of Ukrainian scholarship say yes — not only because the dead were numerous, but because Ukrainian village life and the Ukrainian party and cultural elite were hit together, while grain left the republic and the border was sealed. Ukraine, many other states, and the European Parliament have recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.
Davies and Wheatcroft, and some other economic historians, argue a crime of policy aimed at the peasantry and at grain, catastrophic and knowing, without being persuaded that the national destruction of Ukrainians was the operative aim. Peasants died in the Kuban, on the Volga, and in Kazakhstan under related orders. That disagreement is real. It is not the same as the Soviet claim, current into the 1980s, that there was no famine. The blackboards, the spikelet law, the export ledgers, and the 22 January 1933 directive do not depend on which side of the legal word you come down on.
The cover-up
Gareth Jones walked the villages in March 1933 and published what he saw. Malcolm Muggeridge filed to the Manchester Guardian the same month. Walter Duranty of the New York Times answered Jones in print on 31 March: “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” He hedged, and in private he estimated millions of deaths. His public line is what Moscow needed. Foreign visitors were shown model farms. The 1937 census, which recorded a population too small to match the official story, was suppressed, and senior census officials were shot.
“Nobody knew” is false. “A few correspondents knew and a prestigious paper helped drown them out” is closer. The articles are in the library and the documents.