Holodomor << HOL oh DOH mohr >> is the name of a terrible human-caused famine that struck Ukraine in the early 1930’s. Historians estimate that between 5 million and 8 million people, mostly Ukrainians, died in the Holodomor. They mainly lived in Ukraine and some nearby regions with large Ukrainian populations. The famine and the resulting suffering and death were caused by the policies of the government of the Soviet Union under the dictator Joseph Stalin. In Ukrainian, Holodomor means extermination by hunger.
The famine struck one of Europe’s most productive food-growing regions. Ukraine has been called the breadbasket of Europe for its rich agricultural production. In 1922, Ukraine became one of the four original republics of the Soviet Union. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, the Soviet government took over privately owned farms in Ukraine and combined them into larger, state-run farms. This process, called collectivization, was part of Stalin’s first five-year plan to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. Several hundred thousand Ukrainian farmers resisted the seizure of their land and were killed or relocated. Many of them were sent to concentration camps called Gulags in remote areas of Siberia or Soviet Central Asia.
The collective farms were assigned production quotas—that is, required amounts of grain to produce for the government. The Soviets regularly increased the quotas. Eventually, they demanded more than Ukraine’s harvest could provide. In 1932 and 1933, the Soviet government resorted to seizing grain and food from Ukrainian people’s homes, causing a major famine. Food on collective farms was considered property of the state. A law passed in 1932 stated that anyone, even children, caught taking food from a collective farm could be imprisoned or executed.
The famine was the hardest on the rural people, most of whom were ethnically Ukrainian. The region’s cities, where more Russian people lived, benefited from food rations during the famine. To prevent rural people from traveling to the cities for food, the government started a system requiring passports for travel within the Soviet Union. These passports were denied to farmers and villagers. The Soviet government closed Ukraine’s borders, so Ukrainians could neither import food nor travel abroad to get it.
At the height of the Holodomor in 1933, 28,000 people died daily of starvation. The Ukrainian population dropped sharply, and huge numbers of children were orphaned. Entire villages of Ukrainians were wiped out, later to be replaced by Russians. The government sold much of the collected grain for export and used some of it for alcohol production. Some of it rotted due to mismanagement.
For a long time, the Holodomor remained largely unknown to other nations. Foreign correspondents were not allowed into Ukraine at the time. The Soviet government denied that the famine was happening and worked to convince other countries that reports of starvation were untrue. In Ukraine, it was a crime to speak of the Holodomor until the late 1980’s. After the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990’s, undeniable evidence of the famine and its causes were released from archives in Russia and Ukraine.
In 1998, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma established a national day of remembrance for the victims of the Holodomor. Holodomor Remembrance Day is observed each year on the fourth Saturday of November.
In 2006, Ukraine’s parliament officially declared the Holodomor to have been a genocide directed at ethnic Ukrainians. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic mistreatment or extermination of a national, racial, political, religious, or cultural group. Many other governments around the world have since passed resolutions declaring the Holodomor a genocide.
