Holodomor

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор, "murder by hunger") was a man-made famine that happened in Ukraine in 1932 and in 1933. It is also known as the Terror-Famine or Great Famine. At that time, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. Around 7,000,000 people were starved to death under the policies of Joseph Stalin.

Holodomor Голодомор
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933
Country	Soviet Union
Location	Central and Eastern Ukraine
Period	1932–1933
Total deaths	7.5 million - 13 million.
Observations	Considered genocide by 16 countries Considered as a criminal act of the Stalinist Regime by 6 countries Considered a tragedy or crime against humanity by 5 international organizations
Relief	Foreign relief rejected by the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin. Respectively 176,200 and 325,000 tons of grains provided by the Soviet state as food and seed aids between February and July 1933.

History

Joseph Stalin was the leader and dictator of the Soviet Union, which was a communist country. He made farmers in the Soviet Union change the way they farmed; then he tried to make the farmers work harder for the government-owned farms, for less money. Many people in Ukraine did not want to go along with this.

When Ukraine had a famine, Stalin refused to help the people there. Instead, the government took food away from people. It became illegal (against the law) to pick up food from the ground of fields. The government also tried to stop people from moving around the country to look for food.

Legacy

Scholars and politicians using the word Holodomor say the famine was a genocide because it was man-made. Some compare it to the Holocaust because millions of people died. They argue that the Soviet policies were an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and therefore is a genocide.

Recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide by countries:

  Officially recognized as an act of genocide

  Officially condemned as an act of extermination

  Officially not recognized as an act of genocide

Other scholars say that the Holodomor was an unexpected consequence of the rapid and massive industrialization started by Stalin, which brought radical economic changes to the farmers and the country, and which was not done on purpose.

Denial

Since the 1930s, many Western scholars have denied the Holodomor for different reasons, mainly out of communist sympathy, preventing them from acknowledging the Holodomor and the worth of Ukrainians as human beings. Such denial is deemed essentially racist and dehumanizing.

Walter Duranty

Walter Duranty, a Moscow-based New York Times journalist in the 1930s, wrote a series of articles denying the Holodomor and praising Joseph Stalin, while millions of Ukrainians starved to death. The articles ironically won Duranty the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, which caused on-and-off controversy in the following decades. In 2003, the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize board reviewed Duranty's articles separately, yet declined to withdraw his prize.

Oksana Piaseckyj, a Ukrainian-American activist who fled to the United States as a child in 1950, referred to Walter Duranty as "the personification of evil in journalism." This case has become the biggest scandal in the history of the New York Times.

Images

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  Passers-by ignore the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1932
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  Passers-by ignore corpses of starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933
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  Children are digging up frozen potatoes in the field of a collective farm in Udachne village, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 1933
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  "Light the candle" event at a Holodomor memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine
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  Memorial at the Andrushivka village cemetery, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine
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  Memorial in Poltava Oblast, Ukraine
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  Holodomor Memorial in Windsor, Ontario, Canada
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  Poster by Ukrainian-Australian artist Leonid Denysenko
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  Stamp of Ukraine of the year 1993.
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  Viktor Yanukovych and Dmitry Medvedev at the Memorial to the Holodomor Victims in Kyiv, Ukraine

	List of countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide
Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City

Other websites

• Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation USA Archived 2011-10-28 at the Wayback Machine
• Famine Genocide Commemorative Committee Ukrainian Canadian Congress Archived 2012-08-31 at the Wayback Machine
• Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Archived 2011-06-04 at the Wayback Machine, U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Report to Congress. Adopted by the Commission, 19 April 1988
• Joint declaration at the United Nations in connection with 70th anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933
• Address of the Verkhovna Rada to the Ukrainian nation on commemorating the victims of Holodomor 1932–1933