On a hill above the Dnieper River in Kiev, the statue of a small, emaciated girl with a sad face reminds us of the famines of 1932 and 1933 – also known as the Holodomor (to starve to death, note). In her hands she holds five ears of corn. These are symbols of a law that was valid at the time, which said that whoever harvests five ears of corn from a field can be sentenced to more than ten years in prison or even death. Children were no exception.
The extent of the catastrophe can only be guessed from the figure of the girl, but also from the few reports of those years. Hungarian reporter Arthur Koestler, who was one of the few Western journalists allowed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, reported on train stations filled with “begging peasants with swollen hands and feet”. The women held “hungry babies with stick-like limbs, huge bobbing heads and bloated bellies in the car windows.”
picturedesk.com/Tass/Sindeyev Vladimir “Man died of starvation in Kharkov 1933”: This photo was shown in Kiev at the exhibition “Declassified Memory”.
Hunger as a Ukrainian “extermination experience”
People would have died of hunger in the fields, on the roads, in the countryside and in the city. Countless lifeless bodies were gathered in the morgues. Cases of cannibalism have been reported in isolated cases. Experts estimate that the famine killed three to four million people in Ukraine alone, which had around 30 million people at the time. Although Ukraine suffered the most deaths in absolute terms, the famine also killed hundreds of thousands of people in other parts of the Soviet Union.
The Holodomor is “an integral part of the extermination experiments that Ukrainians have had to make over time in contact with empires or in contact with foreign invaders such as the Soviet empire, before the Russian empire and now that of Vladimir Putin”, says the historian. Kerstin Susanne Jobst from the University of Vienna for ORF.at. “It’s a piece of history, and Ukrainians remember it as an attempt to erase it,” American historian Anne Applebaum told the Washington Post. The awareness that they “might be exterminated” is a “reason they are fighting now”.
book references
Kerstin S. Jobst: History of Ukraine. Complaint, 276 pages, 7.60 euros.
Timothy SnyderBloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. CH Beck, 523 pages, 29.95 euros.
Anne Applebaum: Red Hunger. Stalin’s war against Ukraine. Settlers, 544 pages, 37.10 euros.
Forced collectivization and dekulakization
The catastrophic famine in the heavily agricultural area was mainly the product of misguided Soviet policy in the previous months and years: after a separate Ukrainian People’s Republic was established in parts of present-day Ukraine for a short time as a result of the October Revolution in 1917 , was renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920 incorporated into Bolshevik-ruled Soviet Russia. There were also famines in the 1920s.
However, the situation worsened dramatically with the change of government: while revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin still allowed peasant freedom with his policies, this would change comprehensively with Stalin’s rule from 1928 onwards. Under Stalin, first a collectivization voluntary agriculture and later, due to low support, forced collectivization (i.e., the integration of peasants into the economic structures of the state) and dekulakization were decided upon. Rich peasants who were a thorn in Stalin’s side were called kulaks at the time.
picturedesk.com/Mary Evans/Marx Memorial Libra Stalin ordered forced collectivization, forcing peasants to abandon their farms and join large-scale enterprises
Tough action against peasant resistance
Historian Kurt Scharr of the University of Innsbruck told ORF.at there was considerable resistance from farmers. In anger, some killed their livestock or destroyed farm equipment. Stalin reacted to the protest with deportations, executions, arrests and expropriations.
“At the same time, Stalin is launching a policy of industrialization,” continues the historian. “He has to finance it. And how? There is an old recipe – through agricultural exports.” Thus, as agricultural crops migrated abroad and into the growing cities, less and less was left for the rural population.
Stalin’s “cloak of silence”
This eventually culminated in the 1930s with the Holodomor. At that time, famines were “very well accepted” because “in the end you can eliminate that social class of the peasant population that resisted or didn’t fit into this system in one fell swoop,” says Scharr. However, it was not wanted for the general public to find out about it.
“Stalin was trying to put a blanket of silence over the famine at the time,” says Jobst. The stats have been embellished. The population was also prevented from leaving Ukraine for the west – at the same time, in the interest of maintaining propaganda, the rural population should be prevented from going to cities like Kharkiv. The West also did not fail to become involved in the unfortunate situation: “The world public was aware of these events. But there were also interests on the part of the West not to make this famine too public,” Jobst said, referring to Soviet grain exports abroad.
Thirst for secret history
Indeed, knowledge of the devastating famine has remained obscure for decades. This only changed under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. According to Scharr, his policy of transparency and restructuring fueled the “hunger of the people for a past that was inaccessible to them: “The idea of the Ukrainian nation is emerging again”.
Anyone who wants to “establish their own state overnight” has to give something to the people who “live in this territory”, explains the historian. In addition to the abstract borders of the State, in the case of Ukraine, for example, there was a language that was suppressed for a long time and a history that was not always homogeneous – after all, the different regions of present-day Ukraine also belonged to different empires Over the centuries.
Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko Monument to the famine victims in Kiev
Ukraine demands recognition as genocide
This is where the tragic famine of the 1930s comes into play. “If I take the Holodomor and say that it was then specifically aimed at the Ukrainian population, then that provides a unifying element in a young nation-state,” explains the historian, alluding to the Genocidal Debate.
Genocide or genocide is a criminal offense in international criminal law. According to the United Nations (UN) definition, genocide occurs when “a national, ethnic, racial or religious group is destroyed in part or in whole”. Opinions are still divided on whether it was genocide.
“The official Ukrainian opinion is that it was a genocide by starvation,” notes historian Jobst. To this day, Ukraine also demands international recognition as genocide. “The official Russian position is that it was not a famine directed against the Ukrainians because many Russians and others also died. Initially, it was mainly a consequence of the unfortunate collectivization, and many non-Ukrainians also died,” explains the expert on the Russian perspective. In addition, Ukrainian party secretaries shared responsibility for the situation at the time.
experts disagree
Experts also disagree with the assessment. American historian Applebaum, for example, describes the famine as a planned and targeted mass murder, while American historian Timothy Snyder sees the classification criteria as genocide given. According to Scharr, Stalin’s policy was directed against a social class, but not against the Ukrainian people themselves. In his own words, Jobst, on the other hand, “occupies an intermediate position”.
“Originally, Stalin and his group did not plan this as a targeted action against the Ukrainians,” adds Jobst. , she says. Last but not least, a number of Ukrainian intellectuals were deported in the 1930s.
picturedesk.com/EPA/Sergey Dolzhenko Former President Viktor Yushchenko saw the Holodomor as an event that all Ukrainians should identify with
Orange Revolution brings new meaning
Hunger was “politically instrumentalized” in the 1990s and 2000s in the course of “nation-building”, says Scharr – not least by Viktor Yushchenko, who was president from 2005 to 2010 as a result of the “Orange Revolution”. In a related article, Ukrainian historian Tatiana Zhurzhenko (Zhurzhenko) wrote: “It was after the Orange Revolution that the Holodomor became the centerpiece of a new identity politics that conceptualized the Ukrainian nation as a ‘post-genocidal’ community, a collective victim of a communist regime”.
This official opinion also caused mixed reactions in Ukraine, writes the researcher in the 2011 article. “This event is like no other as a metaphor for Ukrainian suffering under the Soviet regime.
The collective memory of the Holodomor played an important role for the protesters in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014,” says historian Serhiy Plochy in an interview with “Spiegel” about the meaning of the Holodomor in the 21st century.
the lie lives
These days, on the one hand, the alarm is sounding because of the precarious humanitarian situation related to the war in parts of Ukraine, on the other hand, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, warns of a “hurricane of hunger” due to to an imminent global famine associated with the war. However, Scharr and Jobst reject comparisons to the current Russian war of aggression.
AP/Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev According to experts, Putin also perfectly masters the tools of “deception and camouflage”.
In that case, the comparison should be at a meta level, says Scharr. “That means: what flows together in Putin?” asks the historian and immediately provides the answer: “the Soviet system, which was false per se” and the structures that were created there with the predecessor organizations of the KGB, “its task was to terrorize, control and undermine the population”. Scharr emphasizes that Putin has “perfect mastery” of the tools to manipulate and control people.
Just as Putin is lying to his people today about the invasion of Ukraine, the lie Stalin told about the famine lives on, wrote American historian Applebaum. In 2015, for example, an article titled “Holodomor Hoax” was published in English on the Kremlin-affiliated website Sputnik News. The famine, he says, is “one of the most famous myths and one of the most poisonous works of anti-Soviet propaganda.”