Holodomor

Holodomor

Holodomor is the Ukrainian word for “ki**lling by hunger.” It is now the proper term for Josef Stalin’s forced starvation genocide against Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. How Stalin forced it on the Ukrainian people is open for discussion. Still, most historians agree that he knew what was happening in Ukraine and refused to provide relief of any kind, even ordering food shipments diverted from Ukraine and what food its population had confiscated, violently if necessary. He imposed this particularly cruel death sentence on so many solely out of retaliation for Ukraine striving for national recognition and independence.

Today, we refer to it as a country, Ukraine, with Kiev as its capital city. But at that time, it was still referred to as the “Ukrainian SSR,” or simply, the “Ukraine,” one of many areas of Russia. The famine was manmade, an imposition directly from Stalin, but whether he premeditated it beforehand is difficult to determine. Most of Russia was experiencing famine at that time, and Stalin may have seen this as a chance to make the Holodomor look, at best, like an accident, at worst, passive justice.

justice.

The numbers are the saddest testimony overall in every one of these entries. Records were not well kept during the famine, so the death toll ranges from 1.8 to 12 million. Some scholars have narrowed this down to about 4 to 5 million. The borders were closed by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, and anyone attempting to flee to other countries or Russian states was either shot or captured and brought back to starve. Around 190,000 tried to escape Ukraine after the first year. Starvation may be the most awful cause of death. The commoners’ despair, agony, and terror led tens of thousands to resort to eating their own children. Many ate their own feet. It did not end until Stalin’s implementation of forced collectivization of grain threatened to destroy all of Russia, not just the Ukraine. Once the police and military stopped stealing everyone’s grain, farmers could grow for small communities, as they always had.