THT's den

THT's den

The Holodomor

There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the famine that happened in the USSR around 1932-1933 as “The Holodomor” (literally: “to kill by starvation” in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:

  1. It implies the famine mainly affected Ukraine.
  2. It implies there was intent or deliberate causation.

This framing was used to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. However, both these points are highly debatable.

First Issue

The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, not just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan, for example, was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine was.

The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European anti-Semitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls “Holocaust Envy,” the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their “own” Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was “a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history.”

Second Issue

The second issue is that one of the main causes of the famine was crop failure due to weather and disease, which is hardly something anyone can control no matter their intentions. However, the famine may have been further exacerbated by the agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization policies of the Soviet Union. However, if these policies had not been carried out there could have been even more devastating consequences later.

Necessity

In 1931, during a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry, Stalin said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.”

In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union’s industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the Soviet Union to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.

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