Holodomor

The **Holodomor** 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**. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union back then. Around 7,000,000 people died under the policies of Joseph Stalin.

## 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 _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.

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.

### Soviet Union

The Soviet Union's regime is said to have denied the Holodomor throughout its existence. It is also said to have never commemorated the Holocaust.

### Communist Party USA

News of the Holodomor reached the US in 1933. The Yiddish _Jewish Daily Forward_ was one of the media that reported the Holodomor. Shortly after, it was accused by the Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) of "spreading Nazi-inspired lies", despite the magazine being run by Jewish Americans.

### 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 controversies 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.

#### Ukraine

Ukraine passed the  in 2006 to ban Holodomor denial, recognizing it as an insult to the memory of victims and humiliation of the dignity of Ukrainians.

#### Germany

In November 2022, Germany recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, while changing a law to ban the approval, denial, and "gross trivialization" of genocides or war crimes in the new paragraph 5 of section 130 of the German Penal Code, the _Strafgesetzbuch_.

## Recognition

|||align="center" style="background:#ccccff" width="200%"|Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide|||
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## Related pages

- Ruscism
- The Holocaust
- Rwandan genocide
- Cambodian genocide
- Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II

## Infobox (famine)

- **famine name in local**: Голодомор
- **image**: GolodomorKharkiv.jpg
- **caption**: Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933
- **country**: Soviet Union
- **location**: Central and Eastern Ukrainian SSR, 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 aid, Foreign relief rejected by the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin. Respectively 176,200 and 325,000 Ton, tons of Grain, grains provided by the Soviet state as food and seed aids between February and July 1933.
- **food situation**: Deliberate macro-economic food extraction from affected region