page_title: Soviet famine of 1932–33
section_title: Reactions
hierarchical_section_title: Soviet famine of 1932–33 / Reactions
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Дмитрий Медведев и Виктор Янукович почтили память жертв голода на Украине, поставив горящие лампады к подножию памятника, посвящённого этой трагедии.English: Dmitry Medvedev and Viktor Yanukovych honoured the memory of victims of the famine in Ukraine, placing candles at the foot on the monument to the victims of this tragedy.
context_page_description: The Soviet famine of 1932–33 was a major famine that killed millions of people in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. The Holodomor in Ukraine and Kazakh famine of 1932–33 have been seen as genocide committed by Joseph Stalin's government. It has been estimated that between 3.3 and 3.9 million died in Ukraine and 2 million died in Kazakhstan.
  The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in the heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban region are included. Older estimates are still often cited in political commentary. In 2007, David Marples estimated that 7.5 million people died as a result of the famine in Soviet Ukraine, of which 4 million were ethnic Ukrainians. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficit. Later in 2010, Timothy Snyder estimated that around 3.3 million people died in total in Ukraine.
context_section_description: The famine of 1932–1933 was officially denied, so any discourse on this issue was classified as criminal "anti-Soviet propaganda" until Perestroika.  The results of the 1937 census were kept secret as they revealed the demographic losses attributable to the Great Famine.
  Some well-known journalists, most notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, downplayed the famine and its death toll. In 1932, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his coverage of the Soviet Union's first five-year plan and thus, he was considered the most expert Western journalist to cover the famine. In the article "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving", he responded to an account of starvation in Ukraine and, while acknowledging that there was widespread malnutrition in certain areas of the USSR (including parts of the North Caucasus and Lower Volga), generally disagreed with the scale of the starvation and claimed that there was no famine. Duranty's coverage led directly to Franklin Roosevelt officially recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933 and thus revoked the United States' official recognition of an independent Ukraine.  A similar position was taken by the French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, who toured the territory of Ukraine during his stay in the Soviet Union. Other Western journalists, however, did report on the famine at the time, including Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, who both severely criticised Duranty's account and were later banned from returning to the Soviet Union.
  As a child, Mikhail Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine in Stavropol, Russia. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father."
  George Orwell's Animal Farm was inspired by Gareth Jones's articles about the Great Famine of 1932–1933.
  Members of the international community have denounced the USSR government for the events of the years 1932–1933. However, the classification of the Ukrainian famine as a genocide is a subject of debate. A comprehensive criticism is presented by Michael Ellman in the article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited" published in the journal Europe-Asia Studies. The author refers to the UN Convention which specifies that genocide is the destruction 'in whole or in part' of a national group, "any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". The reasons for the famine are claimed to have been rooted in the industrialization and widespread collectivization of farms that involved escalating taxes, grain-delivery quotas, and dispossession of all property. The latter was met with resistance that was answered by “imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.” As people were left with insufficient amount of food after the procurement, the famine occurred. Therefore, the famine occurred largely due to the policies that favored the goals of collectivization and industrialization rather than the deliberate attempt to destroy the Kazakhs or Ukrainians as a people.
  In Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum argues that the UN definition of genocide is overly narrow, due to the USSR's influence on the Genocide Convention. Instead of a broad definition that would have included the Soviet crimes against kulaks and Ukrainians, genocide "came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust. The Holodomor does not meet that criterion ... This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide'". Applebaum thus concludes:
  The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against
caption: Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 17 May 2010 near Memorial to the Holodomor Victims in Kiev.
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