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. 

  Retrieved 21 July 2012. Russian version ; Ukrainian version.


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. Retrieved 22 July 2012. Part 1  - Part 2  - Part 3  - Part 4 'Stalinism' was a collective responsibility. Kremlin papers, The News in Brief, University of Melbourne, 19 June 1998, Vol 7 No 22

Denial
Soviet Union

The Soviet Union's regime is said to have denied the Holodomor throughout its existence. Catherine Merridale, "The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule" Historical Journal 39, 1996.
 Boriak, Hennadii (Fall 2001). "The publication of sources on the history of the 1932-1933 famine-genocide: history, current state, and prospects". Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25 (3-4): 167–186.


  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-fundedHarvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, Yale University Press (1998); . 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. 





Responses

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.

Gallery

Recognition

70px|MapCountries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 

Related pages

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

Footnotes

References

Category:Hunger

Category:History of Ukraine
Category:Soviet crimes against humanity