Double genocide theory

The double genocide theory () says that two equally serious genocides happened in World War II. The first was the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany against Jews.* 



 * 



  The other was a genocide committed by the Soviet Union against Eastern Europeans (including the Poles, Ukrainians, and Baltic states' population), according to this theory.* 



Overview

Historians think that the double genocide theory appeared in Lithuania after the Soviet Union ended in December 1991. After this, formerly Soviet-occupied countries built monuments and museums to show the world the evidence of their suffering under Soviet totalitarianism.


Supporters of the double genocide theory base their views on a series of events that happened in Soviet-occupied countries. The theory is controversial among scholars worldwide. Some say that the double genocide theory is a form of historical revisionism.


Soviet persecution of Poles

Josef Stalin's Soviet forces killed at least 150,000 Poles on Polish soil in wartime. Soviet persecution of the Poles continued until the Soviet puppet government in Poland fell in 1989.thumb|Rows of exhumed bodies of Polish officers, killed in the 1940 Katyn massacre, placed on the ground by the mass graves, awaiting examination.

 The Great Terror 
During the Great Terror (also called the Great Purge) between 1936-1938, Stalin's forces killed 111,091 Poles living in or near the Soviet Union.McLoughlin, Barry, and McDermott, Kevin (eds). Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, December 2002. , p. 164

 Soviet-occupied Poland 
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and divided it in two.Telegrams sent by Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, German ambassador to the Soviet Union, from Moscow to the German Foreign Office: No. 317  of 10 September 1939, No. 371  of 16 September 1939, No. 372  of 17 September 1939. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Retrieved 14 November 2006.1939 wrzesień 17, Moskwa Nota rządu sowieckiego nie przyjęta przez ambasadora Wacława Grzybowskiego (Note of the Soviet government to the Polish government on 17 September 1939, refused by Polish ambassador Wacław Grzybowski). Retrieved 15 November 2006. The Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland. Stalin claimed he did this because pre-war Poland was a "crime against revolution [... with] counter-revolutionary activity". Meanwhile, Nazi Germany occupied western Poland. 

Soviet-occupied Poland included 52.1% of pre-war Poland (c. 200,000 km2) and over 13,700,000 citizens.. Also in: Trela-Mazur 1997, Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie, Wrocław. Among its citizens who were not Poles, 37% were Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians, and 0.6% Germans. 

In late June 1941, the Nazi-led Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. By that time, Soviet forces had already arrested 500,000 Poles in the Kresy macroregion.*DAVID ENGEL, FACING A HOLOCAUST: THE POLISH GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE AND THE JEWS, 1943–1945, at 71 (1993) (“The German broadcast [announcing the discovery of the Katyn graves] charged that these officers had been shot by the Soviets in March 1940 . . . .”).
"In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. (...) The Soviet-imposed myth about "Communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries." Johanna Granville, H-Net Review of Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad.
Tomasz Szarota & Wojciech Materski (2009), Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance,  (Excerpt reproduced in digital form). 

 Katyn massacre 

In a memo on March 5, 1940, Lavrentiy Beria asked Stalin to order the execution of 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" in the Soviet-occupied zone. Six members of the Soviet Politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin – signed an order authorizing this mass execution. 


Between April and May 1940, the Soviets executed around 22,000 Poles in the Katyn forest (now in Smolensk, Russia). 




  Most victims were captured Polish soldiers, Polish police, or members of the intelligentsia.


Between February 10, 1940 and June 1941, as many as 1,200,000 Poles were deported to mainland Russia. 


  The deportation happened while Polish and Jewish property across the occupied zone were taken away by the Soviets. Represje 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich  (Repressions 1939–41. Arrested on the Eastern Borderlands.) Ośrodek Karta. Retrieved 15 November 2006. Polish Jews made up 30% of the Poles deported to Siberia,Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 196–98. making them statistically the most targeted group among the deportees.

The Katyn massacre was part of the Soviets' campaign to erase Poland's culture and identity.  The Soviets thought the Poles were "avowed enemies of Soviet authority", according to German-American historian Gerhard Weinberg. Weinberg also wrote:

 Destruction of Polish society 
In both the Nazi- and Soviet-occupied zones, Poles were oppressed because of anti-Polish racism (also called anti-PolonismThaddeus C. Radzilowski, Anti-Polonism  or Polonophobia). This racism was not new; it existed even before the Soviet Union did.Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: literature and the discourse of empire from Napoleonic to postcolonial times, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2001, 354 pages.  Page 69. 

In their zone, the Soviets forced Russian culture onto the Poles. They made Polish universities focus on Russian studies, suppress Polish studies, and teach according to Soviet rules (called the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools). They systematically erased traces of Polish history. They dissolved all Polish political parties and organizations. They also made the Polish currency invalid, which caused the whole population to lose their life savings overnight.

 NKVD prisoner massacres 

Before June 1941 (when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union), the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across its occupied Eastern European territories. 



 Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007  Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. 

The NKVD hastily killed two-thirds of these prisoners. Among the victims, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation. Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. Around 9,000 died in the Ukrainian SSR, which had just gone through the Holodomor and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kyiv. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.Valery Vasiliev, Yuriy Shapoval, "Stages of «Great Terror»: The Vinnytsia Tragedy", Zerkalo Nedeli, No. 31 (406), August 17–23, 2002, (in Russian , in Ukrainian  ) They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity.

Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:

 Soviet puppet state in Poland 
After Nazi Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union set up a puppet state in Poland.The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs By William Bullitt, Francis P. Sempa   Around 25,000 Polish Home Army soldiers were deported to Gulags in mainland Russia. Soviet soldiers also raped as many as 100,000 Polish women right after the war.Joanna Ostrowska, Marcin Zaremba, "Kobieca gehenna" (The women's ordeal) , Polityka - No 10 (2695), 2009-03-07; pp. 64-66.   Dr. Marcin Zaremba  of Polish Academy of Sciences, the co-author of the article cited above – is a historian from Warsaw University Department of History Institute of 20th Century History (cited 196 times in Google scholar). Zaremba published a number of scholarly monographs, among them: Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm (426 pages), Marzec 1968 (274 pages), Dzień po dniu w raportach SB (274 pages), Immobilienwirtschaft (German, 359 pages), see inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books. Joanna Ostrowska  of Warsaw, Poland, is a lecturer at Departments of Gender Studies at two universities: the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, the University of Warsaw as well as, at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of scholarly works on the subject of mass rape and forced prostitution in Poland in the Second World War (i.e. "Prostytucja jako praca przymusowa w czasie II Wojny Światowej. Próba odtabuizowania zjawiska," "Wielkie przemilczanie. Prostytucja w obozach koncentracyjnych," etc.), a recipient of Socrates-Erasmus research grant from Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, and a historian associated with Krytyka Polityczna.

The Soviet Union ruled Poland with communist totalitarianism until 1989,*Lappin, Shalom (2006), ‘How Class Disappeared from Western Politics’, Dissent, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 73-78.

Kirsch, Adam (2024), On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London. and Soviet troops did not leave Poland until 1993.*

 Polish resistance 
Some anti-communist Poles fought against the Soviets. The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 By Norman Naimark   However, the armed resistance failed because it had no support from foreign countries. Tens of thousands of Polish resistance members were deported to mainland Russia. The victims included around 6,000 Poles who had been jailed in Borowicze (now Borovichi, Russia) and another 6,300 in Stalinogorsk (now Novomoskovsk, Russia). 

Most were sent to Gulags in Workutstroj, Pieczorłag, or Uchtiżemłag, located in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in northwestern Russia. Historians cannot tell exactly how many died, because nobody has access to all of the Soviet documents. Just a few survived, at most. 

The Poles resisted the Soviet puppet regime throughout the Cold War, often peacefully. The government often used violence, arrests, and police brutality to respond to protests, even peaceful ones. However, strikes and protests by the Polish people contributed to the fall of the puppet regime in 1989.

Polish resistance efforts included:

 Protests in June 1956 in Poznań (c. 100 killed and 600 wounded) "Z perspektywy historyka i w świetle dokumentów…" – interview with dr Łukasz Jastrząb
 Protests in March 1968 
 Protests in December 1970 (44 killed, 1,000+ wounded and 3,000+ arrested) 
 Strike actions in 1971 and June 1976The origins of democratization in Poland By Michael H. Bernhard, page 45 in Łódź
 Strikes in 1980 in LublinWarsaw Voice, Solidarity 1980-81 
 A warning strike*The biggest strike in history of Poland, J. Polonus 

Kalendarium 1980–1981, Jaroslaw Szarek  and hunger demonstrations*"Anger Over Food Spreads in Poland".  By James M. Markham, The New York Times
The Polish Revolution By Timothy Garton Ash, p. 191 in 1981
 Demonstrations in 1982* Encyclopedia of Solidarity – Lubin Crime. Article written by Lukasz Kaminski, historian of Wroclaw University. Encyklopedia-solidarnosci.pl. Retrieved on August 31, 2011.
Rzeczpospolita daily, KAZIMIERZ GROBLEWSKI "Winni sa niewinni" . Rzeczpospolita.pl (December 13, 2001). Retrieved on August 31, 2011.
Poland under Martial Law, by Roman Stefanowski, Blinken Open Society Archives
August 1982 demonstration, Portal of the Polish Press Agency. 11listopada1918.pl. Retrieved on August 31, 2011.
 Strikes in 1988*Turning the tables? by Andy Zebrowski “The second massive wave of strikes this year has shaken the Polish regime to such an extent that it doesn't know which way to turn”
Pushing back the curtain. BBC News, Poland 1984 - 1988
Second August, by Andrzej Grajewski

 Soviet persecution of Baltic states' population 
The Baltic states also suffered under both the Nazis and the Soviets.The Baltic States. Years of dependence 1940-1990 (Romuald J. Misiunas, Rein Taagepera, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993)

Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States (V. Davoliute, T. Balkelis, Central European Press, 2018)
A Soviet Story: Mass Deportation, Isolation, Return (Alain Blum, Emilia Koustova in Narratives of Exile and Identity, Central European University Press, 2018)
Soviet Mass Deportation from Latvia, briefing papers of museum of the Occupation of Latvia (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia)
The History of the Occupation of Latvia (Museum of the Occupation of Latvia) Under Nazi occupation, Estonia lost 25% of its pre-war Jewish population, Latvia lost 75%, and Lithuania lost over 95%.

1940–41

The Soviets first occupied the Baltic states between June 1940 and June 1941. Dunsdorfs, Edgars. The Baltic Dilemma. Speller & Sons, New York. 1975
 The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
 Stephane Courtois; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. .
 Küng, Andres. Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic States. 1999 
  During that time, they deported around 124,467 people to mainland Russia. The deportees included modern Latvia's founder, Kārlis Ulmanis (1877 – 1942); he died of dysentery in a Gulag in Soviet Turkmenistan. Baltic states' soldiers who refused to join the Red Army were shot.Motyka G., Wnuk R., Stryjek T., Baran A., 2012. Wojna po wojnie. Antysowieckie podziemie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1944-1953. Scholar, Gdańsk-Warsaw. More were arrested and deported by the NKVD. 

Historian Robert Conquest called these selective deportations a policy of "decapitation" by killing off Polish elites, "as was later evidently to be the motive for the Katyn massacre [in which about 22,000 Poles were killed]".The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986) Meanwhile, Estonians and Latvians viewed this deadly year as the "year of horror".

 1941–44 
Many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians accepted the Nazi takeover. They did not know that the Holocaust was happening, and they viewed the Nazis as the only alternative to the oppressive Soviets. By July 1944, the Nazis had forced 160,000 people in occupied Latvia to fight for Adolf Hitler by July 1944.Palmer A., 2008. Północne sąsiedztwo. Historia krajów i narodów Morza Bałtyckiego. Książka i Wiedza, Warsaw. In Nazi-occupied Lithuania, they conscripted at least 20,000 people.Kasekamp A., 2013. Historia państw bałtyckich. PISM, Warsaw. 

Though the Nazis had forced these people to fight, they claimed the conscripts were volunteers.

 1944–91 


After World War II ended, the Soviets re-took control of the Baltic states. Between 1944 and 1956, many Baltic people resisted Soviet ethnic cleansing and totalitarianism. In response, the Soviets deported at least 505,000 people from the Baltic states to Gulags in mainland Russia (including 124,000 Estonians, 136,000 Latvians, and 245,000 Lithuanians). The Baltic states lost 20% of their total population as a result. This included 250,000 who people who fled to Western countries to escape the Soviets.

+ Soviet forced settlements for Baltic deportees  Region of the Soviet Union Families People Average family size % of total deportees Amur Oblast 2,028 5,451 2.7 5.8 Irkutsk Oblast 8,475 25,834 3.0 27.3 Krasnoyarsk Krai 3,671 13,823 3.8 14.6 Novosibirsk Oblast 3,152 10,064 3.2 10.6 Omsk Oblast 7,944 22,542 2.8 23.8 Tomsk Oblast 5,360 16,065 3.0 16.9 Total 30,630 93,779 3.1 99.0 

To scare the local people into obeying them, the Soviets would sometimes kill resistance members and dump their bodies in local villages.*Dundovich, E., Gori, F. and Guercett, E. Reflections on the gulag. With a documentary appendix on the Italian victims of repression in the USSR, Feltrinelli Editore IT, 2003.  On October 15, 1956, Adolfas Ramanauskas ("Vanagas"), chief commander of the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters, released a report describing the tortures some of them had suffered:Kuodytė, Dalia and Tracevskis, Rokas. The Unknown War: Armed Anti-Soviet Resistance in Lithuania in 1944–1953, 2004. 

 Colonization during the Cold War 
The Soviet regime imported millions of colonizers into the Baltic states from other parts of the Soviet Union. This changed the Baltic states' ethnic composition forever:

 Ethnic breakdown  1939  1970  1989 Estonians in Estonia 88% 60% 61.5%  Latvians in Latvia 75% 57% 50.7% Lithuanians in Lithuania 85% 84.6% 80.6%

The occupied Baltic states did not benefit from the decades-long Soviet colonization; they were exploited by it. 

  Declassified archives show that the Soviets took much more money from the occupied Baltic states than they ever invested back. They used huge amounts of this money for military infrastructure to oppress the native population. The myth of "generous Soviet aid in developing the Baltics" is propaganda invented to justify Soviet colonization, under which the Baltic states went through decades of oppressive rule.


 Deportations of Chechens and Ingush 

After the Soviets retook the part of Chechnya previously occupied by Nazi Germans, they mass-deported Chechen and Ingush people from the Northern Caucasus. They falsely accused these people of collaborating with the Nazis. 

  The Soviets forced as many as 400,000 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush from the area within 8 days. 

Fearing that the area's mountainous terrain favors guerrilla war, the Soviets entrapped the Chechens and Ingush by inviting them to join the Red Army Day celebrations on February 23, 1944. Once they showed up, they were arrested by soldiers armed with machine guns. The Chechen and Ingush deportees were sent to camps across Central Asia and Siberia. They were not allowed to return to Chechnya until 1957.

The Chechens and Ingush lost as much as 33% of their total pre-war population under the Soviet invasion. This is around the same percentage of population that Cambodia lost during the Cambodian genocide (1975‒79) under the pro-Soviet Khmer Rouge regime. 





Debates about the double genocide theory

 Dovid Katz 
American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz wrote that the double genocide theory is a form of Holocaust revisionism. He thought the theory resulted from a "recent initiative that seeks to create a moral equivalence between Soviet atrocities committed against the Baltic region and the Holocaust in European history".

 Michael Shafir 
Romanian-Israeli political scientist Michael Shafir shared Dovid Katz's views. He said the double genocide theory was partly "competitive martyrdom".

 Timothy Snyder 
American historian Timothy Snyder discussed the double genocide theory in his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Some left-wing scholars, including Dovid Katz and Efraim Zuroff, have accused Snyder of "suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust". In response, Snyder said:

While accusing Snyder of trivializing the Holocaust, Zuroff himself denied the Holodomor 




  and Bosnian genocide, despite the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) having ruled that the Bosnian genocide was indeed a genocide. 









In addition, scholars who hold similar views to Zuroff often accuse the NATO of "inventing" the Bosnian genocide to justify the bombing and "destruction" of Yugoslavia, or blame the Bosnian genocide victims for their own suffering. The leading Bosnian genocide deniers include but not limited to Michael Parenti, Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, Jared Israel, Tariq Ali, Mick Hume and Diana Johnstone, most of whom also reject the double genocide theory.

 James Kirchick 
In a review of Snyder's book, American reporter James Kirchick said that Western intellectuals do not pay much attention to the Holodomor because of "the machinations of that [Soviet] regime in crafting the internationally agreed-upon legal definition of the term [genocide]".

While the United Nations were drafting the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Soviets reportedly prevented "social" and "political" groups from being included in the list of possible genocide victims. This kept the Soviets' crimes from being classified as genocide. The victims belonged to several ethnic groups randomly labelled as "reactionary" or "counterrevolutionary", who were killed until Stalin chose to stop. 

Kirchick defended Snyder against accusations that he was "minimizing the Holocaust".  Snyder documented Nazi and Soviet atrocities equally, Kirchick said. He also wrote that Stalin enabled Hitler's war in Europe by:

 Making Soviet communism absolutist and totalitarian; this allowed Hitler to justify militarizing German society to confront the Soviet Union
 Telling the German communists to treat the Social Democratic Party as "social fascists"; this divided the left-wing Germans who could have prevented the Nazi takeover
 Signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
 Invading Poland and occupying it until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union

 Dovilė Budrytė 

Dovilė Budrytė, a Lithuanian-American political scientist, wrote in 2016 that Ukrainians and Baltic people describe Soviet crimes with the word "genocide" as a form of "nation-building myths rooted in traumas". She cited studies done by other scholars to support this theory.* Johan Dietsch. Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Culture. Lund: Lund University Press, 2006.
 Georgii Kas’ianov. “The Holodomor and the Building of a Nation.” Russian Social Science Review 52 (2011): 71–93.
 Rebekah Moore. “‘A Crime against Humanity Arguably Without Parallel in European History’: Genocide and the ‘Politics’ of Victimhood in Western Narratives of the Ukrainian Holodomor.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 58 (2012): 367–79. She saw those views as "postcolonial trauma narratives". She warned against any "unquestioning acceptance" of these ideas.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. According to Budrytė, the Baltic states strongly support Ukraine because they have a shared history of suffering "genocides" under Soviet rule. 

She also wrote that people's lived experiences do not divide neatly between "Western" and "non-Western". She highlighted the need to consider "power structures, broader political contexts and existing local and international norms" in order to judge how valid some of their claims are.

 Kristen Ghodsee 

American ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee wrote about the double genocide theory in 2014. She had previously claimed that "East German women had better sex under communism".Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Nation Books, 2018. . She argued that "economic and political elites" promoted the double genocide theory because they "fear[ed] a leftist resurgence in the face of [...] extreme social inequalities [... and] the excesses of neoliberal capitalism". She accused these "elites" of "focusing almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin's crimes" when discussing communism, and "linking all leftist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism".

 Debates about the Katyn massacre 

Historians have debated whether the Katyn massacre ‒ a major Soviet war crime ‒ could be called a genocide under the double genocide theory. Many Polish scholars have described the massacre as a genocide, including historian Adam Basak,See Adam Basak, Katyń: Problem odpowiedziałności karnej sprawców w świetle Norymbergi, in 21 Studia na Faszyzmem i Zbrodniami Hitlerowskimi 325, 325–60 (Karol Jonca ed., 1998). jurist Cezary Mik,See Cezary Mik, Lech Aleksander Kaczyński (18.6.1949-10.4.2010), 1/2 Kwartalnik Prawa Publicznego 5, 10 (2010) (describing the life as well as public and academic work of the late Lech Kaczyński, President of Poland, who, while heading a Polish delegation for the celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, died along with the ninety-five people accompanying him on April 10, 2010 in a plane crash in Smolensk). Karolina Kosińska,Karolina Kosińska, Zbrodnia ludobójstwa w prawie międzynarodowym 34 (2009). and prosecutor Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota,See Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota, Kwalifikacja prawna Zbrodni Katyńskiej—Wybrane zagadnienia, in Zbrodnia Katyńska: W kRęgu Prawdy i Kłamstwa 46 (Sławomir Kalbarczyk ed., 2010). who investigated the massacre.

Basak wrote:

Mik called the massacre "genocidal murder of the Polish elite in Katyn and other places". 

Kosińska said:

More importantly, Kuźniar-Plota, who investigated the massacre, ruled that:

 Debates about the Holodomor 

Some scholars who debate the double genocide theory discuss the Holodomor. This was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine between 1932-1933. 



  As many as 7,000,000 people died of starvation under Stalin's policies. As of 2025, over 30 countries recognize that the Holodomor was a genocide against the Ukrainian people:

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

Many Western scholars who reject the double genocide theory have denied the Holodomor. 





  This denial comes from communist sympathies, which prevent them from recognizing the worth of Ukrainians as equal humans, according to other scholars. 

Holodomor denial is considered racist and dehumanizing. Jurij Dobczansky, a senior Library of Congress cataloging specialist, said:

Related pages

 Jan Grabowski
 Holocaust uniqueness debate
 Guerrilla war in the Baltic states
 Antisemitism in the Soviet Union

References

Category:History
Category:Controversies