Defiant Russia:
Holodomor
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2023

During the 20th Century, Ukraine also faced attempted genocide from Moscow, in the form of a deliberate campaign of starvation, known since as the Holodomor (literally, the “plague of starvation”). There would actually be three separate artificial famines over the course of just under thirty years, all of them linked by their orchestration by the Soviet government with the goal of killing huge numbers of Ukrainians and obliterating their culture.

The accusation of “genocide” is at times thrown around loosely, almost casually. Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1943 or 1944, to name the offense under international law. The United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” A hate-based mass murder might be horrific, but it’s not genocide unless the killer or killers tried to kill everyone (or a part of everyone) who belonged to the targeted group.

Ukraine faced famine in the wake of the Russian Civil War; drought in 1921 caused short harvests in the Volga and Kuban basins of the Russian Republic and in many parts of Ukraine. The newly-installed Soviet government ordered grain reserves shifted from Ukraine to the afflicted Russian areas, regardless of shortages in Ukraine. Starvation followed, and anywhere from 235,000 (the low-end estimate) to one million Ukrainians died as a result.

Toll of famine in Kherson, 1922.

Some Ukrainian historians have labelled the 1921 famine a genocide, but to date no record has emerged of a Soviet leader deliberately targeting Ukrainians for starvation. There’s most definitely callous disregard for human life; Vladimir Lenin blamed “the gluttony of rich peasants in Ukraine” and permitted Red Army soldiers to send home food parcels from Ukraine.

The Great War had created huge shifts in the global grain markets. Agricultural production dropped across Europe due to the war, with overseas producers – the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia – planting heavily to make up the difference. The big, mechanized farms were much more efficient and profited handsomely during the wartime runup in grain prices.

Afterwards, those producers had no interest in handing back the market share they’d gained. A European agriculture recovered and good weather brought bountiful harvests, grain prices fell. Imperial Russia held 25 percent of the world market in 1913, while the Soviet Union controlled just 12 percent in 1926. Soviet central planners saw no alternative but to bulk up their grain exports– and those bushels of wheat and rye had to come from somewhere.

During the Revolution and Civil War, peasants throughout the Soviet Union had seized the estates of large landowners and broken them up into small holdings. Imperial Russia had been a major grain exporter before the First World War, and most of that production came from the large estates favored by government policy. Now those lands fell into the hands of the peasants who had worked them, and production plunged – in no small part because the peasants now kept back enough to feed themselves and their families.

The Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan, opening in 1928, would fix that. “Small-scale production,” Lenin had written, “gives birth to capitalism.” And that trend was personified by the kulaks, the so-called “rich peasants.” Just who qualified as a kulak varied; the oft-cited measure of employing other peasants as wage laborers applied to less than one percent of all Soviet peasant households. Eventually, just ownership of six acres or a cow could meet the definition.

Initially, the Five-Year Plan called for large-scale grain (chiefly wheat and rye) requisitions, with the producers paid a pittance for their produce. The grain would be sold abroad and help fund the imports of machinery needed for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. These at first targeted the kulaks, as they were believed to be hoarding grain, but when the amounts taken from kulaks fell well short of quotas the demands moved on to the serednyaks, or middle peasants.

Peasants who failed to meet their quotas would be fined five times the amount initially assessed; those who still didn’t cough it up could be sent to labor camps. Peasants reacted by passing grain around to confound collection efforts, hiding it, or simply burying it. They also sharply cut back on the grain they planted. The Soviet government introduced bread rationing in Soviet cities in late 1928 and early 1929. Perhaps 100,000 people perished in Ukraine as a direct or indirect result of starvation, but this was only a prelude.

“We took away the grain,” Vyacheslav Molotov, General Secretary Josef Stalin’s man in Ukraine, wrote later. “We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices. They gained nothing.”

Komsomols have found a cache of grain. Ukraine, November 1930.

While Stalin praised Molotov for his actions, Lazar Kaganovich, leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, warned that the Ukrainian peasantry saw the exactions as targeted specifically at Ukraine. That led to nationalist and separatist feelings, that Ukraine would be better off if independent. Urban dwellers, whether they spoke Russian or Ukrainian, likewise wondered if bread would be seized from their hands and shipped to Moscow from an independent Ukraine.

It became clear to the Politburo that grain production had fallen off with the breakup of the big estates. In November 1929, the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture proposed essentially re-creating the big estates, but now under state control. The kolkhoz, or cooperative farm, supposedly brought peasant farms together willingly. The kolkhozniki still, on paper at least, owned their land (kolkhoz has since become a Russian slur for Ukrainians). The sovkhoz, or state farm, was a state-owned enterprise, just like factories or mines, and the farmers its employees.

A month later, Stalin called for “liquidation” of the kulaks. The Party encouraged the poorest peasants to help strip their better-off neighbors of their land, property and often even their clothing, driving them out of villages stark naked. Over 300,000 Ukrainian kulaks would be jammed onto cattle cars and shipped to the Arctic, Siberia and Central Asia; most of them died on the journey or soon afterwards. With voluntary collectivization having failed, those remaining would be forced into the new enterprises.

The process went hard enough in Russia, where most peasants already lived in communes that jointly held their land. But most Ukrainian peasants held theirs individually, passed on by heredity since the end of serfdom in 1861, and few of them wished to give it up. Peasants resisted bitterly, sometimes arming themselves to fight the party activists trying to organize the farms, and frequently slaughtering and eating their farm animals rather than hand them over to the collective. Josef Stalin, the Communist Party’s General Secretary and the Soviet Union’s vozhd, or boss, slowed the process as grain output fell even faster, but it would pick up again in the mid-1930’s.

The People’s Commissariat for Agriculture blamed those peasants who had not yet joined collective farms (about 30 percent of the total) for the shortfall, and set heavy quotas for them in 1930. In Ukraine, the delivery quotas exceeded harvest output – that is, farmers were expected to hand over more grain than they had harvested. The Young Communists (Komsomols) and party activist factory workers sent into the countryside to collect the grain set out to meet these targets anyway by seizing stockpiles accumulated in previous years and also seed grain. Thanks to those extreme measure and a bumper crop that year, Ukraine met its target of 7.7 million tons.

In Ukraine (and in heavily-Ukrainian areas outside the traditional provinces, like the Kuban to the south-east), these moves against the countryside – grain requisitions, de-kulakization, collectivization – fell overwhelmingly on Ukrainian-speakers. The split in these provinces between those who spoke Russian (whatever their ethnic heritage) and those who spoke Ukrainian (almost exclusively ethnic Ukrainians) exactly mirrored that between urban and rural dwellers. The cities spoke Russian; the countryside spoke Ukrainian. The tsars had banned Ukrainian-language publishing and education, effectively making the cities Russian islands in a Ukrainian sea.

The Soviet secret police recorded over one million acts of individual resistance in 1930, on top of over 13,000 collective acts involving 2.5 million people, a ten-fold increase over 1929. Enforcement of grain requisitions, and collectivization, fell to the hands of Party activists, Young Communists, and secret police. Red Army units did not take part – since the army drew heavily from the peasant population for its rank-and-file, Party leaders feared they might not carry out such orders, while the party faithful would do so enthusiastically.

For 1931, the Party increased Ukraine’s grain quota – after all, the republic had met its 1930 quota. But this time the totals fell off sharply; millions now starved and a quarter-million died. The Party decreased the quota 1932 three times, but only by small amounts. “Only a policy of uncompromising harshness,” Stalin decreed, “would enable the grain requisitions to succeed.”

The policy of fining peasants (and collective farms) who failed to meet their target quotas expanded; if the miscreants could not meet their fine, their animals would be taken instead. In January 1933, Stalin abandoned the quota tables and simply ordered all collective farms and individual farmers in Ukraine to hand over all of their grain, both stockpiles and seed grain. The state would then issue them bread: city-dwellers received ration cards, peasants did not.

Children dig for forzen potatoes. Donetsk oblast, 1933.

Starvation became acute. Peasants attempted to flee, prompting the authorities to adopt an internal passport system: over 220,000 peasants were arrested in cities where they lacked residence permits, with 190,000 sent back to their villages to die and the remainder presumably shot. The Soviet OGPU, the secret police, sealed the borders of Ukraine (and the heavily-Ukrainian Kuban), stopping peasants from leaving for neighboring foreign countries or Union republics.

The starving ate weeds, insects, tree bark and carrion; they still died. The elderly died first, followed by children. The Party instituted a propaganda campaign against cannibalism, plastering village squares with posters declaring that “Cannibalism is a barbarian act” and convicting 2,500 people of eating other people.

Additional laws made gleaning leftover grain from fields an anti-Soviet crime; meanwhile, grain exports continued. In 1932 the Soviet Union exported 1.8 million tons of grain, down from 5.2 million tons the previous year. Seventy percent of Soviet grain exports came from Ukrainian fields. Meanwhile, the people died – half of that export total would have fed them all. Estimates of famine deaths in Ukraine range from about two million to about seven million, with an extensive 2002 demographic study coming up with 4.5 million, or 15 percent of the total population of the Ukrainian SSR.

The percentage of Russians within Ukraine rose from nine percent to 13.5 percent. “The current disaster,” the Italian consul in Kharkiv, Sergio Gradenigo, warned Rome, “will bring about a predominantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer to able to speak of a Ukraine, or of a Ukrainian people, or even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.”

By late 1933, the will of the Ukrainian peasants had been broken (those who had not died). The survivors submitted to collectivization, while the Soviet state eased off its quotas (though still exporting one million tons). Harvests improved, and starvation faded – not least because Ukraine now had to feed only 85 percent of its previous population.

The mass famine, engineered by the Soviet state, specifically in Ukraine, had been accompanied by mass arrests, mass deportations and mass executions. It was a political war aimed at the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian culture. If it succeeded in trading lives for machine tools, it failed in its broader goals.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an unknowable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.

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