Holodomor Remembrance Day: terrible facts about the genocide of the Ukrainian people - ForumDaily
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Holodomor Remembrance Day: Scary Facts About the Genocide of the Ukrainian People

On the fourth Saturday of November, Ukraine honors the memory of the millions of victims of the Holodomors that took place in Ukraine in the 1932th century. The largest of them was in 1933-XNUMX. In the opinion of most historians, the reason for the famine of this period was the coercive and repressive grain procurement policy for the peasants, which was pursued by the communist government. Writes about it Air force.

Photo: Shutterstock

The famine in Ukraine, known as the Holodomor, has killed at least 3,9 million people. The number of victims throughout the USSR, according to experts, is about seven million.

20 countries recognized the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine as genocide of the Ukrainian nation. But this issue still causes fierce discussions among historians and politicians, and a number of countries, in particular Russia, deny the genocide.

1. Genocide

In 2006, the Verkhovna Rada officially recognized the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people. Public denial of the Holodomor is considered illegal, but there is no punishment for such actions.

There is no consensus among historians and politicians as to whether the Holodomor can be considered genocide in the legal sense of the word, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

At the same time, the “father of the Genocide Convention,” Dr. Raphael Lemkin, who actually coined this term, said in 1953 that “the destruction of the Ukrainian nation” is “a classic example of genocide.”

The Holodomor was recognized as genocide by Ukrainians from 16 states: Australia, Georgia, Ecuador, Estonia, Canada, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, USA, Hungary, Portugal, as well as the Vatican (as a separate state).

Eight more countries condemned the Holodomor as an act of annihilation of humanity and honored the memory of millions of Ukrainians killed by famine: Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Chile.

Russia acknowledged that forced collectivization was the cause of the famine, but many regions of the USSR suffered from it.

“This tragedy does not and cannot have internationally established signs of genocide and should not be the subject of modern political speculation,” the State Duma of the Russian Federation said in a statement.

The word “genocide” is not in the documents of the UN, UNESCO and PACE dedicated to the Holodomor.

A 2008 European Parliament resolution called the Holodomor “a terrible crime against the people of Ukraine and humanity.” The document also contains references to the UN Genocide Convention.

In 2010, the Kyiv City Court of Appeal in its decision declared the genocidal nature of the Holodomor and the intention of the leaders of the USSR, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Chubar, Khatayevich, Kosior, to destroy part of the Ukrainian nation.

According to a survey by the Rating group last year, 82% of Ukrainians believe that the Holodomor of 1932-1933 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people.

2. Number of victims

Researchers are still arguing about the exact number of victims of the Holodomor.

The Institute of Demography and Social Research has developed a methodology for assessing the losses of Ukraine as a result of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 based on statistical data and modern methods of demographic statistical analysis.

Scientists have reconstructed the annual basic parameters of the dynamics of the population of Ukraine between 1926 and 1939.

Based on these estimates, the Institute of Demography estimated the number of victims of the Holodomor as 3,9 million people. This figure is considered the most scientifically proven.

Among other things, scientists argue that due to the fall in the birth rate during the Holodomor, Ukraine lost 600 babies.

Some historians call significantly large numbers, and the Institute of National Remembrance suggests that the number of deaths in Ukraine is about 7 million.

The decision of the Kiev Court of Appeal regarding the perpetrators of the Holodomor since 2010 indicates the number of 3,9 million.

There is a Unified Register of Holodomor Victims in Ukraine.

3. Geography of hunger

Researchers argue over the total number of deaths from the 1932-1033 famine.

Some foreign historians talk about 5,5-8 million people killed and claim that more than half of them were Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian Institute of Demography has provided an estimate of demographic losses due to the Holodomor of 1932-1933 throughout the USSR and in the former republics.

Losses due to supermortality as a result of hunger during that period in the USSR amounted to 8,7 million people. Among the republics of the former USSR, Ukraine is the leader in absolute amounts of losses due to excess mortality, and Kazakhstan has the highest loss rates in relation to the population.

Ukrainian scientists have established that the relative losses due to supermortality in Ukraine in 1932-1933 are four times higher than in Russia.

Then there was a massive famine in the Volga region and the Kuban (many ethnic Ukrainians lived there), in Belarus, in the South Urals, in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan.

The Institute of Demography claims that in Russia, regions with high losses from hunger account for 6% of the rural population and 1% of the territory, while in Ukraine - 41% of the population and 34% of the territory.

On the subject: Ukrainians in the USA commemorated the victims of the Holodomor: how it happened

The highest intensity of losses from famine was in the central forest-steppe regions of Ukraine, which did not play a major role in grain procurement, and in Russia - in its key grain regions.

Most Ukrainians died in modern Kharkiv, Kiev, Poltava, Sumy, Cherkassk, Dnepropetrovsk, Zhitomir, Vinnitsa, Odessa Chernigov regions, as well as in Moldova, part of which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR.

The Institute of Demography estimates the population loss in the Ukrainian regions from 20% to 10% of the total.

About 81% of those killed by famine in Ukraine were Ukrainians, 4,5% were Russians, 1,4% were Jews, and 1,1% were Poles. Among the victims there were also many Belarusians, Bulgarians and Hungarians.

Researchers note that the distribution of Holodomor victims by nationality corresponds to the national distribution of the rural population of Ukraine.

4. Where there was no Holodomor

According to the historian Stanislav Kulchitsky, in the fall of 1932 there were almost 25 collective farms in Ukraine, to which the authorities put forward overestimated grain procurement plans.

Despite this, 1500 collective farms were able to fulfill these plans and did not fall under punitive sanctions, so there was no fatal famine in their territories.

In the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers regularly published lists of districts, villages, collective farms, enterprises, or even individuals who did not fulfill their food procurement plans.

Debtors who ended up on these “black boards” (as opposed to “red boards” - honor rolls) were subject to various fines and sanctions, including direct repression against entire work collectives.

In the years of famine, hitting a village on the "black board" meant a sentence to its inhabitants.

The regional representative offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine had the right to add villages and collectives to such a list, as suggested by regional and rural cells. In other words, formally it was an initiative from below.

The “black board” system, in addition to Ukraine, operated in the Kuban and Don region, in the Volga region, Kazakhstan - territories where many Ukrainians lived.

5. Settlements listed on the "black boards" in 1932-1933.

There was no famine in the Ukrainian lands of Galicia, Volhynia, Western Podolia, which were part of Poland in 1932-1933, as well as in Bukovina, which was then Romanian, as well as in Czechoslovakia at that time Transcarpathia. The famine hardly touched the Crimea, which at that time belonged to the RSFSR.

6. Duranty and the first mention in the press

One of the first to report the famine in the USSR was the English journalist Malcolm Mugheridge in December 1933, writes researcher Stanislav Kulchitsky. In three articles in the Manchester Guardian newspaper, the journalist described his depressing impressions of his trips to Ukraine and the Kuban, and spoke about the famine among the peasants.

Mugheridge showed the mass death of peasants, but did not give specific numbers.

After his very first article, the Soviet government banned foreign journalists from traveling to the famine-stricken territories of the country.

In March 1933, 27-year-old British journalist Gareth Jones traveled to the USSR to interview Stalin. He drove through Ukraine and recorded the horrors that were happening there.

At the end of March 1933, Jones published an article, “There is No Bread Here,” about the famine in Ukraine, which was republished in the Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post. In 2019, Agnieszka Holland’s film “The Price of Truth” was released about the tragic fate of Gareth Jones and famine.

On the subject: Mr. Jones: the story of a journalist who told the world about the Holodomor and interviewed Stalin

In 1934, a special debate on the Holodomor took place in the British Parliament.

New York Times correspondent in Moscow Walter Duranty tried to object to the journalists' sensational discoveries. His note was titled: “Russians are starving, but they are not dying of hunger.” When other American newspapers began to write about the problem, Duranty confirmed the fact of mass deaths from starvation.

Duranty is also known for being the only foreign journalist who managed to interview Stalin and receive the Pulitzer Prize for his work.

In Ukraine, some activists demanded that the Pulitzer Committee posthumously take away this prestigious journalism award from Duranty, but this did not happen.

7. Official recognition

The word “Holodomor” first appeared in the printed works of Ukrainian immigrants in Canada and the United States in 1978. In the USSR at that time, historians were only allowed to talk about “food difficulties,” but not about famine.

The word “Holodomor” was first heard from a party official in December 1987. Then the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Vladimir Sherbitsky, speaking at the celebrations on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Ukrainian SSR, acknowledged the fact of the famine of 1932-1933.

When they began to talk about this topic more and more openly, in 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine authorized the publication of the book “The Famine of 1932-1933. in Ukraine: through the eyes of historians, the language of documents.”

According to the historian Stanislav Kulchitsky, the actual circulation of the publication was only 2,5 thousand copies, and it became a library rarity.

The first professional literary work about the famine was “The Yellow Prince” by Vasily Barka, which was published by the diaspora in 1962.

In 1981, the memoirs of the Ukrainian dissident and Soviet general Pyotr Grigorenko were published in the United States, in which he described in great detail the horrors of famine and the mechanisms of its implementation in the Kherson region and throughout Ukraine.

In 2006, during Yushchenko's presidency, the SBU declassified more than 5000 pages of state archives about the Holodomor.

Subsequently, a large Holodomor Museum and a memorial complex were erected in Kiev.

Honoring the memory of the victims of the Holodomor is part of the official program during the visits of foreign delegations to Ukraine.

8. In-kind fines

The peasants who did not fit into the grain procurement plans and owed grain to the state were confiscated all the rest of the food.

It was not counted as payment of a debt and was only a punitive measure and a way of enriching representatives of the Soviet government.

The policy of fines in kind was supposed to force the peasants to hand over the grain supposedly hidden from it to the state, which in reality did not exist.

At first, the punitive authorities were allowed to select only meat, bacon and potatoes, but later they took up other long-term storage products.

Fyodor Kovalenko from the village of Lyutenka, Gadyachsky district, Poltava region, recalled: “In November and December 1932, they took away all the grain and potatoes. They took everything, even the beans, and everything that was in the attic. The dried pears, apples, cherries were so small - they took everything.”

Nina Karpenko from the village of Matskovtsy, Lubensky district, Poltava region, said that people in the village still remember people who, on behalf of the authorities, took food from their neighbors.

Special detachments, using metal “probes,” even searched the gardens of peasants and looked for buried food.

In December 1932, the second General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Stanislav Kosior reported to Stalin: “The use of fines in kind gives the greatest results. Now the collective farmer and even the individual farmer hold on tightly to the cow and pig.”

In the Volga region and the North Caucasus, fines in kind were applied sporadically.

9. The law of “five ears of corn”

In August 1932, under the pretext that dispossessed peasants and “other antisocial elements” were stealing cargo from freight trains, as well as collective farm and cooperative property, Stalin proposed a new repressive law on the protection of state property.

The law provided for such violations by execution with confiscation of property, and in mitigating circumstances - 10 years in prison. Convicts were not subject to amnesty.

According to the punitive document, the popular name “the law of five ears of wheat” was established, since in fact anyone who collected several ears of wheat on a collective farm field without permission was guilty of theft of state property.

In the first year of the new law, 150 thousand people were convicted under it.

The law was in effect until 1947, but the peak of its application fell precisely in 1932-1933.

10. Cannibalism

Holodomor witnesses tell of cases where desperate peasants ate the bodies of their own children or those of their neighbors.

“This cannibalism reached its peak when the Soviet government... began printing posters with the warning: “Eating your own children is barbaric,” write Hungarian researchers Agnes Vardy and Stephen Vardy of Duquesne University.

According to some reports, more than 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during the Holodomor.

Doctor of Historical Sciences Vasily Marochko indicates that in the first half of 1932 there were isolated facts of cannibalism, and in the second half of 1932-1933 it became a mass phenomenon in all regions of Ukraine, where famine was raging.

“Usually, women most often resorted to cannibalism, perhaps to preserve the family, when a smaller child was sacrificed so that the older ones could survive. This happened especially often in the spring,” says Marochko.

Often the victims of cannibalism were street children who wandered around the villages in search of food. Also over the years, several million dogs and cats have been eaten.

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11. Resettlement from Russia

After the Holodomor, they tried to bring peasants from other regions of the Soviet Union into the devastated villages. This was assumed by the secret resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On the resettlement of 21 collective farmer families in Ukraine” dated October 000, 25.

15,5 million rubles were allocated for their resettlement.

According to archival documents, collective farmers from Russia were going to be resettled in the Donetsk (then extended to the territory of the present Lugansk region), Dnepropetrovsk (to which the current Zaporozhye region partially belonged) and Kharkov regions, and to the Odessa (then extended to the territory of the present Nikolaev and Kherson regions) - from Belarus and Russia.

By the end of 1933, 109 trains with settlers and their property were sent from the Western region of the RSFSR to Dnepropetrovsk, 80 trains from the Central Black Earth region of Russia to the Kharkov region, and 44 trains from Ivanovo to Donetsk.

61 trains with people were sent from the Byelorussian SSR to the Odessa region, and 35 trains with people from the Gorky region.

Although scientists point out that the lion's share of immigrants did not take root in the new place.

“Still, the numbers about immigrants from Russia and Belarus are not very large. Thousands of farms on the scale of such large regions as Donbass and Slobozhanshchina are not very impressive,” says historian Stanislav Kulchitsky.

He also said that, according to research by the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, more than half of those who moved from Russia to the territory of Ukraine in 1933-1934, returned back to Russia due to poor conditions in the then devastated villages.

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