The Holodomor Did Not Happen

The Historical and Ongoing Harms of Russian Denial

Despite the notoriously meticulous record-keeping of the Soviet bureaucracy, there is no published census for the year 1937. This was not a mistake, not an oversight, not an indication of lower levels of pedanticism from the upper echelons. Rather, this was part of a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth of a genocide the regime carried out against Ukrainians and the Ukrainian state half a decade before. In 1932, the Soviet state artificially exacerbated a famine in order to destroy the final vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. The effects of this Holodomor (meaning “death by hunger” in Ukrainian) were so devastating that the 1937 census was buried in order to hide the “missing” numbers of dead Ukrainians. The Soviet Union continued to downplay the realities of the famine until it ceased to exist in the early 1990s, and from there the Russian state took up the torch of denying Ukrainians the truth. The genocide and its subsequent cover-up have remained a point of contention in Russo-Ukrainian relations into the modern era and its echoes can be heard as a backbeat to the shots fired in occupied Ukrainian territory today.

            Roughly four million (with some estimates as high as seven million) Ukrainians died of starvation and disease between 1932 and 1933, uncountable others died later from nutritional deficiencies and other aftereffects of extreme hunger. During this time, the Soviet regime imposed forced collectivization and grain requisitions on the Ukrainian peasantry – refusing to halt the confiscations or the export of Ukrainian grain even once the peasants in the region began to starve. These scant details constitute the undisputed facts of the case, everything else is debated to this day. The first point of contention among scholars is the origin of the famine itself: Some argue that the famine was entirely constructed by the Soviet regime, although this is the less popular view. The majority now agree that the origins of the disaster were natural, citing a poor growing year in 1931 that made food shortages by 1933 “likely if not inevitable” according to agrarian history expert Mark Tauger (1991, p.89). The next dispute is the extent to which the regime used the famine to specifically target Ukrainians. Although food shortages did affect other regions like Kazakhstan at this time, it difficult to explain why Ukraine – a traditionally fertile region known for its rich black earth and double crop of wheat – was affected so much more deeply than other regions more prone to food insecurity without considering external manipulation. As more evidence has been revealed with the opening of Soviet archives, it has become clear that unique policies were implemented in Ukraine in order to make the famine as deadly as possible. Blacklisting, a policy of punishing collective farms or even entire villages who failed to meet their production quotas were implemented “earlier, more widely and more rigorously” in Ukraine than anywhere eventually encompassing “almost every district in Ukraine” (Applebaum, 2017, p.230). Ukrainians were also forcibly restricted from leaving famine-affected areas, when starving people tried to flee to Russia or Belarus the Soviet leadership closed the Ukrainian border. Increased border security had the additional benefit of ensuring that news of the famine could not spread beyond Ukraine itself (Applebaum, 2017). These policies were devastatingly effective; a study on famine mortality conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that ethnic Ukrainians accounted for between 30% and 45% of famine victims despite only 21% of Soviet citizens being categorized as such (Rhyne, 2021).

            The least argued component of Holodomor history is the motivation of the central state, there is no question that this region had long been a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian countryside had been a hotbed of anti-Soviet activity since its inception, as Hiroaki Kuromiya points out in an article for Europe-Asia Studies “nearly half of all peasant uprisings against collectivization in 1930 took place in Ukraine” (Kuromiya, 2008, p.669). Ukraine had always displayed a degree of nationalism a shade too fervent for the Soviets, who were tolerant of national identities among their periphery only to the extent that they presented no challenge to the central regime. The Soviet indigenization policy as described by Terry Martin in The Affirmative Action Empire demonstrates just how threatening Moscow found Ukrainian national consciousness. This policy was designed to enmesh local identity with communist ideology and it is very telling that it was abruptly recalled “in Ukraine, and only in Ukraine” just before the famine in 1932 (Martin, 2001, as cited in Werth, 2008, sec.3). The final argument concerns not motive, but means. Stalin was certainly motivated to eliminate the problem of Ukrainian resistance, but some take issue with the idea of famine as his weapon of choice. Kuromiya, for example, examines the typically repressive methods of the Stalinist regime and argues that a man-made famine would leave too many “loose ends” to be characteristic of control-obsessed Joseph Stalin (Kuromiya, 2008, p.667). It is unlikely that scholars will ever reach a perfect consensus on the fine details of the Holodomor, but even if we accept as the truth the version of events that paints the leadership of the USSR in the best possible light, we must accept that they refused aid to a starving region after a poor harvest that occurred as a direct result of their poorly-conceived agricultural-reengineering and then prioritized arbitrary production quotas above the lives of millions of Ukrainians. This alone comprises a grievous crime against humanity and if we take into account the cover-up that followed the famine years, the regime’s culpability becomes more and more obvious.

            States have a spectrum of responses in the aftermath of atrocity, ranging from public truth-telling to absolute amnesia. The Soviet state took the latter path in the aftermath of the Holodomor and enforced a strict code of silence both within the USSR and in the information presented to the outside world. Red Famine, Anne Applebaum’s definitive work on the Holodomor, details “doctors and nurses …being told to “invent something” for [the] death certificates” of famine victims (Applebaum, 2017, p.355). Interviewees for the book also describe their memories of village registry books being “burn[ed] and rewrite[ten] eliminating references to hunger” (Applebaum, 2017, p.356). When news of food shortages slipped through cracks in the borders of the USSR and international aid was subsequently offered, the regime continued its strategy of denial and rejected the offered help “on the grounds that there was no famine” (Loroff et al., n.d., sec.1). The Stalinist regime made every effort deny the genocide as it unfolded and then to expunge it from collective memory afterwards. If it was mentioned in official circles at all, the famine was downgraded to a “food shortage” and typically painted as equally destructive across the USSR. By re-casting the genocide as a universal tragedy for the entire Soviet Union, the regime denied both the particular suffering of the Ukrainian people and its own culpability for that suffering. Within Ukraine itself, people were ordered not to speak of the famine, and to go on living as if the devastation of the previous years had simply never happened. So unlike in the Gacaca courts created after the Rwandan genocide, no local bosses or minor officials implicated in the Holodomor were ever brought before their communities for a chance to tell the truth. Neighbours – as in the case of Rwanda – were turned against neighbours in Ukraine. Village headmen and others deemed useful to the regime were recruited to search for hidden grain, enforce travel bans, and force the handover of crops and livestock. These people may have been true believers in the Soviet regime, seeking to enrich themselves, or simply trying to play the game in order to save their own families. After the famine, these minor-league perpetrators were re-absorbed into the population without any formal reintegration or reconciliation measures. This left a legacy of deep distrust, “politicians and bureaucrats” writes Applebaum, “were never again seen as benign public servants” (Applebaum, 2017, p.425). She goes so far as to trace many of Ukraine’s modern “political pathologies” back to the aftermath of 1932 (Applebaum, 2017, p.425).

            The invasion of Ukraine by Nazi Germany in 1941, handed the USSR (and later, the Russian Federation) one of its most enduring and damaging deflections from the topic of the Holodomor. The events of the previous decade led many Ukrainians to welcome the Nazis, hoping that the Germans might prove less brutal masters than the Soviets (Berkhoff, 2004). While these hopes were swiftly and brutally dashed by the Nazi assault on the region, the Nazi occupation provided one of the first opportunities for Ukrainians to publically discuss the famine. The Germans encouraged this as a way to discredit the Soviets and encourage loyalty from their newly occupied territories. Although this propagandized commemoration was the farthest thing from truth-seeking, the link between famine and fascism was established at this time. From then onwards Moscow had a new party line: “the Holodomor did not happen, and only “Nazis” would claim that it did” (Applebaum, 2017, p.424). Accusing Ukraine of rampant Nazism and using this as an excuse to retain control over the country and deny its independence remains a part of the Russian federation’s playbook to this day. Ukrainians were denied all acknowledgement of the genocide carried out against them in 1932-33, then those who dared to write this history were accused of and associated with fascism. People kept silent for fear of being branded Nazi collaborators once the Soviet government regained control of the region.

            “Fascism” is not the only word whose use is heavily debated in piecing together the history of the famine, “genocide” is another controversial one. People outside of Ukraine, and maybe Canada which has a large Ukrainian diaspora and hosts the Holodomor Research Center, do not readily use the word genocide to describe the famine. The associations with Nazism as well as other “Russian assault[s] on historiography” have made many hesitant to even discuss the event nevermind apply the contentious label of “genocide” despite Raphael Lemkin himself calling it “the classic example” of such a crime (Applebaum, 2017, p.424; Lemkin, 1953, para.2). There cannot be justice for Ukrainian genocide victims nor for their descendants as long as the world cannot even agree that a genocide happened. This pattern then repeats itself; Putin began the war in Ukraine by denying there was a war, just as Stalin once denied there was a famine. In 2015 Putin claimed to be saving the people of Crimea from “Hitler’s accomplices” in the Ukrainian leadership just as Stalin once equated the Ukrainian pushback against his regime with a Nazi conspiracy (Putin, 2022, para.30). When Ukraine pushes back on Russian control, accusations of fascism are always quickly deployed to discredited the resistance – this began with the famine. The war in Donbas was dismissed internationally as a “border skirmish” or even more to Russian liking an “internal matter for Russia” as if Ukraine was not in fact its own sovereign state. Russia’s campaign of disinformation has been so successful as to exhaust any external commentators who might be trying to describe anything that happens between Russia and Ukraine. International media twisted itself into a knot of “hybrid warfare” and “ambiguous warfare” to avoid the very simple truth carried by the word “war” until 2022 when denial was no longer possible (Whitmore, 2014). The Soviet Union was never brought to account for its crimes against the Ukrainian people – if anything they were celebrated for it, gaining official recognition from the United States just months after the genocide (Khara, 2022). It is unsurprising then that Russia believes it can do the same and carry out acts of terror while shaping the narrative of Ukraine for the world’s consumption.

            The question of reconciliation on the topic of the famine is a complicated one. Clearly there was no attempt made to reconcile the those who planned and participated in the genocide in its immediate aftermath, but some have suggested that some kind of reconciliation process may still be possible. The first obstacle to this potential process is the fact that the entity that perpetuated the genocide of the Ukrainian people – the Soviet Union – no longer exists. Russia is not the USSR and the USSR was not Russia; however, the modern Russian state did inherit the assets of this former state and consequently benefitted from the aftereffects of the famine. Russia clearly feels some sense of connection to the regime that instigated the genocide as the Russian press has gone so far as to call any commemorations of the Holodomor “Russophobic” (Young, 2008, para,8). What Russia certainly may be asked to answer for is the ongoing dismissal of the Ukrainian people, the ongoing denial of their past suffering, and the ongoing manipulation of the truth surrounding the famine. For example, the destruction of monuments erected to honour and remember victims of the Holodomor have been routinely targeted by Russian attacks on Ukraine in the 21st century. In 2015, a Russian-backed separatist group desecrated a memorial site in the town of Snizhne in Eastern Ukraine (Applebaum, 2017, p. 423). Just under a decade later, the Holodomor Museum documented the tearing-down by truck crane of a “modest memorial” to famine victims in the occupied town of Mariupol in October of 2022 (Holodomor Museum, 2022, para.1). Russia has made the destruction of the Holodomor memory – all the more precious as its direct survivors become fewer and fewer, a clear priority during its invasion of Ukraine. Russia has chosen to continue in the esprit of the Soviet regime in regards to Ukraine so while they may not be called upon to recognize – much less issue apologies for the original sin – they must be called to account for the ongoing molestation of Ukraine and its national memory. Unlike in Germany which criminalized Nazi symbols and glorification, the Putin regime in Russia has revived the idea of Stalin as a great leader, and in doing so dismissed his genocide of the Ukrainian people and culture. The biggest obstacle remaining to the potential reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine is the Russian federation’s ongoing aversion to hearing the truth told.

            The consequences of hiding the truth are made devastatingly obvious by the case of Ukraine. The harms of obscurity compounded the harms of the original crime against humanity and because the truth was never allowed to be told, there was no hope for healing or for reconciliation between the parties involved. Russia has continued the Soviet legacy of denying Ukrainian credibility in the eyes of the world –take Putin’s 2021 speech that claims “Russia has never been anti-Ukraine” (Putin, 2021, para.88). The Holodomor has been rebranded as a tragic oversight that caused equal harm to the entire Soviet Union (through no fault of the regime’s own) and the Ukrainian peasants who tried to save their children by caching a few precious morsels of grain were blamed for their own fates as hoarders, anti-regime agitators, and capitalist drones. Now, Ukrainians are called terrorists and fascists for speaking about this history and demanding that the world recognize the suffering of the Ukrainian people at the hands of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation could have rebuilt its relationship with Ukraine when the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, but they refused. They instead continued the Soviet legacy of treating Ukraine with paternalistic contempt, with coercive force, and with an absolute denial of the rights of Ukrainians to write their own history. This wound of falsehood and obscurity continues to fester between Russia and Ukraine and one can only hope that eruption of pus that is the current war may lead to an excision of the infection.

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