Holodomor: The socialist famine and genocide perpetrated by Stalin

Holodomor, aka the Ukrainian Famine, was one of history's greatest crimes against humanity. The crime, by Joseph Stalin, claimed the lives of 3.9 million people (13% of the Ukrainian population). At its peak 28,000 men, women, and children were dying each day.

As Stalin rose to power he tried to replace the small Ukrainian farms with state-run collectives, but when the farmers resisted giving up their livelihoods, Stalin sent the secret police to remove these 'Kulaks' (aka enemies of the state). Within a few years, production on these farms dropped by 60%. While failing to meet the quotas imposed, Stalin's regime started 'looking' for saboteurs and food hoarders. As punishment, Stalin ordered all Ukrainian produced food to be confiscated, and proceeded to jail anyone accused of opposing government policies. 

How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine (Source: History.com)

At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients.

"You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went," he said many years later, in a case history collected in the late 1980s by a Congressional commission. In the cemetery outside the village hospital, overwhelmed doctors carried the bodies on stretchers and tossed them into an enormous pit.

The Holodomor's Death Toll

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”

In those days, Ukraine—a Texas-sized nation along the Black Sea to the west of Russia—was a part of the Soviet Union, then ruled by Stalin. In 1929, as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed collectivization, which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives. Ukraine’s small, mostly subsistence farmers resisted giving up their land and livelihoods.

Resistant Farmers Labeled as 'Kulaks'

In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as kulaks—well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state. Soviet officials drove these peasants off their farms by force and Stalin’s secret police further made plans to deport 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia, historian Anne Applebaum writes in her 2017 book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.

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