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Soviet famines


In the 2 decades which followed the Russian October Revolution two devastating famines occurred in Soviet Russia/USSR, each killing about 5 million people (estimates vary). At the end of Russian Civil War at the peak of the Russian famine of 1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War Communism with the New Economic Policy to prevent Russian economy from collapsing. That policy was abandoned by Stalin in 1928, who replaced it by the policy of collectivization with the goal of rapid industrialization of USSR. The radical changes in policies together with severe droughts caused the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. That famine most severely hit Ukrainian SSR, which until 1930s enjoyed benefits of the Bolshevik policy of Ukrainization. A significant portion of the famine victims (3-3.5 million) were the Ukrainians. At the time, the Soviet government tried to deny the occurrence of the famines and the Western powers demonstrated their indifference.

These famines attracted little international attention until mid-1980s. With glasnost numerous studies of the famines started to appear, highlighted by publication of Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow in 1988. In Ukraine the famine of 1932-1933 became a symbolic issue for the independence movement which popularized the term Holodomor ("murder by starvation"). Some scholars have argued that the Stalinist policies that caused the famine may have been designed as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and thus may fall under the legal definition of genocide.

Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, public interest in the famines subsided. Having introduced a day of commemoration (26 November) in 1998, President Kuchma went further in 2002 and signed a presidential decree asserting that the famine of 1932-33 had in fact been 'genocide' against the Ukrainian nation. A parliamentary resolution in 2003 reiterated this view. In 2004 Ukraine agreed to a joint statement of the United Nations General Assembly, co-signed by 25 countries including Russia, which referred to the famine as a 'national tragedy'. It followed by a similarly worded UNESCO resolution. By that time everyone recognized that the famines indeed occurred and were in part caused by government's policies. However the debate over whether the term genocide was applicable to these famines was still open.

The Orange Revolution of 2004 brought to power individuals, notably President Yushchenko, who are convinced that the famine was genocide and who see this interpretation as a central part of their nation-building project. Opinion polls show that Yushchenko's view is not universally shared in Ukraine. In November 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a bill branding the Holodomor an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In November 2007, the government of Ukraine proposed a law which would criminalize public statements of both Holodomor and Holocaust denial. The law was never put to parliamentary vote.

A writer and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed in April 2008 that the accusation of the Holodomor being genocide was invented decades later after the event and Ukrainian efforts to have the famine recognised as genocide is an act of historical revisionism that has now surpassed the level of Bolshevik agitprop. He believed that the famine was caused by the nature of the Communist regime, under which all peoples suffered. It was not an assault by the Russian people against the people of Ukraine, and that the wish to view it as such is only a recent development, which he blamed on Ukrainian chauvinism and anti-Russian sentiments. The writer cautioned that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.

As of March 2008, the Ukraine and nineteen other governments have recognized the actions of the Soviet government as an act of genocide. On 23 October 2008 the European Parliament adopted a resolution that recognized the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.

The issue of recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide sparked numerous controversies in Russia which vehemently rejected the idea, as well as in Ukraine which was accused of politicization of the tragedy, outright propaganda and fabrication of documents