War crimes and massacres are nothing new in our world's history. Very often this was (and is) done during wartime to destroy resistance. However, very often states will wage war on their own citizens, whether to subdue opposition, or to eliminate "undesirable" cultural or ethnic groups. Suprisingly, one of the largest such atrocities in the 20th century remains largely unknown to the general public. This was the Holodomor (Ukrainian: holod - hunger or starvation, moryty - to kill by hunger) an artificial famine orchestrated by the Soviet government in the years 1932-33 against the whole of Ukraine (S.S.R.), and against minority populations in the Kuban, Northern Caucasus, and Lower Volga regions. Some 10 million people were killed by hunger or died in concentration camps in Northern Siberia.
The setup of the Holodomor began with events 25 years prior, when the Russian Empire collapsed under the strain of the First World War, and the Ukrainian people declared independence and formed the Ukrainian Republic. Beset on all sides by enemies, Ukraine was eventually conquered by Communist forces in 1920. The memory of this brief period of independence remained, and continued to fuel opposition against Soviet totalitarian rule. The Soviets initially adopted a policy of appeasement in the middle 20's, but switched to a radically different approach during the first Five Year Plan.
The violence began with the liquidation of national leadership and intellectual elite. More than 1500 priests and 5000 intellectuals were executed, and their institutions shut down (90% of church buildings were destroyed). However, since most Ukrainians at the time worked in agriculture, "decapitating" Ukrainian resistance meant that the village leadership had to be destroyed as well, and so a policy of "dekulakization" began. A "kulak" was first though of as farmer who produced surplus, but really applied to anyone speaking out against Soviet policy. The punishment for being a "kulak" was either execution or exile to hard labour in northern Siberia or the Arctic. In this way, at least 2.4 million Ukrainians were exiled and 300,000 - 500,000 were executed.
The next phase in the five-year plan was collectivization, or the process of concentrating all farmland and farming technology into state owned collective farms. This centralized arrangement made it easy for the Soviet authorities to collect quota of grain to sell to the West for industrial technology. The grain quotas were set unrealistically high from the very beginning, and the farms were not able to meet the state's demand for food. All reserves were drained and all personal stores of food were confiscated by the government. The draconian "Five Stalks Law" was enacted making everything imaginable "socialist property". Historian Miron Dorlot writes: "to glean the already harvested fields, to fish in the river, to pick up a fallen dry twig in the forest, or even to collect dry weeds along the roads for fuel was an unpardonable crime equal to state treason." The age limit for the death penalty was lowered to 12 years.
In his memoirs, Winston Churchill recalls a conversation with Joseph Stalin. When asked about opposition to the "policies of collective farms", Stalin replied he had to contend with 'Ten millions." Stalin's apologist for the The New York Times, Walter Duranty, noted the same figure in his private letters, as does the famous high-ranking Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko in his court testimony in Paris in 1949. Thus, the Holodomor remains one of the worst atrocities in modern history, comparable to the Holocaust in Europe and Cultural Revolution in China.
Unlike their Nazi counterparts after World War II, Soviet officials who planned and organized the Holodomor were never persecuted for their crimes against humanity. In actual fact, Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov, both close associates of Stalin and responsible for the Holodomor in their assigned areas, each lived to 97 and 96 years old respectively. If there are to be no Nuremberg trials for the Soviet murderers, then let there at least be recognition, both among citizens and governments, that 10 million lives were destroyed in a deliberate attack on the Ukrainian people by Soviet authorities.
