Holodomor genocide question
The Holodomor genocide question refers to attempts to determine whether the Holodomor was an ethnic genocide against Ukrainians. The famine killed 3.3-3.9 million people in Ukraine, while the broader Soviet famine of 1932–33 killed 5.5-6.5 million people in the USSR.
Scholars continue to debate whether the Holodomor was man-made, intentional, and genocidal and nature-made, unintentional, and ethnicity-blind. Whether the Holodomor is a genocide is a significant issue in modern politics and there is no international consensus on whether Soviet policies would fall under the legal definition of genocide. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and 15 other countries.
Scholarly debate
Raphael Lemkin
Professor of law and coiner of the term "genocide" Raphael Lemkin states that the famine was man-made and the Holodomor was a genocide. In his 1953 article "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine", he states that the Holodomor was the "third prong" of Soviet "Russification" of Ukraine:What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. The third prong of the Soviet plan was aimed at the farmers, the large mass of independent peasants who are the repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit, of Ukraine. As a Soviet politician Kosior declared in Izvestiia on 2 December 1933, ‘Ukrainian nationalism is our chief danger’, and it was to eliminate that nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet state that the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed. The crop that year was ample to feed the people and livestock of Ukraine, though it had fallen off somewhat from the previous year, a decrease probably due in large measure to the struggle over collectivization. But a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order, by plan, through an unusually high grain allotment to the state as taxes.
Timothy D. Snyder noted that, during the 1948 convention to define genocide, the Soviets "made sure that the term genocide, contrary to Lemkin's intentions, excluded political and economic groups." Thus the Ukrainian famine could be presented as "somehow less genocidal because it targeted a class, kulaks, as well as a nation, Ukraine."
Robert Conquest
In 1986, Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, under Stalin's direction in 1929–31, and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution. In this book, Conquest supported the view that the famine was a planned act of genocide. According to historians Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies, "Conquest holds that Stalin wanted the famine... and that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately inflicted for its own sake." However, Conquest clarified to them in a letter in 2003 that "Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put "Soviet interest" other than feeding the starving first thus consciously abetting it."James Mace
Professor of political science James Mace stated that the Holodomor was genocide. In his 1986 article "The man-made famine of 1933 in Soviet Ukraine", Mace writes:For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.
Mark Tauger
Professor of history Mark Tauger states that the 1932 harvest was 30–40% smaller than official statistics and that the famine was "the result of a failure of economic policy", not "a 'successful' nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups". In his 1991 article "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Tauger writes:Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as "man-made" or "artificial." Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population. New Soviet archival data show that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than has been assumed and call for revision of the genocide interpretation. The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. Thus for Ukraine, the official sown area reduced by the share of sown area actually harvested to a harvested area of 17 million hectares and multiplied by the average yield gives a total harvest of 8.5 million tons, or a little less than 60 percent of the official 14.6 million tons. .
Davies and Wheatcroft criticized Tauger's methodology in the 2004 edition of The Years of Hunger. Tauger criticized Davies and Wheatcroft's methodology in a 2006 article. In the 2009 edition of their book, Davies and Wheatcroft apologized for "an error in our calculations of the 1932 yield" but still conclude grain yield was "between 55 and 60 million tons, a low harvest, but substantially higher than Tauger's 50 million."
David R. Marples argues that Tauger is incorrect because in his view there "is no such thing as a 'natural' famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input."
Stanislav Kulchytsky
Stanislav Kulchytsky and Hennadiy Yefimenko state that the famine mostly harmed people based on rural status, not ethnicity. The distribution of all-cause mortality among ethnicities in the Ukraine closely reflects the ethnic distribution of the rural population of Ukraine. The more-rural Moldavian, Polish, German, and Bulgarian populations of Ukraine suffered in the same proportion as the rural Ukrainian population, while the more-urban Russians and Jews survived the famine more successfully.This becomes clear when comparing Kulchytsky's table on all-cause mortality by ethnicity and the 1926 population of the Ukraine SSR in the 1926 Census:
| Nationality | 1926 Census Count | 1926 Census Proportion | 1933 Mortality Count | 1933 Mortality Proportion | Mortality Proportion / Census Proportion |
| Total | 29018187 | 1.0000 | 1909000 | 1.000 | 1.0000 |
| Ukrainians | 23218860 | 0.8001 | 1552200 | 0.8131 | 1.0162 |
| Russians | 2677166 | 0.0923 | 85000 | 0.0445 | 0.4826 |
| Jews | 1574391 | 0.0543 | 27000 | 0.0141 | 0.2607 |
| Poles | 476435 | 0.0164 | 20700 | 0.0108 | 0.6604 |
| Germans | 393924 | 0.0136 | 13200 | 0.0069 | 0.5094 |
| Moldavians | 257794 | 0.0089 | 16100 | 0.0084 | 0.9493 |
| Greeks | 104666 | 0.0036 | 2500 | 0.0013 | 0.3631 |
| Bulgarians | 92078 | 0.0032 | 7700 | 0.0040 | 1.2712 |
Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft
Professors R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft conclude the famine was man-made but unintentional. They believe that a combination of rapid industrialization and two successive bad harvests were the primary reason of the famine. However, Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies towards the peasants were brutal and ruthless and do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the massive famine deaths. In his 2018 article, "The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines", Wheatcroft writes:We all agreed that Stalin’s policy was brutal and ruthless and that its cover up was criminal, but we do not believe that it was done on purpose to kill people and cannot therefore be described as murder or genocide. Davies and I have produced the most detailed account of the grain crisis in these years, showing the uncertainties in the data and the mistakes carried out by a generally ill-informed, and excessively ambitious, government. The state showed no signs of a conscious attempt to kill lots of Ukrainians and belated attempts that sought to provide relief when it eventually saw the tragedy unfolding were evident. But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the ‘man-made on purpose’ side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the ‘famine as a genocide’. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.
Michael Ellman critiqued Davies and Wheatcroft's view of intent as too narrow:
According to them , only taking an action whose sole objective is to cause deaths among the peasantry counts as intent. Taking an action with some other goal but which the actor certainly knows will also cause peasants to starve does not count as intentionally starving the peasants. However, this is an interpretation of 'intent' which flies in the face of the general legal interpretation.
Michael Ellman
Professor of economics Michael Ellman states that Stalin clearly committed crimes against humanity but whether he committed genocide depends on the definition of the term. In his 2007 article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-33 Revisited", he writes:Team-Stalin’s behaviour in 1930 – 34 clearly constitutes a crime against humanity as that is defined in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court article 7, subsection 1 and Was Team-Stalin also guilty of genocide? That depends on how ‘genocide’ is defined. The first physical element is the export of grain during a famine. The second physical element was the ban on migration from Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The third physical element is that ‘Stalin made no effort to secure grain assistance from abroad’ If the present author were a member of the jury trying this case he would support a verdict of not guilty. The reasons for this are as follows. First, the three physical elements in the alleged crime can all be given non-genocidal interpretations. Secondly, the two mental elements are not unambiguous evidence of genocide. Suspicion of an ethnic group may lead to genocide, but by itself is not evidence of genocide. Hence it would seem that the necessary proof of specific intent is lacking.
Ellman asserts that if Stalin were guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "any other events of the 1917–53 era would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of ." However, Ellman asserts that the "national operations" of the NKVD, particularly the "Polish operation", may qualify as genocide even under the strictest definition, but there has been no ruling on the matter.
Norman Naimark
Professor of East European studies Norman Naimark states that the Holodomor's deaths were intentional and thus were genocide. In his 2010 book Stalin's Genocides, Naimark writes:There is enough evidence − if not overwhelming evidence — to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.
Steven Rosefielde
Professor of comparative economic systems Steven Rosefielde states that most deaths came from state action, not the poor harvest. In his 2009 book Red Holocaust, he writes that:There was a famine 1932–33 caused by two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932 attributable partly to collectivization and partly to weather, but it didn’t cause the killings. Grain supplies were sufficient to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly of terror-starvation, not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.
Timothy Snyder
Professor of history Timothy Snyder stated that the starvation was "deliberate" and that several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. In his 2010 book, Bloodlands, Snyder stated:In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. It was not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.
In a 2017 Q&A, Snyder said that he believed the famine was genocide but refrained from using the term because it might confuse people:
If you asked me, is the Ukrainian Holodomor genocide? Yes, in my view, it is. In my view, it meets the criteria of the law of genocide of 1948, the Convention – it meets the ideas that Raphael Lemkin laid down. Is Armenia genocide? Yes, I believe legally it very easily meets that qualification. I just don't think that means what people think it means. Because there are people who hear the word "genocide" and they think it means the attempt to kill every man woman and child, and the Armenian genocide is closer to the Holocaust than most other cases, right, but it's not the same thing. So, I hesitate to use "genocide" because I think every time the word "genocide" is used it provokes misunderstanding.