Holodomor

The Holodomor or “ extermination by the hunger ”, in Ukrainian Голодомор , is the name of large a Famine, which has occurred in Ukraine, forming then part of the the USSR, between 1932 and 1933. There was between four and ten million died according to the estimates, in primarily agricultural areas.

This famine was extended to other Soviet territories, such as the the Volga, the Ciscaucasie, the the Ural of the south, the Western Siberia and the Kazakhstan, but the term “Holodomor” indicates, specifically that which took place in the territories populated by “Ukrainians of stock”.

The intention of extermination, targeted by the Soviet authorities in this famine, is discussed, but, since end 2006, the Ukraine officially qualified Holodomor of Génocide.

The collectivization of agriculture as from 1928

In 1928, with the first Five-year plan, the Soviet capacity gives in building site the Collectivisation of the agriculture which had been suspended between 1921 and 1927, during the implementation of the Nouvelle economic policy (NEP). This collectivization reorganizes the agricultural production by founding the Kolkhoze like basic unit. It thus implies the suppression of the Inégalité S for the country world and that with the detriment of richest, the Koulak S. It implies also the direct takeover of the agricultural production by the State and the possibility of puncturing always more the Agriculture with the profit of the sector urban Industriel and . This ponctionnement is necessarily done with the detriment of the interests of the whole of the farming community; and more the area is fertile, plus it is punctured.

In Ukraine, the State collects 30 % of the production as of 1930, 41,5 % in 1931. In 1932, it is envisaged to collect 32 % more than in 1931. This level of taking away, which threatens simple survival of the peasants, causes at the latter all kinds of operations to withdraw the maximum of harvests from the collection. To face this opposition, the central capacity constitutes brigades of shock recruited within the Komsomol S (Communist youths) and of the Communists of the villes^,.

The famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933

August 7th 1932 is promulgated a law known under the name of “law of the ears” which makes it possible to condemn to ten years of camp or the capital punishment “any flight or dilapidation of the socialist property”. From June 1932 in December 1933: 125000 people are condemned, of which: 5400 with the capital punishment, some to have stolen some ears of corn or rye in the fields.

In spite of these repressive measurements, the objectives of the collection in the principal cereal areas are far from being reached so that the Political office must send in Ukraine and in the the Caucasus of North of the extraordinary commissions chaired respectively by Molotov and Kaganovitch to put at the step the local structures of the Party.

With a meeting of the secretaries of district of the party, a resolution is taken which illustrates well the frame of mind of commission: “following the particularly ashamed failure of the plan of collection of cereals, to oblige the local organizations of the Party to break the sabotage organized by the elements kulaks counter-revolutionaries, to destroy the resistance of the rural Communists and the presidents of kolkhoz who took the head of this sabotage. ”.

The question of knowing if the Ukraine were touched hard than the remainder of the USSR poses. Nicolas Werth distinguishes the “zone from the hunger” of the remainder of the USSR where, however, he writes, the demographic losses were not negligible: for example, the area of Moscow where mortality increases 50 % between January and June 1933. The Ukraine belongs to the “zone of the hunger”, but proportionally of other areas were touched as much: the regions Cossack S of the Kouban and the Gift as well as the Kazakhstan, the area of Stavropol, the low one and the average the Volga, support that this famine resulted from the deliberate intention of Joseph Stalin destroy the Ukrainian Nation like political unit and clean entity, while attacking with its root and its most representatives, the Ukrainian peasants divided on the territories of the Ukraine and the Kouban.

Other analysts reject the term of Génocide and insist on the non-national character of the tragedy resulting from the policy of Collectivisation forced Soviet peasants, excessive requisitions their harvests and Dékoulakisation. For them, there would not exist directive proven which would as a whole order a targeted action of the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian nation, but rather against a social class, the peasants. Thus, Stephen Wheatcroft supports that the famine was an accidental consequence of badly designed policies and that the Ukraine particularly suffered for demographic reasons. According to this historian, it thus is not about a famine voluntarily caused by the Soviet leaders to repress Ukrainian nationalism.

A few million Russians and Kazakh also perished during this period. Moreover, another great famine, that of 1921, caused, it also, by the requisitions and repressions of the Bolshevik S for the period known as of the “Communism of war”, had resulted in the death of 3 million peasants, mainly Russian, alive on the the Volga. Several Russian researchers indicate the similarities of the repressive methods having brought to these two great famines. One of the basic differences resides in the fact that the forever masked famine of 1921, contrary to the famine of 1932-33, which made it possible to convey of the international assistance to the victims of the first.

While being based on article 6 of the statute of the International penal court which defines the genocide as “the intention to destroy, in all or partly, a group national, ethnic, racial or religious, like such” and in particular the “intentional tender of the group in conditions of existence having to involve its total or partial physical destruction”, such a definition could be applied to Holodomor^,^,. Near to the opinions of V. Kondrachine during the drafting of the black Book of Communism , Nicolas Werth explains in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde , following the exhumation of the letters of Stalin, the evolution of its position: “Is this a genocide? Rather yes. Compared to the other famines which touched the Soviet Union, this one is characterized by the will from éradiquer nationalism and to punish the peasants. It was voluntarily worsened. There is a specificity”.

The Ukrainian Parliament voted the qualification of Génocide for the great famine on November 28th 2006. Indeed, of many documents and testimonys prove that the Ukraine, mainly the peasants ukrainens, as well as the Cosaques of Kouban which are the descendants of the Ukrainian cossacks zaporoques off-set at the end of the 18th century by the empress Catherine II of Russia following their ultimate revolt against the Russian Empire, were subjected to a specifically severe mode compared to the other parts of the USSR, such as for example the Central Asia, saved by the famine. A particular zeal in the requisitions of the vivres with respect to the Ukrainian peasants who showed a demotivation for Stalinist collectivization was applied by the squadrons of the “extraordinary Commission on the requisition of corn” ( TchKhK ) directed by Viatcheslav Molotov in November 1932. This zeal went until the complete confiscations of the harvest ( natoural' nyï chtraf ) of the peasants who do not coopéraient. Molotov does not hesitate to go in person in the Ukraine famished by Holodomor to incite the failing Communists to remain firm with respect to the peasants revolted and decimated by the hunger.

Moreover, the Stalinist mode having installed a system limiting the migrations of the populations within the USSR, the borders of the Ukraine were closed. The interior Passport, with a plug attaching its owner to his place of residence, was a heritage of Russia imperial, and made even more strict by the Soviet authorities. The peasants as for them were entitled even to the passport and thus no right to not only move, but to move either. However, a flood of famished peasants had been able to flow to north to take refuge in Bielorussia, relatively saved by the famine. Moreover, it was legally interdict to carry help and assistance to the “Koulak S” which could saunter in the cities.

November 10th 2003, a declaration with the the United Nations in bond with the 70e birthday of the “great famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933” points out the duty to remember of the victims, which they are Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh or other nationalities. UNO however does not place Holodomor among the four indexed genocides of the 20th century.

Stakes of Ukrainian historiography

The Ukraine, with the autumn 2006, with the arrival of a new political order following the Orange revolution, legislates by juridically qualifying the time of Holodomor like a Génocide: declaration together with sorrows for Négationnisme for the people who would discuss nature of it. In France, in November 2006, the preserving deputy (UMP) Christian Vanneste deposited a proposal for a relative law to the recognition of the Ukrainian genocide. With the title of the new legislature, it again deposited the private bill on October 9th, 2007.

Surviving Ukrainians of this time regard the circumstances of Holodomor as a political operation Stalinienne, pursuing the following goals:

to break the national rebirth of the Ukraine to which the young person Révolution Bolshevik granted an autonomous statute of republic with his language, his newspapers and his army. The Nationalisme Ukrainian useful for the revolution initially proves to be a dangerous obstacle.
to break the balance of the ancestral agrarian company by imposing a new agricultural mode based on the Kolkhoz S. to include/understand this last aspect, it is necessary to integrate the inexorable effect of measurements which are taken: collectivization of the grounds (distributed a few years before at the time of the revolution under the slogan “Earth to the Peasants”), collectivization of the means of production, collectivization of the Livestock, collectivization of the social aspects of the private life. The kolkhoz one becomes a workman of the ground. This revolution becomes a disaster on the social plan.
to sit the prevalence of the Russian Language in the new socialist order in order to allow a rational management of the hundreds of people which composed the Soviet Union. This point was perceived in a painful way by many Ukrainians, the ethnos group most after the Russian ethnos group.

See too

References and notes

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