causes and effects of the Ukrainian famine.

Also
discuss what the international community knew about
the famine, and what this community did to aid the
starving people.
● Holodomor - Ukrainian SSR famine of 1931 and 1932.
● The famine considered a genocide because a genocide is, “deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part"
● The Hunger Plan by the Nazis was inspired by the Ukrainian FAmine of 1931- 1932.

Cause Effect.

● The Ukrainian farmers were ● So many people died that Russian

stripped off their grains
● After the peasantry decided to
reject the communist rule and
protest against it, it led the
government to use their last option
of leaving them to starve to death.
Thus, the starvation did not
happen due to natural causes but
was deliberately cause due to
political reasons (William Henry)
● Food was taken out of Ukraine in
1921 to 1922 to feed Russian
cities.
● There were uprisings against the
Communist Party led by Stalin by
kulaks, who were arrested or
exiled or executed. There were
many other uprisings mainly in the
Ukraine part, it is under Soviet
control now. To oppress them
Stalin starved them.
● 1932 Stalin prepares for the
Famine-Genocide setting
unrealistic grain procurements for
Ukraine. Famine in Ukraine. 40%
of the harvest in Ukraine will be
handed over to the government.
Little is left for the farmers.
● Stalin took control of farms, then
grains.
people had to be resettled there
which changed the environment
and the demographics of Ukraine
● On one side, millions of starving
peasants, their bodies often
swollen from lack of food
● they had reduced some of the
most fertile land in the world to a
melancholy desert."
● " I saw ravages of the famine of
1932-1933 in Ukraine - hordes of
families in rags begging at the
railway stations, the women lifting
up to the compartment windows
their starving brats, which, with
drumstick limbs, big cadaverous
heads and puffed bellies, looked
like embryos out of alcohol
bottles." —Arthur Koestler, The
God That Failed
● Farmers live off their 6 depleted
reserves and small plots and farm
animals. Ukrainian farmers flee to
cities, to Russia and Belarus in
search of food. August 7, 1932
“kolhosp property decree”—
[kolhosp: Ukrainian acronym for
collective farm]: death penalty for
● January 22, 1933, Secret directive
sent to Kharkiv to close the
borders of Ukraine and Kuban
from the rest of the USSR, to
prevent starving farmers from
searching for food.
● Stalin used force for
collectivization - The All-Union
People’s Commissariat of
Agriculture in Moscow initially
mobilized some of its most reliable
“25-thousanders” Party
members―the majority of them
Russians―and sent them to
Ukraine to organize collective
farms.
● The Ukaranians were stopped
military from going into Russia,
Pole, Rome etc.
● Took the farmer’s grain exported
it.
● The Kremlin will do anything to get
the nation together- even if that
takes destroying a nation or a
whole culture
● Starvation is a tactic to control the
small portion of intellectuals and
religious officials in Ukraine in an
attempt to oppress and Russinize
it.
● Communism came in, people
protests and were arrested or
killed.
● Throughout the entire region,
clergy and laity were killed by
hundreds, while the number sent
to forced labor camps ran into the
thousands.
● 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,
stealing grain in the field.
Unproductive villages in Ukraine
are deprived of manufactured
goods and food stuffs—
blacklisted. Villages are cordoned
off and left to starve.
● Widespread starvation in Ukraine,
the Kuban, and the Caucasus.
Dec. 14, 1932 Secret decree
blames Ukrainization, national
tendencies, for grain problems.
The Ukrainian language is
forbidden in the Russian republic.
In Ukraine, the Ukrainian
leadership is purged, gradually
replaced by non-Ukrainians and
Russification is brought in. In 6
weeks, 220,000 arrested, many
shot, sent to the gulag, 85% were
sent home to starve. Red Cross,
Cardinal Innitzer demands
permission to send famine relief;
Moscow denies famine and rejects
relief.
● The laws and decrees were made
to torture people who tried to gain
any food.
● •At the height of the Famine,
Ukrainian villagers were dying at
the rate of 25,000 per day or 1,000
per hour or 17 per minute.
● •Among the children, one in three
perished as a consequence of
collectivization and the famine.
● •80% of Ukrainian intellectuals
were liquidated because they
refused to collaborate in the
extermination of their countrymen.
Of about 240 Ukrainian authors
were liquidated or disappeared 62
out of 84 liquid said I perished.
● These attacks on the Soul have
also had and will continue to have
a serious effect on the Brain of
Ukraine, for it is the families of the
clergy that have traditionally
 the national language and
literature, the national spirit of
Ukraine.
● s necessary for the Soviet and so
they got one to order, by plan,
through an unusually high grain
allotment to the state as taxes.
● To add to this, thousands of acres
of wheat were never harvested
and left to rot in the fields. The rest
was sent to government granaries
to be stored there until the
authorities had decided how to
allocate it. Much of this crop, so
vital to the lives of the Ukrainian
people, ended up as exports for
the creation of credits abroad.
supplied a large number of the
intellectuals, while the priests
themselves have been the leaders
of the villages, and their wives the
heads of the charitable
organizations. The religious orders
ran schools, and took care of
much of the organized charities.
● In the face of famine on the farms,
thousands abandoned the rural
areas and moved into the towns to
beg food. Caught there and sent
back to the country, they
abandoned their children in the
hope that they at least might
survive. In this way, 18,000
children were abandoned in
Kharkiv alone
● Cannibalism became
commonplace
● much higher mortality rate among
the individual peasants proved a
most potent argument in favor of
joining collective farms.
● population of Ukraine changed
from 80% Ukrainian to only 63%.
In the face of famine and
deportation, the Ukrainian
population had declined absolutely
from 23.2 million to 19.6 million,
while the nonUkrainian population
had increased by 5.6 million.
When we consider that Ukraine
once had the highest rate of
population increase in Europe,
around 800,000 per year, it is easy
to see that the Russian policy has
been accomplished.
● Mothers were forced to abandon
their kids in markets like Blahabaz,
in the hope that authorities will
take them to shelters.
● People who were made to wait for
commercial bread were made to
wait as such that they would end
up fighting and the weak ones
would be killed.
International Policies:
● Red Cross
● 1934 The USSR is invited to join the League of Nations.
● All the Western powers knew but did not do anything, refer section 8 and 9.
● Help from outside organizations were discouraged or blocked.
● Finally, in 1988 accepted that Stali did genocide.
●

Things of not causes:

● There were no natural calamities that caused the famine.
●

Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the

destruction of the Ukrainian nation
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 Hunger Plan was inspired by the famine in Ukraine. It killed many.

Movie Notes:
● No one believed at first that Hitler would ever get into the global power that he
did.
● Stalin is paying by selling grain. Rubles’ value is very low.
● Americans had boycott Russia, so they were trying to lure them by making them
see that they can make money in Russia. Russians want foreign investment for
complete Revolution. British Duranty helping the Russians.
● Journalists weren’t allowed to Ukraine. So the ones who wanted to help were
killed some way or the other.
● The journalists are kept a tab on.
● They would carry dead bodies on horse-driven carriages.
●