Holodomor: Stalin's genocide against Ukraine Russia denies

From 1932 to 1933 Stalin murdered 7-10 million Ukrainians by starving them to death. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. This became known as the “collectivisation policy “. Much like other attempts of Communist collectivization of lands and farms, like in China in the late 1950s or in Cambodia in the 1970s, these measures only succeeded in destroying the food and grain production and unleashed a horrible famine in the USSR. The famine, which was caused by Stalin's policies, spread all over Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine, which was the next Soviet republic to face collectivization.

Instead of acknowledging his mistakes in collectivizing individual farms, and deporting or murdering hundreds of thousands of farmers simply because they were not poor, Stalin doubled down and blamed the starving Ukrainian peasants, and accused them of betraying the USSR. Blaming the Ukrainians for the failure of his own agrarian collectivisation policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured the mass death of the local population. Stalin also requisitioned almost all the grain that was stored in Soviet Ukraine, knowing full well that doing that while a people were already starving there would end up killing millions and millions of Ukrainians. The starving Ukrainian peasants were reduced to eating their livestocks, their horses, their pets, and when all else failed, each other. Starved parents cooked and eat their children, and other parents begged their children to eat them when they died. In fact human meat replaced almost all other types of meat in the Ukrainian countryside, as the only option to not stave was to become a cannibal. It is estimated that in Ukraine alone Stalin's man made famine, the "Holodomor", killed around 7-10 million people.

A starving Ukrainian family in 1932.

Since the moment Stalin became the leader of the USSR in 1924 and until his death in 1953, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, through executions, starvation, and working to death in the Soviet Gulags. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million. In his book, “Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R.: 1928-1954,” I.G. Dyadkin estimated that the USSR suffered 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" during that period, with 34 to 49 million directly linked to Stalin. In “Europe A History,” British historian Norman Davies counted 50 million killed between 1924-53, excluding wartime casualties.

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For decades, in the USSR, the memory about the victims of the Holodomor was prohibited, there was no public awareness about this, and no commemoration of the innocent victims. Mentioning or even commemorating Holodomor in Ukraine itself was forbidden by the Soviet authorities. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by Stalin and the Soviet government. However, modern day Russia and its president Vladimir Putin refuse any such recognition. Instead Russia outright denies any claims of genocide and repeats the almost 90 year old Soviet lies that were coined by Stalin himself about how the starvation was caused by “natural circumstances” and was in fact was the fault of the Ukrainians. Bibliography: “Unnatural Deaths in the U.S.S.R.: 1928-1954.” I.G. Dyadkin. “Europe A History.” Norman Davies. "Bloodlands." Timothy D. Snyder.