The Holodomor: Famine-Genocide in Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1933

Approaching this lesson

This lesson is about a real tragedy in which millions of people died of hunger. It is described accurately but without graphic detail. Read it slowly, and take a break or talk with a trusted adult if you need to.

The revised Grade 10 course asks you to learn about the Holodomor because it shows what can happen when a totalitarian regime (Lesson 5) treats a whole people as an enemy, and because it is an important part of the history of Ukrainian Canadians, one of Canada's largest communities.

What happened?

In the early 1930s, Soviet Ukraine was one of the richest farming regions in Europe, sometimes called a "breadbasket". Yet in 1932 and 1933, millions of people there died of starvation. This was not caused by drought or crop disease. It was caused by the policies of Joseph Stalin's Soviet government.

• Forced collectivization. From 1929, the Soviet government seized private farms and forced peasants into state-run collective farms. Farmers who resisted were labelled "kulaks" and many were deported or arrested. Resistance was strong in Ukraine.
• Impossible quotas. In 1932, Ukraine was ordered to deliver grain quotas far larger than farms could provide while still feeding people.
• Confiscation. Brigades searched homes and took grain and other food. A harsh law of August 1932 made taking even small amounts of grain from collective fields a serious crime.
• Blacklists. Villages that failed to meet quotas were blacklisted: cut off from all deliveries of goods.
• Sealed borders. In January 1933, the regime blocked peasants from leaving Ukraine to look for food.
• Denial. The Soviet government denied that a famine was happening, refused outside help, and kept exporting grain abroad.

At the same time, the regime purged Ukrainian cultural and political leaders and attacked Ukrainian national identity. Historians and demographers estimate that about 4 million people died in Ukraine; estimates vary, and some are higher.

Why is it called a genocide?

The word genocide was created by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in 1944, and defined in the UN Genocide Convention (1948): acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Many scholars, Ukraine, and many countries, including Canada, recognize the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, pointing to the targeting of Ukraine specifically (the blacklists, the sealed borders and the attack on Ukrainian culture and leaders at the same time). In 2008, Parliament passed an act recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide and making the fourth Saturday in November Holodomor Memorial Day in Canada. Ontario passed its own Holodomor Memorial Day Act in 2009.

Some historians debate exactly how to classify Stalin's intentions. What is not in doubt is that the famine was caused by Soviet policies, that the regime knew people were starving, and that it chose not to stop it.

Canada and the Holodomor

• Ukrainian Canadians. By the 1931 census, more than 200,000 people in Canada, many on the Prairies, were of Ukrainian origin. Many had relatives in Ukraine and received desperate letters. Ukrainian Canadian organizations held protest meetings, sent petitions and tried to organize relief, which the Soviet government refused.
• A divided community. Some pro-Soviet Ukrainian Canadian groups repeated the Soviet denial. This shows how propaganda could divide even a community with family ties to the victims.
• Reporting. A few journalists reported what they saw, including Rhea Clyman, a journalist from Toronto who travelled in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and was expelled from the USSR, and the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones in 1933. Other well-known foreign correspondents in Moscow downplayed or denied the famine.
• Government. Canada, like other Western governments in the Depression, took no action. Few people in Canada outside the Ukrainian community knew much about the famine.
• Remembrance. Under Soviet rule, discussion of the famine was banned in Ukraine. After Ukraine became independent in 1991, archives opened and survivors could speak freely. Ukrainian Canadians played a major role in research and commemoration.