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The Holodomor: Famine in Soviet Ukraine

1932–1933 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Confinement Mass Killing Killing was the defining act

Confined

190,000

The defining act was holding a starving population in place rather than moving it. Under the directive of 22 January 1933 signed by Stalin and Molotov, which banned peasants from leaving Ukraine and the North Caucasus, about 220,000 people were intercepted by the OGPU by mid-March 1933 and roughly 190,000 were sent back to their villages; the internal passport system introduced on 27 December 1932 denied passports to collective farmers and so bound them to the countryside, and blacklisted villages were cut off from all goods. The interception figures come from OGPU reports published from the Soviet archives.

Share of the population affected

0.60%

of the population of the Ukrainian SSR at the start of the famine, 1932

Killed

3.5–5 million

excess mortality incl. disease and starvation

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What happened

Grain procurement quotas set far above what the 1932 harvest could yield were enforced in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban by requisition brigades that confiscated seed grain and other foodstuffs, while villages that failed to meet quotas were 'blacklisted' and cut off from supply. The decree of 22 January 1933 sealed the republic's borders against peasants seeking food, and the internal passport system introduced weeks earlier tied collective farmers to their villages. Demographic reconstructions put excess deaths in Ukraine at roughly 3.5 to 5 million in 1932-33, within a Soviet-wide famine toll of at least 5 to 7 million that also devastated Kazakhstan, the Volga and the Kuban. The famine was denied by the Soviet state, excluded from the 1937 census results and not publicly acknowledged until 1986-87. Whether it constituted genocide against Ukrainians is a live political and scholarly dispute: Ukraine, the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and more than thirty other states and parliaments have declared it genocide, while the Russian government rejects that characterization and describes the famine as a shared tragedy of the peoples of the USSR.

Parties

Soviet party and state organs seized grain, blacklisted villages and closed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban to starving peasants

Disputed

Whether the famine in Ukraine was a genocide directed at Ukrainians as a national group, or a Soviet-wide catastrophe of collectivization that struck Ukraine hardest, is disputed between Ukraine and many Western parliaments on one side and the Russian government and some historians on the other.

The denominator

The 1926 Soviet census counted 29.0 million in the Ukrainian SSR and Soviet statistical estimates for the beginning of 1933 give about 31.9 million. The 1937 census, which recorded the resulting deficit, was suppressed and its organisers shot; its recovered returns underpin modern estimates of excess mortality.

The Kuban, blockaded under the same decrees and heavily Ukrainian-speaking, lay outside the Ukrainian SSR and so outside this denominator; and excess deaths in Ukraine are estimated by demographers at 3.5-5 million, far above the figure carried in this entry.

Where the baseline comes from

Holodomoropen-edited
Soviet Census (1937)official

On the death toll

The range is for Ukraine. Britannica cites a demographic study finding at least 3.9 million Ukrainian deaths; Werth gives 4 to 4.5 million for Ukraine and the Kuban together; the lower bound of about 3.5 million reflects the reconstructions of R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, the higher figures those of Ukrainian demographers and of scholars who add unborn children. Soviet-wide famine deaths in 1931-34 are put at 5 to 7 million, including 1.1 to 1.5 million in Kazakhstan and 300,000 to 400,000 in the Volga region. All figures are reconstructions from census and registration data, since deaths were deliberately under-recorded.

Documented forms of violence

Starvation and SiegeArbitrary DetentionDestruction of Property

Grain and food confiscation, the blacklisting of villages, and the police cordon that returned fleeing peasants are documented in Soviet party and OGPU directives published from the archives and cited by Werth and by the European Parliament resolution.

Formal findings

European Parliament (2022) — Recognised the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, by 507 votes to 12, and called on other states to do the same — source
German Bundestag (2022) — Adopted a cross-party motion in November 2022 classifying the Holodomor as genocide — source

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Ukraine

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.