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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

What is it like to have 30,000 excess deaths per day?

Recent demographic analyses have suggested that the daily rate of excess mortality at the height of the Holodomor approached 30,000. It's very hard to translate that number into what it might have meant for the people who actually lived through the horror. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic gives us at least a tiny inkling of what it might have been like.

Immediately after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, news stories explaining Ukraine's geographic size would often say that it is "slightly smaller than Texas". While the Ukrainian SSR in 1930 was a bit smaller than present-day Ukraine, the comparison is still reasonable. Furthermore, Texas in 2020 and the Ukrainian SSR in 1930 had remarkably similar populations of approximately 30 million. This allows us to directly compare absolute mortality numbers.

According to the CDC, Texas experienced several waves of excess mortality between July 2020 and April 2022. The peak of the largest of those waves occurred in the week ending January 16, 2021, when there were over 7,000 deaths, compared to an expected number of deaths of approximately 4,000. Thus, there were approximately 3,000 excess deaths in that week, or (on average) about 400 per day.

The difference between 400 and 30,000 is hard to wrap one's head around. Numerically, it would seem that the Holodomor was more than 70 times worse than COVID-19, though it is not clear what that even means. We remember the impact that the coronavirus had on the United States, and that allows us to imagine how the impact of the Holodomor on Ukraine would have been indescribably worse.

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1933 — The Holodomor reaches its peak Compared to the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths during 1932, deaths from hunger spiked into the millions during the first half of 1933.

As the famine progressed, it became even more clear that Stalin viewed the situation not as an economic or humanitarian crisis, but as a political one. Based on the archival record, Stalin knew that large numbers of people were dying of starvation, but instead of providing relief, he doubled-down on repression. He admitted in his own words that the battle in Ukraine was about "counter-revolution". He believed that Ukrainian Communists (especially those blaming the regime for the collectivization disaster) needed to be purged, and that a "shattering blow" was required in the form of house-to-house searches for "stolen grain" and the confiscation of food.

The measures that he and his top subordinates approved intensified the famine with the full knowledge that it would devastate the countryside, which was the home of the small-scale village farmers that formed the Ukrainian nation's spine.
Stalin’s New Year’s telegram
The year 1933 began ominously from the very beginning: a telegram sent by Stalin on New Year’s Day that instructed Bolshevik Ukrainian leaders to inform the villagers that those who voluntarily turned in “stolen or hidden grain” would not be subject to repression. This implied that farmers who did not do so and were discovered to have “illegal” foodstuffs would be prosecuted, and possibly executed, under the “Five Ears of Grain” law. Mass searches took place throughout Soviet Ukraine in early January. In many cases, all food products (not just grain) found in village households were confiscated or intentionally destroyed. These raids further cut the food supplies for village farmers and were a significant contributor to the massive mortality spike in 1933.
Blockades
On January 22, an explicit order was issued in Moscow to prohibit villagers in Ukraine and the Kuban from leaving famine-stricken regions into neighboring areas of Belarus and the Russian Federation. Just in the month of February, 220,000 people were arrested by secret police and militia units stationed at the border of the Ukrainian republic. Of these, 190,000 were forced to return back to their villages and very likely died of starvation.

This border blockade was on top of existing de facto restrictions that prevented rural farmers from traveling to major cities where food was somewhat less scarce. This did not stop starving people from attempting the journey: dead and dying villagers could routinely be seen on the streets of Kyiv and Kharkiv.

The closure of the internal border was intended to prevent a mass exodus of the kind that happened a year earlier. But it also had a political motivation: Stalin and Molotov wrote that the Soviet central government had determined (contrary to all evidence) that the flight of starving farmers from Ukraine was not a spontaneous, rational reaction to famine but was “organized by enemies of Soviet power, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Polish agents”.

In fact, Stalin went even further. He absurdly insisted that farmers were waging a "'secret' war against Soviet power" using "hunger as a weapon". In other words, reactionary farmers were purposely starving themselves in order to sabotage Soviet economic progress. This is reminiscent of “accusation in a mirror”, where the perpetrator of a malicious action falsely attributes their own intentions to the victim. In this case, it allowed the Kremlin to justify further starvation by claiming that any existing starvation was not the result of decisions made by the regime, but was due to “saboteurs” who were “hiding food”. Based on this warped logic, further food requisitions were the only way to extract those "hidden" commodities.
Purges and repressions
Early 1933 saw Stalin continuing his measures to bring Ukraine under direct Kremlin control. Pavel Postyshev was sent to Ukraine to be, in effect, Stalin’s viceroy. Postyshev soon began repressions against Ukrainian cultural and political figures, accusing them of "nationalism". Those repressed included Communists who supported the cultural, economic, and political autonomy of Soviet Ukraine, as well as thousands of collective farm leaders and local Party committee secretaries.

Some prominent individuals saw the writing on the wall and took matters into their own hands. The writer Mykola Khvylovy and Ukrainian Communist leader Mykola Skrypnyk both committed suicide in 1933. They had become disillusioned and lost their faith in the Bolshevik revolution that they had such great hopes for. Part of what led Khvylovy to the breaking point was his witnessing of the horrors of the Holodomor. May 13, 1933, the day of his suicide, has been considered by some to be the day that early 20th century literary modernism died in Ukraine. The Executed Renaissance had begun.
Desperate attempts at survival
Even though searches and confiscations had stripped the Ukrainian countryside of nearly all food, the requisition campaign continued under Potyshev’s orders into early February. By spring, there were literally no food products left to eat in the countryside. People who had gold or foreign currency and had the means to get to a city could buy food at a Torgsin. Those who couldn’t resorted to eating dogs, cats, dead livestock, insects, tree leaves, bark, weeds, and almost anything that could conceivably provide a few calories. There were substantiated reports of cannibalism. Children were abandoned in towns and cities, where they begged for food.

The number of people dying from hunger skyrocketed, eventually reaching nearly 30,000 per day in the late spring and early summer of 1933. The number of deaths was so large and the survivors were so weak that in many places normal funeral practices stopped: corpses would be collected in a cart by a designated individual and simply dumped into a common grave.
A return to “normal”
On May 8, 1933 the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party finally eased up on the severe repressions against rural farmers. They declared that victory had been achieved in the war against the kulaks and that collectivization was now secure. The USSR Council of People's Commissars had already announced that starting with the 1933 harvest, collective farms would no longer be subject to arbitrary requisitioning, but would pay a fixed, in-kind tax to the state. Things gradually returned to what passed for “normal” during the Stalin regime. However, political and cultural repression such as the Executed Renaissance had only just begun.
What exactly was the Holodomor? The Holodomor was a genocidal artificial famine engineered by Soviet government under Stalin that took place in Ukraine and other regions with significant Ukrainian ethnic populations in 1932 and 1933. The term "Holodomor" literally means "killing by famine" and derives from the Ukrainian words "holod" ("famine") and "moryty" ("to kill").

The Holodomor was the result of acts of omission and commission by the Soviet authorities. While there were food shortages and famines in multiple regions of the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in Ukraine and the Kuban region of the northern Caucasus the famine took a substantially different course. Not only was no relief provided to the starving, but measures were intentionally taken that guaranteed an even larger death toll among the very people who produced the food — the village farmers.

That death toll reached mind-boggling proportions. There were millions of deaths, constituting perhaps 20-30% of the population in the countryside. These deaths occurred very rapidly, with perhaps 30,000 daily cases of excess mortality at the famine's peak in the late spring and early summer of 1933. Urban areas were not shielded from the impact: in addition to hunger (though not as extreme as in the countryside), city dwellers were faced with dead or dying villagers who had come to find food.

Recent scholarship has made a very strong case that the staggering death rate during the Holodomor was the result of intentional actions by the Soviet regime that meet the definition of genocide. The goal of the Holodomor was never to physically destroy all Ukrainians. That is not a necessary condition for it to be considered a genocide: the 1948 UN "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" includes in its definition "Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" (emphasis added).
The Holodomor as cultural genocide
Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and was the author of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, had a more expansive view that included cultural destruction as a significant component of the concept of genocide. Lemkin's early draft texts of the Convention had cultural destruction as part of the definition of genocide, but this was eliminated due to opposition from former European colonial powers and by nations whose history included the displacement and cultural disintegration of indigenous peoples (including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil).

The targeting of Ukraine's agricultural base during the Holodomor was not an accident. It is hard to overstate the importance that agriculture has had in traditional Ukrainian society. Ukraine is at the western end of the extraordinarily fertile belt of chornozem ("black earth" or "black soil") that stretches across Eurasia. For centuries, most Ukrainians had lived in a society that was deeply linked to that land and to the cycles of nature. Collectivization, the Holodomor, and related anti-Ukrainian policies in the 1930s were a direct assault on those age-old traditions and institutions. They made obsolete many traditional occupations and trades, such as icon painters and itinerant musicians. It eliminated or severely restricted ancient cultural practices like weddings and seasonal rituals that had associated with them vast numbers of customs, songs, and traditions. The catastrophic impact that this had on the countryside was yet another aspect of the genocidal nature of the Holodomor era that went far beyond the actual famine.
How many people died in the Holodomor? There has been considerable controversy over the decades regarding the number of deaths directly attributable the Holodomor, with estimates ranging from about one million on the extreme low end to eight to ten million on the extreme high end. Recent scholarly opinion has been gradually settling towards the upper end of the 2.5 to 4 million range, though that is still far from unanimous. While knowing the number is important, we feel that this is a task best left to historians and demographers who specialize in this type of work. It certainly is not something that we at the UHEC have any expertise in or would be in a position to critically evaluate.

Frankly, we may never know the real number. To understand why, we need only look at the recent pandemic. No matter what estimate was made of the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19, somebody would invariably dispute that figure as being biased and claim that it was a significant over- or underestimate. And that's despite the presence of essentially complete official death records. The situation in Ukraine in the 1930s makes such estimates significantly more challenging. It is known that there were severe breakdowns in governmental record keeping in 1933, and there are also major issues with reliability of the 1937 and 1939 Soviet censuses (even if we disregard the official statistics published at the time, which are known to contain wholesale fabrications). This makes any demographic analysis incredibly difficult.

In some respects, debates about the exact number of deaths are a distraction from the bigger picture. Even if the number of deaths directly attributable to the Holodomor was "only" 2 million, that is still an astounding number, especially if we consider how short of a time period those deaths occurred in. It is indisputable that these deaths, regardless of the exact number, had a massive traumatic impact on Ukraine and its people. And the impact is even greater if we consider all of the collateral effects, such as a greatly decreased birthrate, the "demographic echo" of that population loss over the decades, and the simultaneous attack on Ukrainian language and culture during that period.

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Excess deaths