What exactly was the Holodomor?
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.