What was the Holodomor?
The Holodomor was the result of acts of omission and commission by the Soviet authorities. Not only was no relief provided to the starving, but measures were intentionally taken that guaranteed an even larger death toll. The result was millions of deaths, constituting perhaps 20-30% of the ethnic Ukrainian population in the countryside. These deaths occurred over an extremely short period of time, with excess death rates into the tens of thousands per day during the famine's peak, making the impact even more horrific.
It is hard to overstate the importance that agriculture had in traditional Ukrainian society. Ukraine is at the eastern end of the extraordinarily fertile chornozem ("black earth" or "black soil") belt that stretches across Eurasia. For untold centuries, 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, frontal 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, which 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.
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 and reached mind-boggling proportions. There were millions of deaths and perhaps 30,000 daily cases of excess mortality at its peak in the late spring and early summer of 1933. Recent scholarship has made a very strong case that this staggering death rate was the result of intentional actions by the Soviet regime that meet the definition of genocide, and that these actions occurred in the context of a broad attack on Ukrainian language and identity.
The Holodomor has not been a part of public consciousness in the United States, especially when compared to the Holocaust and the Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian, or Rwandan genocides. This is not an accident: it is due in good measure to efforts at denial, erasure, and disinformation by the Soviet Union, Russia, and their apologists.
Soviet authorities systematically attempted to erase the memory of this genocide. Discussion of the 1932-1933 famine was forbidden, as was even the use of the word "famine" in connection to those years (one could speak only of "food difficulties").
But even during the Soviet period, memory of the Holodomor did not completely vanish. Older family members would whisper their stories to children or grandchildren, with the admonition that they should "keep quiet" about it. Ukrainians in the diaspora, of course, faced no such restrictions: they published whatever information was available in their newspapers; they organized meetings, protests, and commemorations; and they promoted the scholarly study of the Holodomor and attempted to bring it to the attention of the broader public. And they created works of art and literature.