Holodomor

To overcome the resistance of Ukrainian peasants Stalin decided to use new weapon – hunger. Twenty-five percent of Ukraine's population was exterminated in what is known as the Holodomor or Ukrainian Holocaust. The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR as well as the Moldavian ASSR (a part of the Ukrainian S.S.R. at the time) between 1932 and 1933. Some scholars view the famine as a consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization However it has been suggested by other historians that the famine was an attack on Ukrainian nationalism engineered by Soviet leadership of the time and thus may fall under the legal definition of genocide. By the end of 1933, millions of people had starved to death or had otherwise died unnaturally in Ukraine, as well as in other Soviet republics. The total estimate of the famine victims Soviet-wide is given as 6-7 million. Modern calculation that uses demographic data including that available from recently opened Soviet archives narrows the losses to about 3.2 million or. According to estimates about 81.3% of the famine victims in Ukrainian SRR were ethnic Ukrainians, 4.5% Russians, 1.4% Jews. The Ukrainian rural population was the hardest hit by the Holodomor. Since the peasantry constituted a demographic backbone of the Ukrainian nation, the tragedy deeply affected the Ukrainians for many years.

These Soviet documents suggest that the Soviet regime singled out Ukraine by not giving it the same humanitarian aid given to regions outside it. Professor Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam concludes that, according to a relaxed definition of the term, the famine of 1932-33 may constitute genocide. He bases this on the actions (two of commission and one of omission: exporting grain - 1.8 million tonnes - during the mass starvation, preventing migration from famine afflicted areas and making no effort to secure grain assistance from abroad) and the attitude (that many of those starving to death were "counterrevolutionaries," "idlers" or "thieves" who fully deserved their fate) of the Stalinist regime in 1932-33.

The times of industrialisation and collectivisation also brought about a wide campaign against "nationalist deviation" which in Ukraine translated into an assault on the national political and cultural elite. The first wave of purges between 1929 and 1934 targeted the revolutionary generation of the party that in Ukraine included many supporters of Ukrainization. The next 1936-1938 wave of political purges eliminated much of the new political generation that replaced those that perished in the first wave and halved the membership of the Ukrainian communist party. The purged Ukrainian political leadership was largely replaced by the cadre send from Russia that was also largely "rotated" by Stalin's purges. As the policies of Ukrainisation were halted (1931) and replaced by massive Russification approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite, intellectuals, writers, artists and clergy, had been "eliminated", executed or imprisoned, in the following decade. Mass arrests of the hierarchy and clergy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930. In 1939 as a result of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Western-Ukraine was united to Ukraine and sovietized, which lead to massive terror and several deportations.

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