Holodomor genocide question

[12] While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made,[a] the topic remains a significant issue in modern politics with historians disputing whether Soviet policies would fall under the legal definition of genocide.

Lemkin stated that it consisted of four steps:[24][25][26] In 1986, British historian Robert Conquest published The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine, dealing with the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union under Stalin's direction in 1929–1931 and the resulting famine, in which millions of peasants died due to starvation, deportation to labor camps, and execution.

Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.Mace, staff director for the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, compiled a 1988 Report to Congress, he stated that, based on anecdotal evidence, the Soviets had purposely prevented Ukrainians from leaving famine-struck regions; this was later confirmed by the discovery of Stalin's January 1933 secret decree "Preventing the Mass Exodus of Peasants who are Starving", restricting travel by peasants after "in the Kuban and Ukraine a massive outflow of peasants 'for bread' has begun", that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power.

Among proof he cited a letter written by Stalin to Lazar Kaganovich on 11 September 1932, shortly before Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov were appointed heads of special commissions to oversee the grain procurements in Ukraine and Kuban (a region considered to be populated primarily by ethnic Ukrainians at the time), in which Stalin urged Kaghanovich to force Ukraine into absolute compliance.

[36] Historian John Archibald Getty wrote a critique of The Harvest of Sorrow and of Robert Conquest's claim that the famine constituted a genocide.

While Getty writes that the conclusion of genocide requires a highly stretched interpretation of the evidence, he also states that Stalin was nonetheless the entity most responsible for the disaster.

[37] Getty calls into question the estimate of the death toll at around five million Ukrainians presented in The Harvest of Sorrow as being much too high, citing much lower demographic estimates from Stephen Wheatcroft, Barbara Anderson, and Brian Silver, and notes that the severity of the famine varied greatly between local regions of Ukraine.

Moreover, even Stalin's own plans during this time period were frequently unclear and subject to constant change, furthering confusion among the lower bureaucracy and the peasantry.

Getty believes these delays stemmed from Stalin's intense distrust even of his own advisors rather than a calculated, deliberate effort to prolong the crises.

[37] Mark Tauger, professor of history at West Virginia University,[38] stated that the 1932 harvest was 30–40% smaller than recorded in official statistics.

[39] He stated that it is difficult to accept the famine "as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide" but that "the regime was still responsible for the deprivation and suffering of the Soviet population in the early 1930s", and "if anything, these data show that the effects of [collectivization and forced industrialization] were worse than has been assumed.

"[43] While they disagree on the exact tonnage of the harvest, they reach a similar conclusion as Tauger in their book's most recent edition and state that "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions [...] obvious fact that the famine was also to a considerable extent a result of the previous actions of Stalin and the Soviet leadership",[44] and "in our own work we, like V.P.

Marples criticized Tauger and other scholars for failing "to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine", commenting that people died in the millions in Ukraine but not in Russia because "the 'massive program of rationing and relief' was selective.

In his work, Graziosi noted that collectivization, which would give the Soviet government control over agricultural resources in Ukraine and force the farmers to give up their property to the state, was met with resistance, which, combined with the history of resistance from earlier years, prompted Stalin to view Ukraine as a threat to the Soviet rule.

It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.

This complies with Raphael Lemkin's older concept of genocide, which included cultural destruction as an aspect of the crime, such as that of North American Indians and Australian Aborigines.

[16][c] In addition while Wheatcroft rejects the genocide characterization of the famine, he states that "the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainisation.

"[44] According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, the Holodomor matches the legal definitions of a genocide.

[49] Nancy Qian notes in a lecture about the paper that the statistics are entirely consistent "with a model of ethnic bias and mass killing" for the famine presented by other authors.

[54] He criticizes scholars' approach to study the history of the USSR with a "standard toolbox", which in his opinion does not work in the case of a country whose system does not follow basic principles of a natural historical process and evolution and was born out of Vladimir Lenin's conception of Ukraine.

[59][60] Kulchytsky also criticized Davies and Wheatcroft for the statement that procurements "were allocated among the republics, provinces, and districts with particular assignments for state farms, collective farms, and individual farmers" without adding any further information; he questioned why Ukraine produced more grain in 1930 than the Central Black Earth Oblast, Middle and Lower Volga and North Caucasus regions all together, which had never been done before, and on average gave 4.7 quintals (470 kg) of grain from every sown hectare to the state – "a record-breaking index of marketability", – but was unable to fulfill the grain quota for 1930 until May 1931.

He also cites several measures taken by the Soviet government that, although ineffective, provide evidence against the intentionalist thesis, such as nine occasions of curtailing grain exports from different famine-stricken regions and clandestinely purchasing foreign aid to help alleviate the famine.

He goes on to suggest that the prioritisation of military food stockpiles over the peasantry was likely motivated by Stalin's paranoia about what he believed to be an impending war with Japan and/or Poland rather than a desire to deliberately starve Ukrainians to death.

They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late.

[63] Professor of history Timothy Snyder stated that the starvation was "deliberate"[64] and that several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine.

In his 2010 book Bloodlands, Snyder stated:[65] In the waning weeks of 1932, facing no external security threat and no challenge from within, with no conceivable justification except to prove the inevitability of his rule, Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. ...

He states that "although on moral grounds one form of mass killing is as reprehensible as another", for social scientists and historians "there is utility in restricting the term 'genocide' to what might more accurately be referred to as 'ethnocide,' that is, the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group."

"[67] Suny states that "Stalin's intentions and actions during the Ukrainian famine, no matter what sensationalist claims are made by nationalists and anti-Communists, were not the extermination of the Ukrainian people", and "a different set of explanations is required" for the Holodomor as well as for the Great Purges, the Gulag, and the Soviet ethnic cleansings of minority ethnic groups.

According to Kondrashin, in some aspects, conditions for peasants were actually even worse and oppressive laws concerning agriculture even harsher in the Russian regions of the Kuban and Lower Volga, making the genocide thesis untenable in his view.

[73] Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has run campaigns and lobbied the United Nations and the Council of Europe to recognise the Holodomor as a genocide internationally.