1 Hapaina Antonia-Isabella DICHA, year 1 The Holodomor – the Ukrainian Genocide 1. Introduction The Holodomor is one the most tragic events in… [613993]

1 Hapaina Antonia-Isabella DICHA, year 1 The Holodomor – the Ukrainian Genocide 1. Introduction The Holodomor is one the most tragic events in history that occurred because of the inhumane totalitarian policies of the Soviet Union. The term “Holodomor” was coined in the 1980s and has a literal meaning of starvation deliberately generated to cause death1. Also known as the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, the Holodomor represents a genocide that targeted the Ukrainian peasantry and the national intelligentsia. The measures taken by the Soviet Union against these groups aimed to crush the “backbone” of the country, removing any possibility for the Ukrainian nation to resist the communist policies2. The Ukrainian tragedy has been a subject of interest for many experts in this area, while numerous books and articles have been published as a way to reconstruct the narrative of the events leading to the famine, the Holodomor itself and its aftermath. Regarding the genocidal character of the Holodomor, there are two main groups that have opposing viewpoints: those who see the famine as a simple result of natural causes and economic trouble and those who believe that the famine was man-made, with the intention of destroying a part of the Ukrainian population. However, many qualified experts have spoken in favour of the genocidal intent that Stalin had against Ukrainians, taking into consideration the clear proof confirming that the Holodomor was indeed a genocide. The purpose of this paper is to create a step-by-step analysis of the events related to the Holodomor and to gather solid evidence which confirms the hypothesis that the famine can be classified as a genocide. The paper will follow information regarding the background of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Ukraine, the collectivization imposed by Stalin, the actions taken to eliminate the Ukrainian elites, the famine of 1932-1933 and, lastly, the genocidal character of the Holodomor. 1 HREC, “Was the Holodomor a Genocide?”, HREC, accessed May 13, 2020, https://holodomor.ca/resource/was-the-holodomor-a-genocide/. 2 Christian Noack, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford, Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland (London: Anthem Press, 2014), 167.

2 2. Historical and political context In order to understand the true origins of this man-made famine, we should take a look into the past to observe some of the factors that led to Ukraine becoming a victim of malicious Soviet policies. We may ask ourselves: what was the Russian obsession towards Ukraine? Although the latter was clearly a country of its own history, language and culture, Russian imperialists regarded Ukraine as a part of their country. They even believed that the Ukrainian language did not exist, but it was merely a dialect of Russian. As the country was controlled by the Russian government, during the second half of the nineteenth century, all books, newspapers and theatrical or musical performances in Ukrainian were entirely forbidden. However, this attempt at Russification resulted only in an enormous increase in illiteracy for eighty percent of the Ukrainian population. People got accustomed to the name that the colonizers gave them, the “Malorosi” or “Little Russians”3. Besides their unusual attachment to the country, the Russians could never accept to lose influence over Ukraine because of its great agricultural potential and natural resources. The Ukrainian state was considered to be Europe’s “breadbasket”, with eighty percent of the population working in agriculture. To Lenin, the country’s resources, and especially its famous grains, were indispensable4. That is one of the main reasons why he and his successor desperately tried for many years to subjugate the population and exploit the precious resources. After the 1917 revolts and the fall of the tsarist rule, Ukraine expectedly sought to obtain independence and, on 22 January 1918, it was at last declared an independent republic. However, this accomplished dream was soon shattered when the country was forcefully integrated into the USSR in 1921. Under Lenin’s orders, the Bolsheviks arrived with food detachments to take grains from the peasants living in Ukrainian villages5. In the context of the Russian Civil War, all territories claimed by the Soviet Union had to support the Red Army against the White Army. Ukrainian peasants were forced to contribute to the army’s food supply, providing it with various agricultural products. Along with this, the Soviets also took measures against the economy’s capitalist elements, abolishing the market, private enterprises and currency. Taking into consideration the harsh impact of the First World War, all these actions brought an unprecedented economic crisis in Ukraine, 3 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)., 29-30. 4 Alexandra Ilie, “Holodomor, the Ukrainian Holocaust?”, Studia Politica. Romanian Political Science Review 11, no. 1 (2011): pp. 137-154, 144. 5 Ibid., 145.

3 decreasing the grain production to just twenty-five percent of the previous amount before the war. Because of the 1921 Soviet famine, USSR leaders decided to adopt the New Economic Policy (NEP) that demanded a certain tax instead of solid food from farmers. This was a temporary relief for Ukrainians, until the famine situation was overcome and the Soviets introduced nation-wide industrialization and collectivization, as we will see later on at the end of the 1920s6. 3. The collectivization stage At the beginning of 1929, Joseph Stalin introduced nation-wide industrialization and collectivization in Ukraine. His first step was creating a series of collective farms, known as “kolkhoz”, that would collectivize all individual farms, lands, tools and grain excess. The Ukrainian peasants had to support grain production in order to provide food for urban workers who were key actors for accomplishing the Soviet priority of industrialization. While all of their livestock and equipment were collectivized and only a small portion of the total harvest was allocated to them, peasant were forced to farm on the small plots given to them for agriculture7. Although the authorities were supposed to only take the necessary amount for urban industrialization and leave the rest for the farmers, they mercilessly took everything from them. The farmers were robbed not only of their grains, but of all personal valuables, money and anything that the authorities saw useful for their benefit. The result was disastrous: people had nothing to feed themselves with, nor the money to purchase goods. Peasants were overworked to provide grains and they had to resort to eating horsemeat or even dead bodies, leading to serious epidemics in the “kolkhoz”. Even more so, the collective farms proved to be a failed system, because there was a lack of agricultural machinery that was making the work of the farmers much more difficult and ineffective in the long term. The revolting behavior towards the workers, who were being subjected to excessive labour, violence and illegal arrests, also determined most of them to quit performing their job8. 6 Yiwei Cheng, “An Analysis of the Main Causes of the Holodomor,” Constellations 3, no. 2 (September 2012), https://doi.org/10.29173/cons17208, 207. 7 Ibid., 208. 8 Ibid., 208-209.

4 Another negative factor was the misinformation provided by local authorities about the situation in the farms. Most farm officials did not have proper knowledge about agriculture and their reports made Stalin believe that the grain harvest should be much more generous than its real potential. As a result, the overestimation of the collective farms’ productivity led to an increase in the quota set for procurement that was entirely unattainable. Because most farms were not able to deliver the requested harvest, Stalin suspected that some peasants might be hoarding grains. Anyone without authorization that owned more than one “pood” of grain was considered to be an illegal grain trader and was punished accordingly9. 4. Measures of eliminating the Ukrainian elites The only way for Soviets to further diminish the autonomy of Ukraine and remove any possibility of resisting their authority and actions in the country was to annihilate the elites. The elimination actions were organized on two levels: one concentrated against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in urban centres and the other one regarding the wealthier and strong-minded peasants (“dekulakization”). We can say that the destruction of these specific groups was the first step of starting the genocide in Ukraine10. 4.1. The elimination of intellectuals Stalin began taking action against the Ukrainian intellectuals, resuming the attack on the national culture which had ended at beginning of the 1920s. In April 1929, the Soviet Secret Police known as OGPU started bringing accusations against Ukrainian nationalists, organizing a series of public attacks on the most influential national academics. By July, the same year, five thousand members of a supposed underground organization called the “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” were taken under arrest, starting the long series of arrests that were to come11. In 1930, between 9 March and 20 April, the Soviets brought forward a series of false cases against Ukrainian personalities that were alleged members of the secret organization 9 Ibid., 209. 10 Roman Serbyn, The Holodomor: Reflections on the Ukrainian Genocide (The U of M Archives & Special Collections, 2008), 4 11 Conquest., The Harvest, 217.

5 already mentioned. Most of the defendants were former political personalities of different parties, working as scholars, writers, linguists, critics, together with priests, lawyers and even some students. They were charged with accusations of performing activities in the attempt to seize power in Ukraine. Another interesting accusation, directed especially towards linguists, was that they had been conspiring to separate the Ukrainian language from Russian entirely, making it as distinct as it can be12. A year later, important Ukrainian personalities, mainly those who had returned from exile in the mid 1920s, were accused of conspiring inside of an organization supposedly named the “Ukrainian National Centre” and were then arrested. Their leader was thought to be the prominent historian Hrushevsky, who was being helped by the former Premier of the Ukraine in its independence days. There was however no proof of the existence of such organizations mentioned, they merely were fabrications of the Soviet Union to use as excuse to eliminate its enemies. Moreover, there was no public trial and the majority of the accused was sent to penal camps13. Around the same time, the GPU, the secret police, began purging the officers of the Ukrainian Military District, condemning 328 men to death or long-term imprisonment, while eliminating the whole office corps in Ukraine. The GPU believed that the soldiers were being influenced by kulaks, so the purges were a means of preventing their anger at the collectivization, deportation of peasants and countless executions from manifesting through concrete actions14. The fight against the Ukrainian elites meant destroying all figures with great influence on the population. The Orthodox Church was the centre of spirituality in the villages, guiding the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of the peasants. For the atheist Soviet government, religion was the enemy for one reason: it provided people with a different perspective on life than the one promoted by the regime. The fight against religion began on 28 January 1918, with the passing of a decree that forbade religious education in schools, but still leaving people with the possibility to study or teach religion in private. The church land was then confiscated by the Soviet authorities, as well as the property of monasteries which had all been closed. By 1923, the violence against the clergy had reached another level: over a thousand priests and twenty-eight bishops had been executed and many churched had been destroyed15. 12 Ibid., 217-218. 13 Ibid., 218-219. 14 Serbyn, “The Holodomor”, 4. 15 Conquest, The Harvest, 199-201.

6 In 1925, an organization called the League of the Godless was created, with the purpose of helping the Party in its anti-religious propaganda. The League published anti-religious journals, built anti-religious museums and organized anti-religious seminaries, while other organizations such as the Tarde Unions and red Army were spreading the same propaganda among their members. The anti-religious movement became even stronger in 1929, when it was completed forbidden for churches and other religious institutions to organize communal prayer or meetings of religious study, to open libraries or give material and medical aid. The churches were being destroyed, the icons and other sacred objects were being burned and the places of worship were being transformed into clubs16. In 1930, the persecution of the Church and its clergy reached its climax. The GPU forced the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to declare its own liquidation and many of the religious servants and faithful members were oppressed and murdered. Because Stalin’s objective was to destroy the Church and its members in their entirety, we may speak of the destruction of a religious group as a form of genocide in this case, as the Genocide Convention states17. 4.2. The “dekulakization” After the collectivization proved to be a failure, Stalin began organizing what was called the “dekulakization” movement, with the purpose of eliminating those “kulaks” and speculators who were thought to defy the Soviet Union’s plan by hiding grains for themselves18. But who exactly were the “kulaks”? This term defined those wealthy peasants that generally owned a relatively large farm and several animals, while employing hired labour and leasing land. Prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917, the kulaks played an important role in the village, providing mortgages, lending money and managing social and administrative affairs in the community. The Soviets regarded kulaks as capitalists and implicitly enemies of socialism, but because they sought to increase agricultural production, they ended up helping the peasants become even more prosperous. Once they became richer, the kulaks’ position in the village was strengthened and often rivaled the authority of Soviet officials in the villages19. 16 Ibid., 202-203. 17 Serbyn, “The Holodomor”, 5. 18 Cheng, “An Analysis”, 207. 19 Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, “Kulak | Russian Peasant Class”, Encyclopædia Britannica (February 22, 2016), https://www.britannica.com/topic/kulak, accessed May 16, 2020.

7 The worst aspect was that the definition of “kulak” changed rapidly in the view of the Soviet government. If at first it represented the very small category of rich peasants, it soon became synonymous with every person in Ukraine who was opposing collectivization, being labeled as a class enemy: “Anyone who expressed discontent was a kulak. Peasant families that had never used hired labor were put down as kulaks. A household that had two cows, a cow and a calf or a pair of horses was considered kulak. Villages that refused to give up excess grain or expose kulaks were raided by punitive detachments. So peasants had special meetings to decide who was going to be a kulak […] To spare the children they usually chose childless bachelors.”20. Because it was illogical that peasants who did not employ hired labour or did not rent land could oppose collectivization, the Soviets decided to invent a new term. “Podkulachniki” defined a type of kulak agents, people that had a kulak relative, employer, friend or even neighbour. Therefore, every type of peasant, rich or poor, could be considered a kulak21. While Stalin declared his intention of liquidating the kulaks as a class on 27 December 1929, the official Party ruling of dekulakization happened on 30 January 1930, with the approval of a resolution called “On Measures for the Elimination of Kulak Households in Districts of Comprehensive Collectivization”. The first step was to confiscate all valuables from kulak households. But because the grain quota was so high and authorities had been taking everything they could from the peasants, most kulaks did not even fit in the category anymore. They were poor by now and even the deportation costs were larger than the value of goods confiscated from them22. The Soviet plan for dekulakization constituted of three categories or groups of kulaks that would be punished according to their level of defiance towards the regime. The first group was represented by the heads of the kulak families, many of which had fought as soldiers in the White Armies. They fate was either imprisonment or execution. Some of them were taken away and kept in prison for several months before being sent to camps. At the beginning, their families were left in peace, but then it was decided that the relatives would form the second group to eliminate, which would be sent to remote areas in the North, Siberia, the Urals or Kazakhstan. The kulak groups that were considered loyal were not spared either, but their punishment was less severe, if we can say that. They were partly expropriated and taken out of the collective farms and sent in other areas to work, for example in forestry, roads or land 20 Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (Toronto: Signal, 2018), 86. 21 Ibid., 87. 22 Conquest, The Harvest, 117-118.

8 improvement. The most “dangerous” kulaks were sent to concentration camps in distant areas, where they had no power to conspire against the Soviet Union’s plan23. The estimated number of deported peasants is somewhere between nine and twelve million. The dekulakization movement took the lives of around six and a half million people, with half of this number dying by 1935 and the rest surviving for a few more years in the deportation camps before perishing24. However, this is nowhere near the total number of lives taken by the famine, as we will see later on. 5. The famine of 1932-1933 By 1931, Stalin’s Five Year Plan for collectivization had proved to be a failed one. The grain harvest was now even smaller than the one from last year, and the Soviets were not able to meet the proposed export quotas. There were grain shortages not only in the countryside but also in the cities, as well as a lack of other food sources such as meat and vegetables, all caused by the reckless collectivization measures. Stalin was aware that his collective farms had failed and there was no other way to recover the losses. His image and reputation along with the ones of the Soviet Union were too closely tied with this failure, so the only way to escape humiliation was to find a scapegoat. When the policies malfunctioned, there was nothing left to do but blame the peasants and Ukrainian authorities for sabotage. They Soviets once again found the “guilty” party, a “saboteur counter-revolutionary organization” called the Peasants Labour Party of Podolia. They arrested and eliminated all its sixteen members, who were agronomists. The trial was intensively portrayed in the Soviet press and Stalin managed to avoid taking responsibility25. Although the Soviet Union found someone else to blame for the situation, that still did not solve the issue of insufficient harvest. Ukrainian communists held a meeting in December 1931 and agreed to collect 8.3 million tonnes of grain, although nobody believed it was possible. They assigned one party leader in charge of six collection districts, to ensure that the operation would go smoothly. In 1932, the officials desperately started to collect grain, 23 Ibid., 120-122. 24 Ibid., 305-306. 25 Applebaum, Red Famine, 111-112.

9 ravaging the houses of poor peasants in search of any small amount of harvest they might find, leaving people to die of starvation26. Because private farmers and collective farms could not meet to grain quota, Stalin decided to make them pay in another way. After taking away their seed reserves, he forced them to pay a meat and potato penalty from collectivized and personal livestock. Meat and vegetables had been the only source of food for Ukrainian peasants in the last years, as the grain harvest was insufficient due to collectivization and unfavourable weather conditions. This meant that there was no other way for farmers to sustain themselves and their families. Although Stalin knew that, in 1933 he exported around 5400 tonnes of butter and more that 1000 tonnes of bacon confiscated form Ukrainian peasants, along with eggs, poultry, apples, nuts, honey and other foods taken from the poor27. In 1923, Stalin reintroduced the blacklist system, which had been previously used in the civil war. In short, this system placed the names of successful workers on red boards, while those who did not fulfil their job correctly were written on black boards. This time, the Soviet Union blacklisted many collective farms, cooperatives and even entire villages that were unable to fulfil the grain requisition requirement. The names found on the blacklists were then published in the newspapers. The blacklisted villages were punished severely: people were fired from their jobs in local factories, while their tractors, animals, seed stock and garden plots were all confiscated. They had to repay their loans early, some people’s bank accounts were closed and they were forced to pay collective debts, they were prohibited to mill grain so they could make flour for bread and they had to perform their work manually28. The peasants now had nothing to eat. To make the situation worse, on August 7, 1932, the Soviet ruling committee elaborated the Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property, in the attempt of preventing any form of theft in the collective farms and punishing the peasants who dared to steal from their “sacred” property. The decree was also known as the Law of Spikelets, referring to those minuscule end parts of grain that remained in the fields after a harvest. They made it a crime to even take these insignificant parts and the penalty for such a crime was execution or between five to ten years in prison. Around 11000 people died as a result of this unbelievable law29. 26 Ibid., 113. 27 Ibid., 127-128. 28 Ibid., 128-130. 29 Philip Wolny, Holodomor: the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide (New York: Rosen YA, 2018), 28.

10 Because of the famine, hundreds of thousands of starving Ukrainians tried to escape to other areas of the country in search of food. Soviet authorities intervened quickly and introduced internal passports that restricted the people’s freedom of movement within Ukraine. People were also forbidden to move outside the country and anybody who was found after escaping their own village was forcefully deported back to where they came from, which was essentially a death sentence. While people were not allowed to leave elsewhere, there was also a restriction that prevented outsiders from coming to areas affected by the famine. Anyone who tried to bring food or other materials to the villages was turned away and sometimes deprived of everything they had with them. Because peasants were seeking help in the urban areas, the secret police and military built roadblocks at the entrances to big towns and cities30. The situation in Ukraine soon resembled an apocalyptic scenario: starving people were trying to survive by eating anything they could find from wild animals to insects and even grass, but this ended up giving them deadly diseases. Shockingly enough, there were even some reports of cannibalism after all food sources were gone, with at least 2500 people sentenced to jail for this behaviour between 1932 and 193331. With no possibility to escape the famine and no one who was willing to help, Ukrainians were simply waiting for imminent death. This famine-genocide was one of the most horrific events in human history, having devastating consequences and leaving a mark on the memory of Ukraine that can never be erased. Although it is impossible to give exact numbers, it is estimated that victims who lost the lives accounted to around 14.5 million people, dying either as a result of deportation, execution or starvation32. 6. The genocidal character of the Holodomor There have been many debates about whether or not the Holodomor can be considered a genocide. As mentioned before, there are two perspectives: the first belonging to people who believe that the famine was indeed a genocide organized to eliminate the peasantry and intellectuals, and the second one shared by those who find the famine to be the result of failed policies and worsened by economic trouble. In order to reach a conclusion on this issue, the first step should be to look into the basic definition of a genocide. According to the UN Genocide Convention, “any of the 30 Ibid., 30-31. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 Conquest, The Harvest, 306.

11 following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” can be considered a genocide: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”33. Of these five defining points, the Holodomor can be characterized by the first three. First of all, the radical measures taken against the Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals were meant to eradicate these groups: people were murdered either directly by the authorities, left to die of hunger in their villages or perished as a result of the harsh conditions during the mass deportations. Evidently, this constitutes proof for the second point as well, regarding the bodily and mental harm inflicted on the group. Not only were they tortured and killed, but the Ukrainians were also attacked mentally and spiritually, through isolation, fear and destruction of their culture and spiritual life guided by the Church. Lastly, the Stalinist regime deliberately worsened the conditions of life of the Ukrainians in order to eliminate the “enemies”, by increasing the grain quotas to an impossible rate and preventing the peasants from escaping hunger in any imaginable way. In a speech delivered in 1953, Raphael Lemkin, the creator of the UN Genocide Convention, acknowledged that the Holodomor was undoubtedly a genocide. He considered the actions taken by Stalin against Ukrainians “the classic example of Soviet genocide”. Lemkin also understood the Ukrainian genocide as having multiple components: the man-made famine, the measures of eliminating the Ukrainian elites, the liquidation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the “government-directed settlement of Ukraine’s farmlands by non-Ukrainians”34. In 1985, a US Commission conducted a study of the 1932-1933 Ukrainian Famine that aimed to spread knowledge on the Holodomor and a better understanding of the Soviet system. After finishing the study, the Commission delivered its findings to the US Congress in April 1988. This was a crucial step in the international acknowledgement of the event and in highlighting the true causes behind the famine. The list of findings encompassed multiple points, of which the most notable are: “There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine 33 Ilie, “Holodomor”, 139. 34 HREC, “Was the Holodomor a Genocide?”.

12 in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.”; “The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.”; “Official Soviet allegations of ‘kulak sabotage,’ upon which all ‘difficulties’ were blamed during the Famine, are false.”; “The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.”; “Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.”; “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.”35. The famine-genocide of 1932-1933 had been only a painful memory in the minds of Ukrainians until it became officially recognized during the presidency of Leonid Kravchuk, the first leading figure of independent Ukraine. In 1993, on the 60th anniversary of the Holodomor, President Kravchuk issued a decree regarding the organization of the commemorative “Days of Sorrow”, which represented the basis of the ideological exploration of the famine. Entitled “On measures connected to the 60th anniversary of the Holodomor in Ukraine”, the document revealed the key term “Holodomor”, which would be used not only as a metaphor from now on, but as an academic, political and juridical concept that would shape the interpretation of the 1932-1933 famine. The decree also marked the first step towards the internationalization of the Holodomor. The President instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to address UNESCO on the issue and request it to mark the event into its calendar. Moreover, in the organisation committee for the “Days of Sorrow”, along numerous representatives from the Ukrainian diaspora, two important foreign scholars were also present: American scholar James Mace and his British companion Robert Conquest, whose book on the Holodomor would become one of the most valuable works on the subject36. In the first half of the 2000s, the Holodomor started to receive even more attention, becoming a subject of interest for many politicians and authorities. With the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the famine and the remembrance of other historical events, 2003 was declared the Year of Russia in Ukraine, to underline the long-lasting persecution of the Ukrainians at the hands of the Soviet Union. On 14 May, the same year, after a parliamentary hearing, the Verkhovna Rada passed the “Declaration to the Ukrainian people” which named the 1932-1933 famine a genocide: “We consider that in independent Ukraine the terrible truth about these years must be released by the state, in so far as the Holodomor of 1932-33 was consciously organized by the Stalinist regime and must be publicly condemned by Ukrainian 35 Report to Congress / Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Washington: U.S. Government Print. Office, 1988) quoted in HREC Education, “Findings of the US Commission,” HREC Education, accessed June 9, 2020, https://education.holodomor.ca/teaching-materials/us-commission/. 36 Noack, Janssen, and Comerford, Holodomor, 169-170.

13 society and the international community as one of the manifestations of genocide in world history, and as one with the highest number of victims.”37 The fight for the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide in the international community became stronger during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. The president struggled to bring to create a general understanding of the genocidal character of the famine and an acceptance of the fact that Ukraine had been subject to one of the most catastrophic genocides in human history. Under his rule, a symbol for the existence of such a genocide – the National Memory Institute – was created. In 2007, Yushchenko also launched an unprecedented ideological and political campaign named “Ukraine remembers, the world acknowledges”, that targeted the national and international audiences. On the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, a committee of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was created with the aim to organize diplomatic missions that would spread knowledge about the Famine. As a result, 13 countries recognized the Holodomor as a genocide. However, these efforts proved insufficient to realize the same achievements on the level of international organizations. Between 2007-2008, UNESCO, the European Parliament and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly acknowledged the Holodomor as a tragic event in the history of Ukraine, but never as a genocide38. Despite not being acknowledged by all states and international organizations, the Holodomor was not a simple result of failed policies, but an intentionally provoked event that took an unimaginable number of lives. The proof of its genocidal character lies in the many measures taken by the Soviet Union against the Ukrainians: the intentional deprivation of the peasants from all food sources, restricting people’s ability to search for food in other areas, the elimination of kulaks or “dekulakization”, the destruction of Ukrainian intellectuals, the refusal to give aid to the starving or permit external parties to intervene. 7. Conclusions The Holodomor is one the most destructive man-made famines in human history, having left a deep mark on Ukraine’s memory that can never be erased. The astonishing number of lives that have been taken during the famine, which we may never know exactly, was the 37 Ibid., 174-175. 38 Ibid., 177-183.

14 worst consequence of the Holodomor but not the only one. The long-lasting Soviet persecution degraded the national identity of the Ukrainian nation, tarnished its culture, traditions and beliefs, took its dignity and broke its spirit in a way that will be felt for centuries. Although the world has yet to recognize entirely that this event was a true genocide, the Holodomor’s genocidal character is undeniable because of the intentionality of the fatal measures taken by the Soviet Union. There is no acceptable justification for the actions taken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Ukraine, no simple mistake or external factor that could have led to the horror that Ukraine went through. Only a carefully made plan and an intention to destroy could have held Ukraine captive in such a way that it could not escape the famine by any means. If we are capable of acknowledging other tragedies caused by the totalitarian ideologies in the past, we should not turn our eyes away from the Ukrainian Holodomor, which is “no less tragic than the Holocaust”39. 39 Noack, Janssen, and Comerford, Holodomor, 167.

15 Bibliography 1. Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. Toronto: Signal, 2018. 2. Cheng, Yiwei. “An Analysis of the Main Causes of the Holodomor.” Constellations 3, no. 2 (September 2012): 207–214. https://doi.org/10.29173/cons17208. 3. Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 4. Graziosi, Andrea. "The Soviet 1931-1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?". Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27, no. 1 (2004): 97-115. 5. HREC Education. “Findings of the US Commission.” HREC Education. Accessed June 9, 2020. https://education.holodomor.ca/teaching-materials/us-commission/. 6. HREC. “Was the Holodomor a Genocide?” HREC. Accessed May 20, 2020. https://holodomor.ca/resource/was-the-holodomor-a-genocide/. 7. Ilie, Alexandra. “Holodomor, the Ukrainian Holocaust?”. Studia Politica. Romanian Political Science Review 11, no. 1 (2011): 137-154. 8. Noack, Christian, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford. Holodomor and Gorta Mór: Histories, Memories and Representations of Famine in Ukraine and Ireland. London: Anthem Press, 2014. 9. Report to Congress / Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Washington: U.S. Government Print. Office, 1988. 10. Serbyn, Roman. The Holodomor: Reflections on the Ukrainian Genocide. The U of M Archives & Special Collections, 2008. 11. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Kulak.” Encyclopædia Britannica. February 22, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/kulak. 12. Wolny, Philip. Holodomor: the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide. New York: Rosen YA, 2018.