Holodomor

Holodomor
Голодомор
Holodomor; Голодомор
	Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933, Ukraine's capital at the time
Country	Soviet Union
Location	Ukraine SSR, northern Kuban, Kazakh ASSR
Period	1932–1933
Total deaths	Around 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine; see death toll; 62,000 to "hundreds of thousands" in the Kuban; Over 300,000 Ukrainians in Kazakhstan dead or migrated;
Causes	Industrialization policy during the First Five Year Plan; Whether it was intentional is debated by scholars;
Relief	Foreign relief rejected by the state. 176,200 and 325,000 tons of grains provided by the state as food and seed aids between February and July 1933.
Consequences	Heavy population loss in Ukraine; Kuban Ukrainian population declined from 915,000 to 150,000 between 1926 and 1939 from various causes; Over 35% of Ukrainians in Kazakhstan lost in the famine;

The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.

Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR in 1930. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million people died. More recent scholarship has estimated a lower range of between 3.5 to 5 million victims.

Public discussion of the famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament, and 35 of the 50 states of the United States as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".