In these days when every comment about Ukraine can see one black-listed by someone, I find myself having to preface this article by saying that I am no apologist for either President Putin or for Joe Stalin. However, having tried for the past year to re-write the present with the ghost of Kiev, the Auschwitz style gold teeth and other spoofs, Ukraine is now trying the most monstrous rewrite of history, a claim that the Holodomor was an act of Russian genocide. The clear implication is that Russians like genocide against Ukrainians. The tweet below sets the case.
The Germans have apparently picked up on this and recognised the Holodomor as an act of Genocide. You would have thought that the Germans would have enough historic expertise in this area to have adopted a more rigorous critique.
Wikipedia says that Holodomor was a man-made famine that hit the Ukraine in 1932-33. It killed as many as three million Ukrainians. Whereas the Germans were very good at record keeping, the Soviets were not so we will never know the exact numbers. The first point to note is that the famine was not 100% man made. There is a long history of famines in the lands covered by the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and they have largely been driven by God not man although corrupt and incompetent governance pre and post 1917 never helped.
In the case of the Holodomor both droughts and in Kazakhstan severe cold meant that harvests in 1931 and 1932 were poor. A poor harvest one year means less seed crop the next year. Two years of poor harvests on the trot and you are in trouble.
Man then doubled down on God’s work as Stalin’s command economy pressed for rapid industrialisation in the Cities. This sucked in labour from the countryside and to support that Stalin seized wheat from the big corn growing areas and especially from the kulaks, land owning peasants who he regarded as bourgeois and thus a class that should be liquidated.
Ukraine produces a lot of wheat and so it suffered and that is the Holodomor but it was not alone. Estimates suggest that between 3.3 and 3.9 million died in Ukraine, between 2 and 3 million died in Russia, and 1.5–2 million died in Kazakhstan. The poor Kazakhs had suffered another famine a decade earlier and with another 1 million fleeing Kazakhstan. This saw Kazakhstan lose more than half of its population within 15 years. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in their own republic. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic’s population were Kazakhs; after the famine, only around 38% of the population were Kazakhs.
But let us not quibble about numbers. They are clearly horrific and the stories that emerge from those times of cannibalism and other horrors just do not bear thinking about. These are the events that George Orwell notes, in the introductionto Animal Farm that left wing teachers ensure their students do not read, the bien pensants of the London liberal elite did their utmost to ensure were not discussed and cold shouldered those like Orwell who had understandable reservations about the Soviet regime. Those events were awful. We can agree on that.
However, the Ukrainians are saying that those who died in Ukraine died as a result of a deliberate drive by Russians to kill Ukrainians. The facts do not bear this out. Stalin made a bad situation worse for Ukrainians, Kazakhs and also for Russians. He did not distinguish between a Russian Kulak and a Ukrainian one. He did not care whether it was a Kazakh village or a Ukrainian village that had its wheat stolen to feed factory workers in Moscow or Kiev (yes Kiev, it was being industrialised too), and so starved.
One can accuse Stalin of effective mass murder and can very legitimately accuse him of wiping out a class, the kulaks. But this is clearly not genocide, a policy directly aiming to wipe out one race. Stalin’s policies in the famine years, the era of Holodomor, killed almost as many Russians as Ukrainians and far more subjects of the FSU (excluding Ukraine) than Ukranians.
My father’s best friend was a Hungarian Jew who was sheltered in a barn during the War so escaped the holocaust but in 1956 picked up a machine gun to fight the Russians. Read “Streets” by Janos Nyiri and you might understand why Janos hated Stalinism or Communism as much as he hated Nazism. I would not argue with Janos with his direct experience of both. I understand why he hated Stalin and what he did and that gives me good reason not to apologise for Stalin but to hate him too.
So I make no excuses for anything Stalin did but saying that the Holodomor was a direct attempt by Russia to kill Ukrainians, genocide, is just not born out by the facts.
But I guess facts do not matter in 2022. Ukrainian missiles kill Poles and it is okay to say they were Russian and try to start World War Three. If Russia is invading it is because it wants to double down on its 1933 genocide. Just accept it is real and please send more weapons so more folks can get killed and more money to end up in Swiss bank accounts. And if you disagree you are an apologist for Putin. Or Stalin. Or both.