Holodomor: How Stalin’s man-made famine starved millions of Ukrainians to death

08/07/2024 / By Kevin Hughes

It has been nearly a hundred years since the dreaded Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s man-made famine in Ukraine that killed millions of people.

Also known as the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor – a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death” – by one estimate claimed the lives of over 3.9 million people, mostly in Ukraine. That was about 13 percent of the population of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a part of the Soviet Union at the time.

The historical assessment of the Holodomor is clear. This preventable disaster was caused by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his desire both to replace Ukraine’s class of small, land-owning farmers with state-run collectives and to punish the perceived threat Ukrainians had over Stalin’s authority and their desire to break away from the Soviet Union. (Related: Think engineered famine could never happen? Learn the story of the HOLODOMOR as history repeats itself.)

“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of the 2018 book, “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.”

De Waal described the Holodomor as “a hybrid … of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”

The lead-up to the Holodomor began in 1929 when, as part of his plan to quickly turn the Soviet Union’s economy into one more in line with his communist ideals, enforced collectivization practices, replacing individually owned and operated farms with larger, state-run collectives. Ukraine, at the time, was run mainly by subsistence farmers who owned their land and were opposed to giving it up.

Holodomor was a “classic example” of genocide

Experts consider Holodomor as a “classic example” of genocide, as defined by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who was one of the first to provide proper definitions for the term after testifying to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Millions of people in Ukraine died by starvation over two years of man-made famine, which irreversibly scarred the structure of Ukrainian society for decades.

The attempt to suppress Ukraine with a scheme to fuel growing industrial centers in Russia led to mass starvation, disease and cannibalism. Some of the darkest moments of the Holodomor featured children looking on as their siblings perished in their homes, with their remains being devoured by rats as those still alive in the household became too weak to bury the deceased. There were also reports of cannibalism, with parents being forced to eat the corpses of their children due to extreme hunger.

The true extent of the Holodomor went largely unnoticed, concealed in a deliberate campaign of propaganda, revised reporting and historical revisionism by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died,” wrote historian Timothy Snyder.

Watch the video below to know more about the Holodomor – Stalin’s secret genocide.

This video is from the Hostile Takeover channel on Brighteon.com.