On November 30, the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, recognizing the devastating period of 1930s famine known as the as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Between 1931 and 1934, at least of hunger in Ukraine, Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union as Josef Stalin attempted to collectivize agriculture. Production plummeted. Conditions became so dire that people died in the streets. Some of the starving .
Ukraine recognized the Holodomor as genocide in 2006. Since then, sixteen other countries have followed suit, including the United States. Argentina, Chile and Spain have declared it an “an act of extermination,” according to the in Kyiv.
Responding to the , Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova the Holodomor was caused by events beyond Soviet authorities’ control:
That is false. In fact, the overwhelming among scholars is that the famine resulted from and brutal oppression of the peasant population. The word derives from the Ukrainian (starvation) and (extermination).
In 1929, the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin launched – the forced integration of individual land holdings and labor into state-controlled collective and state farms. The policy required farmers to rent their land, personal property and housing .
Wealthy and dissenting peasants were sentenced to long terms of hard labor or executed. Some were deported to Siberia. , shortages emerged and the peasants rebelled, sometimes violently.
As noted by the , which is maintained by a team of scholars and editors from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (), the resistance to Soviet collectivization was particularly strong in Ukraine:
Ukraine, as the center of , was known as the . Peasants in Ukraine were and didn’t want to give their property to the state. Also, many farmers had supported in efforts to create an independent Ukrainian state in 1917–1920, in resistance to the Bolsheviks who had engineered the communist revolution in Russia.
Under collectivization, farmers in the Soviet Union had to fulfill . The communist government used this grain to feed the country’s growing urban population and to finance the purchase of equipment from abroad, as part of the Soviet industrialization program.
In 1930, for example, 22.3 million tons of grain were harvested in Ukraine. The state took 35 percent of the total – 7.7 million tons of grain. In 1931, Ukraine harvested 13.8 tons of grain, of which the state took , or 53 percent of the total.
The small amount of grain that the state left for the farmers .
On December 28, 1931, Karl Karlson, vice chairman of the GPU (secret police) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), :
According to Bohdan Klid, at Canada’s Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, Ukraine’s food by the Soviet authorities’ confiscatory measures and unrealistically high grain quotas.
Stalin :
In 1932, Ukrainian farmers again failed to meet the quotas. In response, authorities stepped up their , seizing even seeds, meat and potatoes. Special teams the houses to confiscate grain and other foodstuffs.
On August 7, 1932, the known as the “,” under which the theft of even a few stalks of grain became an act of sabotage, by firing squad. The entire harvest was declared “equivalent to state property.” To protect it, soldiers were placed on watchtowers so that no one could take even five spikelets.
Starving rural inhabitants , but the government issued a decree it. Thousands who managed to get away were detained and sent back. This meant they were effectively sentenced to death through .
In the early spring of 1933, British journalist was able to travel from Moscow to Ukraine, even though Western journalists were forbidden from traveling outside the capital. Jones spent two weeks of the famine in Ukraine and published in the Manchester Guardian on March 29, 1933:
For more than half a century, had occurred. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the archives of the Soviet Communist Party secret police and government confirmed that deliberate actions were to blame.
According to an account in by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, Ukrainian researchers determined that the overall death toll included 3.9 million Ukrainians, with mass graves dug in the countryside and corpses lining the streets of cities. But there was more:
Contemporary Russia maintains the Holodomor of Ukraine because it was “a severe famine broke out in the Soviet Union” in 1932-1933, that killed many nationalities.
Zakharova's unsupported claim that the West demanded grain for payment is a stretch, based on the on grain exports during the famine: