Holodomor (1932-1933): The Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine

The Holodomor was a man-made famine that struck Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933, killing an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people. It was caused by Joseph Stalin’s policies of forced collectivisation and ruthless grain requisitioning, made worse by measures that trapped starving peasants in their villages. Concealed by the Soviet state for more than half a century, it is today one of the central events of modern Ukrainian history and is recognised by Ukraine and many other countries as genocide.

Background: collectivisation and the war on the village

In 1928–1929 Stalin abandoned the New Economic Policy, which had allowed peasants to sell grain on the market. To finance rapid industrialisation under the first Five-Year Plan, the state needed grain for the cities, the army and export.

From late 1929 peasants across the Soviet Union were forced to give up their land and livestock and join collective farms, known as kolkhozy. Wealthier farmers, labelled kulaks, were stripped of their property and many were deported to Siberia, the Urals or Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, where traditions of individual farming and national feeling were strong, resistance was widespread. Peasants slaughtered animals rather than hand them over, and there were hundreds of local revolts in 1930.

Collectivisation disrupted farming everywhere. Harvests fell, while the state continued to demand high procurement quotas and to export grain abroad.

How the famine unfolded

Shortages began in parts of Ukraine in early 1932, but the state kept its demands high. On 7 August 1932 a decree on the protection of socialist property made the theft of collective-farm produce punishable by death or ten years in a labour camp. People caught gleaning a handful of grain from the fields could be prosecuted, and the law became known as the “law of five ears of grain”.

In the autumn of 1932 Moscow sent special commissions, headed by Vyacheslav Molotov in Ukraine and Lazar Kaganovich in the North Caucasus, to enforce grain collection. Brigades of officials and activists searched homes and took not only grain but often all food. Villages that failed to meet their quotas were put on “blacklists”: they were cut off from manufactured goods and could be fined in meat and potatoes.

Two further measures turned shortage into catastrophe. In December 1932 internal passports were introduced, which collective farmers did not receive. Then a directive of 22 January 1933, signed by Stalin and Molotov, ordered that peasants be stopped from leaving Ukraine and the largely Ukrainian-populated Kuban region in search of food. Those caught were sent back.

The height of the famine

Mortality peaked in the spring and early summer of 1933. In some villages most of the population died. People ate grass, bark and pets, and there were documented cases of cannibalism. Orphaned children wandered into towns, and bodies were collected from city streets.

While people starved, the Soviet Union continued to export grain, although in smaller quantities than before. Offers of foreign aid were rejected, since accepting them would have meant admitting that a famine existed. Seed grain was eventually issued for the 1933 sowing, and the harvest that year was better, but deaths continued into the autumn.

At the same time, the regime moved against Ukrainian national life. Decrees of December 1932 ended the policy of “Ukrainisation” outside Ukraine and blamed nationalists for the failed procurements. Communist officials, writers and scholars in Ukraine were purged, and the senior Ukrainian communist Mykola Skrypnyk took his own life in July 1933.

The famine beyond Ukraine

Ukraine was not the only region to suffer. Kazakhstan endured a catastrophic famine in 1930–1933, caused by the forced settlement of nomadic herders and the seizure of their livestock; it killed an estimated 1.5 million people, a higher share of the population than in any other republic. Famine also struck the Volga region, the North Caucasus and parts of western Siberia.

What set Ukraine and the Kuban apart was the combination of measures applied there with particular force: blacklisting of villages, the confiscation of all food rather than grain alone, the closing of borders to starving peasants and the simultaneous attack on Ukrainian cultural and political life. The Kuban, part of Russia but home to a large Ukrainian population, was treated in the same way. These features are at the heart of the argument that the Holodomor was aimed at Ukrainians as a nation, not only at peasants as a class.

Key people

• Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader, whose government set the policies that caused the famine.
• Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, members of the Politburo who led the grain-procurement commissions.
• Stanislav Kosior, head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who enforced Moscow’s orders; he was himself executed in 1939 during the Great Purge.
• Pavel Postyshev, sent to Ukraine in 1933 to tighten party control.
• Gareth Jones, Welsh journalist who reported on the famine after walking through Ukrainian villages in March 1933.

By the numbers

Figures are estimates from demographic studies, since the 1937 Soviet census was suppressed and its organisers arrested.

Denial, silence and recognition

The Soviet government denied that any famine had taken place, and discussing it was forbidden for decades. Some Western journalists in Moscow, most notoriously Walter Duranty of The New York Times, dismissed reports of mass starvation.

Memory was kept alive by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America and Europe, whose survivors published testimonies and organised commemorations from the 1950s onwards. Robert Conquest’s book The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and a United States congressional commission in the 1980s brought wider attention. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness, Soviet Ukrainian authorities acknowledged the famine in 1990.

After independence, Ukraine passed a law in November 2006 declaring the Holodomor a genocide of the Ukrainian people. Since then more than 30 states, including Canada, Australia, Poland and Germany, as well as the United States Senate and the European Parliament (in December 2022), have recognised it as genocide; other governments condemn it as a crime against humanity without using that term. Historians continue to debate whether the famine was planned from the start to destroy Ukrainians as a nation or whether Stalin exploited and deepened a crisis that his policies had created; most agree that the regime knowingly allowed millions to die and targeted Ukraine with particular severity.

Timeline

• 1929, November: Stalin announces the “great turn” towards mass collectivisation.
• 1930, spring: Peasant revolts break out across Ukraine.
• 1932, 7 August: The decree on the protection of socialist property is issued.
• 1932, autumn: Molotov’s commission enforces grain procurement in Ukraine.
• 1932, 27 December: Internal passports are introduced in the Soviet Union.
• 1933, 22 January: Peasants are forbidden to leave Ukraine and the Kuban.
• 1933, spring–summer: Famine deaths reach their peak.
• 2006, 28 November: Ukraine’s parliament recognises the Holodomor as genocide.

Why it matters

The Holodomor shows how state policy, ideology and indifference can turn a harvest shortfall into the death of millions. Its long concealment shaped Soviet and Ukrainian history, and its memory remains central to Ukrainian identity and to wider debates about famine, genocide and historical justice.