Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 3 ·
Holodomor and the Soviet famines
Chapter 3 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “The Famines”
Between 1930 and 1933 Soviet policy turned a crisis into famines in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Kuban and the Volga, with an estimated 5.5 to 8.7 million dead across the Union. In Kazakhstan forced settlement destroyed the nomads’ herds; in Ukraine and elsewhere Moscow kept grain quotas high after poor harvests.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, winter 1932–33 — The famine at its height; Hitler in power.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Soviet state turned a crisis of its own making into the deadliest famines in Europe’s peacetime history between 1930 and 1933, and the hatched regions on the map show where they struck. In Kazakhstan the famine began first, because the campaign to settle nomadic herders on collective farms destroyed the herds they lived on. Collective farms were state-run farms that pooled the villagers’ land and animals and paid them only from what was left after the state’s share, much as a sharecropper keeps what remains after the landlord’s cut. In Ukraine, the Kuban region of the North Caucasus and the Volga, it followed from grain quotas, fixed amounts each collective farm had to hand over, much like a tax paid in kind, which Moscow kept high after the harvests of 1931 and 1932 fell. Estimates of the dead run from about 5.5 to 8.7 million across the Union. They include roughly 3.5 to 5 million in Soviet Ukraine, where the famine is called the Holodomor, “death by hunger”, and 1.5 to 2.3 million in Kazakhstan, where perhaps two in five Kazakhs died. In every region the famine followed from decisions about how much to take, which is why historians treat it as man-made.
Historians agree that policy caused the famines; they disagree about intent. In late 1932 and early 1933 the regime took measures that fell hardest on Ukraine and the Kuban. Villages that missed quotas were blacklisted and cut off from all goods, a decree of December 1932 blamed the crisis on Ukrainian nationalism, and a directive of 22 January 1933 stopped starving peasants from leaving to look for food. Some historians, among them Andrea Graziosi and Anne Applebaum, see in these steps a famine deliberately turned against Ukrainians. Ukraine and many other states recognise it as genocide, the crime of seeking to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group, which international law defined in 1948. Others, including R. W. Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft and Stephen Kotkin, see a regime that pursued grain and control with lethal ruthlessness without aiming to destroy a nation. Both sides agree that the state could have saved most of the victims and chose not to.
The full story
The famines grew from a system that took grain first and asked about consumption afterwards. Collective farms, the pooled village farms created in 1929–33, had to meet delivery quotas fixed in Moscow, amounts owed to the state much like a tax paid in grain. In 1930–32 the state took about twice as much as peasants had sold to it under the New Economic Policy, Lenin’s market compromise of the 1920s that let peasants sell their surplus much as farmers anywhere sell to the highest bidder. When the harvest of 1932 fell short, Stalin’s closest colleagues, Vyacheslav Molotov in Ukraine and Lazar Kaganovich in the North Caucasus, led commissions that searched farms and seized hidden grain, often with the seed for the next sowing. The Law of 7 August 1932 made the theft of collective-farm property, even a pocketful of ears from a field, punishable by death or ten years in a camp, so hungry peasants who gleaned were prosecuted. Because the quota mattered more than the people meeting it, a poor harvest became a famine.
Kazakhstan’s catastrophe came earlier and had a different cause, which the largest hatched area on the map reflects. Most Kazakhs lived as nomadic herders, moving with their animals between seasonal pastures, and the party regarded nomadism as backward. From 1929 officials requisitioned, or took by order, livestock for the towns, forced herders onto collective farms that had no grazing, housing or wells, and punished those who resisted. The herds that supported Kazakh life collapsed by about nine-tenths between 1929 and 1933. Between 1.5 and 2.3 million people died, perhaps 38 to 42 per cent of all Kazakhs, and over a million fled. The arrows show refugees heading for Xinjiang in China and for the oases of Uzbekistan, which turned Kazakhs into a minority in their own republic for half a century.
In Ukraine and the Kuban, decisions taken in Moscow and Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, between November 1932 and January 1933 made the famine far deadlier. Villages that fell behind were put on “blacklists” that cut them off from all manufactured goods and imposed fines in meat and potatoes. In the Kuban, whole settlements of Cossacks, descendants of the frontier soldier-farmers of the tsarist empire, were deported to the north, among them Poltavskaya. A decree of 14 December 1932 linked the grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism and ended the policy of promoting Ukrainian language and culture in the Kuban. The directive of 22 January 1933 ordered the police to stop peasants fleeing Ukraine and the North Caucasus, and by mid-February tens of thousands had been arrested and many sent back to their villages to die. Exports continued at a reduced level, and relief came late, in spring 1933, when the dying had already peaked. The map’s hatching marks where these choices fell, from the Dnieper to the Volga, and the death rates were highest precisely where the state pressed hardest.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
How the dead are counted
Famine deaths can only be estimated, because the dying were not registered and the 1937 census that revealed the population shortfall was suppressed and its organisers arrested. Demographers reconstruct “excess deaths” by comparing recorded deaths with what normal mortality would have produced, and births lost to the famine are usually counted separately. For Soviet Ukraine, a 2015 study by Omelian Rudnytskyi, Natalia Levchuk, Oleh Wolowyna and colleagues estimated about 3.9 million excess deaths in 1932–34, and other careful estimates fall between 3.5 and 5 million. The figures of 7 to 10 million that circulated before the archives opened are not supported by the demographic evidence. For the whole Union in 1930–33, R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft suggest 5.5 to 6.5 million, while Oleh Wolowyna’s estimate of 2020 reaches about 8.7 million. For Kazakhstan, Sarah Cameron and Kazakh demographers estimate 1.5 to 2.3 million. The ranges reflect uncertain baselines, migration and the treatment of deaths in 1934, and every honest account states them as ranges.
The debate on intent
Policy caused the famine, as no serious historian now denies, and the dispute concerns intent. Those who call the Holodomor genocide point to evidence that the measures of late 1932 targeted Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban. They cite the blacklists, the decree of 14 December 1932 tying grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism, the sealing of borders in January 1933, and the simultaneous arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, described the destruction of the Ukrainian nation in a 1953 speech; Robert Conquest, Andrea Graziosi, Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, with differing emphases, see a famine turned deliberately against Ukrainians, and Ukraine’s parliament declared it genocide in 2006. Historians such as R. W. Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft and Stephen Kotkin find the documents show Stalin pursuing grain and punishing resistance across many regions, with Ukraine hit hardest as the largest grain producer, and see no plan to exterminate Ukrainians. Michael Ellman argues that the policies amount to mass murder and fit broader definitions of genocide even without a plan. The disagreement is partly legal, about what intent must be proved, and partly evidential.
Kazakhstan: a forgotten famine
The Kazakh famine killed a larger share of a people than any other Soviet famine, yet it was barely studied until the 1990s, partly because its victims were nomads who left few written records. Sarah Cameron’s The Hungry Steppe (2018), Niccolò Pianciola’s research and Robert Kindler’s Stalin’s Nomads (2014, in English 2018) show how the drive to settle nomads combined with requisitions of livestock and grain. Ethnic tensions between Kazakhs and European settlers made it worse, and officials reported success while their districts emptied. Cameron argues that the famine created modern Soviet Kazakhstan, since it destroyed nomadism and left Kazakhs a minority in their republic, but she does not find evidence that it was planned as an attack on Kazakhs as a nation. Kazakhstan commemorates the victims each year on 31 May. The comparison with Ukraine sharpens the intent debate: in both cases a policy aimed at control and output became lethal, while only in Ukraine was it explicitly tied to suspicions about a nation.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Quotas set in Moscow ignored the harvest. Delivery quotas were fixed by the centre and treated as a test of loyalty, so local officials who reported shortfalls risked being accused of sabotage. The state’s grain take roughly doubled after collectivisation, while the harvest fell in 1931 and 1932 because of disorganised farms, exhausted horses, poor weather and peasants with no reason to work. A system that took its quota first turned every shortfall into hunger in the villages.
Collectivisation had destroyed the peasants’ reserves. Collectivisation had already stripped the villages of their reserves, since in 1929–31 peasants slaughtered or lost about half their livestock, and the most productive farmers had been deported as kulaks. Families that once kept a cow or a store of grain against bad years now had neither. When the collective farm failed, there was no private reserve left to fall back on, which is why a bad harvest killed on a scale earlier shortfalls had not.
The party treated nomadism as backwardness. Soviet planners saw nomadic herding as a primitive way of life to be replaced by settled farming and industry. In Kazakhstan, settlement campaigns and livestock requisitions began in 1929 without the wells, fodder, housing or tools that settled life needed. Planners also wanted the steppe’s meat and grain for the towns, so requisition quotas for livestock rose as the herds shrank. Officials competing to show progress drove herders onto farms that could not support them, and the herds that sustained Kazakh society were eaten, confiscated or died.
Stalin read hunger as political resistance. Stalin interpreted falling deliveries in Ukraine and the Kuban as sabotage organised by kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists, and in August 1932 he wrote to Kaganovich that “we may lose Ukraine”. Seeing a political threat, he answered with political weapons: blacklists, deportations, purges of local officials and the sealing of borders. That interpretation turned a food crisis in the Union’s main grain region into a campaign against its people, in which hunger itself was treated as evidence of guilt.
THE TURNING POINT
Kharkiv, November 1932 – January 1933. The decisions taken in the Ukrainian capital and in Moscow over these three months are the hinge of the Holodomor, because they turned a famine that was already killing into a trap. The blacklists of 18 November 1932, the decree of 14 December tying grain failures to Ukrainian nationalism, and the directive of 22 January 1933 sealing Ukraine and the Kuban came just as reserves ran out. Deaths peaked in the spring of 1933, in the villages these measures had cut off. Whether one reads the measures as genocide or as ruthless policy, they explain why Ukraine and the Kuban suffered more than any region except Kazakhstan.
What it changed
A demographic wound that shaped two nations. Ukraine lost millions of people, overwhelmingly in the countryside, and Kazakhstan lost perhaps two-fifths of its Kazakh population. Russian and Ukrainian settlers later moved into emptied villages, and Kazakhs did not again form a majority of Kazakhstan’s population until after independence. The 1937 census that exposed the losses was suppressed and its statisticians arrested, so the regime punished the people who recorded the losses it had caused.
Silence, then memory. The famine was denied officially until the late 1980s; mentioning it could bring arrest. In the diaspora, survivors kept its memory alive, and after 1991 Ukraine made it central to national history, with a memorial museum in Kyiv and a day of remembrance in November. The struggle over its meaning remains a live question in Ukrainian and Russian politics, because the famine has become part of each state’s account of the other.
The collective farm survived. The regime adjusted collectivisation and kept it. From 1933 fixed delivery quotas, set per hectare sown, replaced arbitrary requisitions, private plots were allowed, and grain stocks were rebuilt as a reserve against the next bad harvest. Peasants learned that the state would take what it wanted first, and the kolkhoz bargain settled into place. The famines thus secured the system that had caused them.
A pattern for treating nations as suspects. The decree of December 1932 was the first time the leadership publicly linked a national culture to sabotage. The same logic, that a whole people could be disloyal, returned in the national operations of the Terror in 1937–38 and the deportations of whole peoples during the war. Suspicion of a nation, once written into a decree, became a habit of government.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Should the famine in Ukraine be judged as genocide, or as a famine caused by policy without the intent to destroy a nation?
Both readings rest on the same documents, so the judgement depends largely on what counts as intent. The case for genocide is strongest for November 1932 to the spring of 1933, when blacklists, the decree of 14 December linking grain to Ukrainian nationalism, the sealing of borders and the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals fell specifically on Ukraine and the Kuban. The case against stresses that the same quotas and seizures hit the Volga, Siberia and, proportionally worst of all, Kazakhstan, and that Stalin’s correspondence is preoccupied with grain and with resistance, which he blamed on nationalists because he suspected them. The UN Genocide Convention requires intent to destroy a group “as such”, which is hard to prove from documents written in the language of grain targets; Lemkin’s broader idea of genocide as the destruction of a nation’s social and cultural life fits more easily. A strong answer states which definition it uses, separates causation, which is not in doubt, from intent, which is, and recognises that the dead were the victims of deliberate choices in either reading.
An interesting fact
The famine was reported in the West while it was happening, and largely disbelieved. In March 1933 the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones walked through villages in Ukraine and told a press conference in Berlin that he had seen mass hunger. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting from Moscow, answered with an article headlined “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”, and other correspondents in Moscow supported him. In 2003 the Pulitzer board reviewed Duranty’s prize and decided not to revoke it, while judging that his prize-winning reporting fell seriously short of today’s standards. Jones was killed in Inner Mongolia in 1935.
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