Holodomor Genocide Question - Background: The Holodomor

Background: The Holodomor

The Ukrainian famine (1932–1933), or Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор) (literally in Ukrainian, "death by hunger"), was one of the largest national catastrophes in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation.

The word comes from the Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’, and mor, ‘plague’, possibly from the expression moryty holodom, ‘to inflict death by hunger’. The Ukrainian verb "moryty" (морити) means "to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody". The perfect form of the verb "moryty" is "zamoryty"—"kill or drive to death by hunger, exhausting work". The neologism "Holodomor" is given in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language as "artificial hunger, organised in vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population". Sometimes the expression is translated into English as "murder by hunger."

The reasons of the famine are the subject of intense scholarly and political debate. Some historians claim the famine was purposely engineered by the Soviet authorities to attack Ukrainian nationalism, while others view it as an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during Soviet industrialization.

Lemkin in his work "Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine", the last chapter of a monumental History of Genocide, written in the 1950s, applies the concept of genocide to the destruction of the Ukrainian nation and not just Ukrainian peasants during the Holodomor. In his work he speaks of: a) the decimation of the Ukrainian national elites, b) destruction of the Orthodox Church, c) the starvation of the Ukrainian farming population, and d) its replacement with non-Ukrainian population from the RSFSR as integral components of the same genocidal process. The only dimension not included in Lemkin’s analysis was the destruction of the 8,000,000 ethnic Ukrainians living on the eve of the genocide in the Russian Republic (RSFSR). Lemkin's individual capacity to make this judgement has been challenged by Weiss-Wendt, on the basis of Lemkin's transformation of his concept of genocide to meet the demands of Central and Eastern European emigre communities who, at that time, provided his funding support. In turn Professor Steven Jacob has disputed the Weiss-Wendt interpretation in his 2008 paper, "Raphael Lemkin and the Holodomor: Was it Genocide?"