Holodomor Genocide Question - Genocide Debate: Russian Government Position

Genocide Debate: Russian Government Position

The Russian Federation accepts historic information about the Holodomor but rejects the argument that it was ethnic genocide by pointing out the fact that millions of non-Ukrainian Soviet citizens also died because of the famine. On 2 April 2008, a statement was voted by the Russian parliament stating there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide specifically against the Ukrainian people. This was in response to the 2006 Ukrainian parliament declaration that the Holodomor was an act of genocide by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian people. The resolution adopted by Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, condemned the Soviet regime's "disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals", along with "any attempts to revive totalitarian regimes that disregard the rights and lives of citizens in former Soviet states." yet stated that "there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds."

According to The Moscow Times article: "The Kremlin argues that genocide is the killing of a population based on their ethnicity, whereas Stalin's regime annihilated all kinds of people indiscriminately, regardless of their ethnicity. But if the Kremlin really believed in this argument, it would officially acknowledge that Stalin's actions constituted mass genocide against all the peoples of the Soviet Union."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature and historian, opined in Izvestia that Holodomor was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements. According to him the lie of the Holodomor being genocide was invented decades later after the event and Ukrainian effort to have the famine recognised as genocide is an act of historical revisionism that has now surpassed the level of Bolshevik agitprop. The writer cautions that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.

In November 2010 a leaked confidential U.S. diplomatic cable revealed that Russia had allegedly pressured its neighbors not to support the designation of Holodomor as a genocide at the United Nations.