Holodomor Genocide Question - Scholarly Debate

Scholarly Debate

Yaroslav Bilinsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, writes in the Journal of Genocide Research (1999) in a review of Holodomor literature—he concludes:

Political usage should not override scholarly logic, especially political usage which is just being established in independent Ukraine, arguably seven years late. My argument, however, is that both logic and political usage in Ukraine point in one direction, that of the terror-famine being genocidal. Stalin hated the Ukrainians, as accepted as a fact by Sakharov, revealed in the telegram to Zatonsky and inferred from his polemics with the Yugoslav communist Semich. Stalin decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture and under the cover of collectivization teach the Ukrainians a bloody lesson. Had it not been for Stalinist hubris and the incorporation of the more nationalistically minded and less physically decimated Western Ukrainians after 1939, the Ukrainian nation might have never recovered from the Stalinist offensive against the main army of the Ukrainian national movement, the peasants.

James E. Mace, a Ukrainian historian of American-Irish origin, wrote:

For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.

Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky has contended that:

he way Stalin dealt with the Ukrainian countryside lifted the events out of the category of merely a famine and into the realm of genocide. In the fall of 1932, on orders from Moscow, government troops came to villages requisitioning grain to meet Stalin’s unrealistic quotas. At gunpoint they took away grain, even when peasants did not have enough for themselves. Those peasants who had no grain were deprived of other food stocks. Those who resisted were shot. Then a Jan. 22nd, 1933 directive from Stalin and Molotov sealed off Ukrainian borders to prevent famished peasants from escaping.

Norman Naimark, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University, asserts that "the Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide." He explains:

There is enough evidence - if not overwhelming evidence - to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR in 1932-33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they prevented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin's hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of "home rule" as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.

According to West Virginia University professor Dr Mark Tauger, to assert that the famine was a political measure intentionally imposed through excessive procurements is to take an uncritical approach to the official sources. Tauger writes that he is skeptical of Conquest's claims about the famine and of the accuracy of Conquest's book on the subject. He has argued that the 1932 harvest was smaller than the official estimate, and smaller than the harvest of 1933, which would suggest the famine was not "man-made."

Tauger's evidence, methodologies and conclusions in regard to the famine were criticized by Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft in their book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33, published in 2004. Wheatcroft additionally claims Tauger's view represents the opposite extreme in arguing the famine was totally accidental. Tauger, however, maintains that his harvest estimates are supported by evidence, and his conclusions are shared by a number of other scholars. In reply, Wheatcroft continues to maintain Tauger's use of the evidence is oversimplified, that his methodology is faulty, and that his conclusions overall are wrong. Tauger replied in kind, defending his work against Wheatcroft's criticisms.

Historian James Mace wrote that Mark Tauger's argument "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic." However, Robert Conquest himself admitted that "Mark B. Tauger has produced some interesting material on the 1932 which will doubtless contribute to debate among economists.". John-Paul Himka, professor at University of Alberta, wrote that "Tauger’s substantive argument, that the famine was in part generated by a change in the way Soviet authorities estimated harvest size, has not been confronted by diaspora scholars or publicists." But Dr. David Marples, professor of history at the University of Alberta, is critical of Tauger's claims, stating "Dr. Tauger and other scholars fail to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine. There is no such thing as a "natural" famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input."

Professor Steven Rosefielde argues in his 2009 book Red Holocaust that "Grain supplies were sufficient enough to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly from terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling."

Yale Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that the starvation was "deliberate" as several of the most lethal policies applied only, or mostly, to Ukraine. He argues the Soviets themselves "made sure that the term genocide, contrary to Lemkin's intentions, excluded political and economic groups." Thus the Ukrainian famine can be presented as "somehow less genocidal because it targeted a class, kulaks, as well as a nation, Ukraine."

Professor Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam concludes that the actions of the Stalinist regime from 1930–34, from the standpoint of international criminal law, "clearly constitutes . . . a series of crimes against humanity." These include not only policies that exacerbated the starvation (exporting 1.8 million tonnes of grain during the height of the famine, banning migration from famine-stricken areas and refusing to secure humanitarian aid from abroad), but also mass shootings and deportations of alleged "kulaks," "counter-revolutionaries" and other "Anti-Soviet elements" around the same time. According to Ellman, whether the famine was genocidal in nature depends on which definition of genocide is applied. If a more relaxed definition is accepted, which is actually favored by some specialists in the field of genocide studies, then the Soviet government was not only guilty of genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-33, but also of several other genocides from 1917 to 1953. Ellman asserts that the "national operations" of the NKVD, particularly the "Polish operation", which occurred during the late 1930s during the great purges may qualify as genocide even under the strictest definition, but there has been no ruling on the matter.

A number of modern academics lean toward the definition of the Holodomor as a genocide, echoing Dr Raphael Lemkin's views. Their work is presented in the collection of essays, "Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine," printed in 2008.