The Holodomor: Stalin’s Genocidal Famine that Starved Millions in the 1930s

As is always the case with famine, the good people died first. If you refused to steal food from your neighbor, you died. If you gave food to your children before you fed yourself, you died, and then they died. But soon, even the people who were willing to do whatever it took to survive were struggling. There simply wasn’t any food to be bought, traded for, or stolen. But there were bodies, thousands of them. If you wanted to survive, you had no other option than to eat the flesh of the dead.

Soon, reports began to emerge of rampant cannibalism. The first cases were usually kept quiet. People would notice a body by the side of the road and return late at night to take a few pieces of flesh before hiding the corpse. Or back-alley butcher shops would suddenly have a supply of fresh meat available at high prices. And of course, the starving customers preferred not to ask questions about where it had come from. But eventually, even this horrible source of food was exhausted. And people stopped waiting for their neighbors to die before they ate them.

By 1933, the rumors of cannibalism were too widely spread to be ignored. So, the Soviets dispatched their secret police to investigate. What they found was shocking. Not only were people cannibalizing the dead, but there were thousands of cases of people committing murder and eating their victims. Often, these victims weren’t strangers, but family members. Soviet records recorded cases where parents killed their children and shared the flesh among the rest of the family. In one shocking case, a family didn’t even wait until they were out of food to kill their daughter-in-law. Instead, they fed some of her corpse to their pigs in order to fatten them up and ate the rest themselves.

Of course, the children who were the most frequent victims were also desperate, as was recorded by a woman who ran an orphanage in Kharkov. “One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, little Petrus,” she wrote, “And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood.” Not only were people cannibalizing each other, they were cannibalizing themselves.

The authorities made a half-hearted attempt to crack down on the murders and cannibalism. Posters were plastered all over Ukranian cities stating “It is a barbaric act to eat your children!” And thousands of people were convicted in Soviet courts of cannibalism, but that number was probably only a fraction of the true number who were forced to eat human flesh. But even if the Soviet authorities were horrified to learn about the acts of cannibalism being committed, they didn’t take any serious actions to provide food to the Ukrainians until late 1933. By then, millions of people were already dead.

By late 1933, the worst of the famine had run its course. There’s no definite estimate of how many people died. But most scholars agree that at least 2 million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1930 and 1933. However, during any famine, the number of people who die from starvation isn’t the best way to determine the total death toll. The stress of long-term hunger makes people more likely to develop deadly illnesses like typhus and cholera. These diseases were prevalent in Ukraine during the famine and killed millions of additional people.

Some have suggested that if you add the number of people who died from disease or were deported to Gulags by the Soviets, the total tally for the Holodomor is probably somewhere around 7 million. For comparison, it’s estimated that around 12-13 million people died during the Holocaust. It’s a staggering number, and if Stalin did plan the Holodomor, or at least let it happen, then it ranks among the worst crimes in human history. But is Stalin really to blame? It’s a question that scholars have debated for years, but no one knows for sure. However, there is a significant amount of evidence that he played at least some part in the deaths.

Stalin considered independent peasants, or “kulaks,” to be a serious threat to the success of Communism. These peasants were really only different from other peasants in that they might own a little bit of land. But Stalin created a set of policies designed to completely eliminate the entire class of people. Their farms were seized and the kulaks were either sent to gulags or moved to collective farms. These collective farms were under the strict control of the communist party, and production quotas were set by the state. This mass collectivization of farms produced food shortages across the Soviet Union.

During the period of the Holodomor, millions of people across the entire Union were starving to death, so the famine wasn’t isolated to Ukraine. But there’s evidence that Stalin went to special efforts to make the situation in Ukraine worse. Food quotas for Ukraine were set higher than the area could actually produce, which meant that the authorities were pulling more food out of Ukraine than the people who lived there could afford to give. And the Soviets passed laws that stated any theft of “Socialist Property” was punishable by death. Of course, “Socialist Property” included food.

So any peasant who wanted to hide a little bit of the food they grew to eat later could actually be sentenced to death. But even with the famine, historians argue that if the Soviets had distributed grain rations fairly, most of the deaths could have been prevented. So there’s little doubt that Stalin’s policies contributed to the millions of deaths during the Holodomor. Many scholars think that these policies were applied in Ukraine in an attempt to eliminate a large portion of the Ukrainian people. If that’s true, then the Holodomor fits the definition of genocide. And with a such a massive death toll, it ranks among the worst genocides in history.

Some Sources For Further Reading:

History Collection – The Soviet Union’s Great Famine was one of History’s Greatest Man-Made Disasters

History Collection – 40 Images of the Tragic Bengal Famine of 1943