About Holodomor

Although I was not fond of my history lessons when I was in high school, surprisingly I like to read books with history as the story background. I read my novels with “holocaust” as a background so I am quite familiar with it. However, recently, I came across with “holodomor” word.

After further reseached, I found that Holodomor was an artificially created famine by Joseph Stalin during 1932-33, which starved to death millions of Ukrainians.
The name is derived from two Ukrainian words mor (plague)and holod (hunger) and literally means “plague of hunger” (Making Sense of Suffering by Johan Dietsch, 2006, pg. 205 cited in John-Paul Himka’s review in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8.3 (2007) 683-694).

I am not sure whether Holodomor is Genocide (deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group). Some Ukrainian politicians, including Viktor Yuschenko, have recently argued that the famine may have been designed as an attack on Ukraine, and therefore, should fall under the legal definition of genocide. However, the attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to manipulate the historical facts in order to make Europe recognise the 'Goldomor' as 'genocidal famine' did not find the support among the EU members. European scholars and politicians agreed that the famine of 1932-1933 in the Soviet Union was NOT an attept to destroy the Ukrainian nation, but an ineffective economic policy of the Communist governments of the Republics of the Soviet Union.