THE FAMINE OF 1932–1933, THE HOLODOMOR

THE FAMINE OF 1932–1933, THE HOLODOMOR – a humanitarian catastrophe on the territory of the USSR that had devastating consequences for Ukraine, the Kuban, and several regions of the Volga region. Reckless grain procurement plans for 1932 (combined with the tragic consequences of dekulakization and a sharp increase in grain exports from the USSR) were not corrected in time, and in the summer of 1932, a total expropriation of grain began in all the country’s grain-growing regions. This was reinforced by the draconian Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of August 7, 1932, “On the Protection of the Property of State Enterprises, Kolkhozes, and Cooperatives, and the Strengthening of Public (Socialist) Property” (the “Law of Spikelets”). According to this law, peasants and their family members who dared to take even a few ears of grain from a collective farm field (which, according to Soviet law, belonged to them) faced criminal punishment up to and including execution by firing squad. A commission sent from Moscow to Ukraine, headed by the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, V. Molotov, ensured the complete removal of the entire 1932 harvest, and by the beginning of 1933, there was no grain left at all, not even seed grain. A famine began in Ukraine, which was deadly for the rural population who did not receive food ration cards (cannibalism became widespread). According to various estimates, the number of famine victims in Ukraine ranged from 4 to 9 million people.

The consequences of the humanitarian catastrophe were carefully concealed by the Soviet authorities; refugees from the villages were prevented from entering the cities, which were cordoned off by special units of the militsiya and state security. Reports of mass mortality in the USSR that appeared in the foreign press were declared slanderous. Demographic statistics for 1932–1933 were strictly classified until Gorbachev’s perestroika. In 1993, a monument to the victims of the Holodomor was unveiled in Kyiv, and in 1998, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor and Political Repressions was established by a Decree of the President of Ukraine, which is commemorated annually on the fourth Saturday of November.