THIS month, Ukrainians will observe the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine and destruction imposed by the Communists on the independent farmers of the Soviet Ukraine. The famine and the many simultaneous deportations of farmers resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths in a once flourishing agricultural region that was known as the breadbasket of Europe. According to a website run by the Connecticut Holodomor Awareness Committee:

In Soviet Ukraine, of course, the Holodomor was kept out of official discourse until the late 1980’s, shortly before Ukraine won its independence in 1991. With the fall of the Soviet Union, previously inaccessible archives, as well as the long suppressed oral testimony of Holodomor survivors living in Ukraine, have yielded massive evidence offering incontrovertible proof of Ukraine’s tragic famine genocide of the 1930’s.

On November 28th 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) passed a decree defining the Holodomor as a deliberate Act of Genocide. Although the Russian government continues to call Ukraine’s depiction of the famine a “one-sided falsification of history,” it is recognized as genocide by approximately two dozen nations, and is now the focus of considerable international research and documentation.

Here is one’s survivor’s story.

— Comments —

Felicie writes:

I am one of those “skeptics” when it comes to the claim that the Holodomor was an event that was specifically aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians. The areas which suffered from the Holodomor also included Southern Russia (to a great extent), Northern Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. In other words, the Holodomor affected those territories in the Soviet Union which produced bread, killing people not only of Ukrainian ethnicity. If one has a scientific hypothesis, it has to match the empirical data. If it doesn’t explain the data, one has to come up with a better hypothesis. The fact that the mass starvation of the early thirties affected not only Ukraine but other territories is a gaping hole in the “deliberate ethnic genocide” theory. In the opinion of other historians, the hypothesis that the Holodomor resulted from the draconian and punitive policy of the Soviet leadership, which wanted to punish peasants for their resistance to forced collectivization and did so by expropriating their stores of grain and thus condemning them to death, has a greater explanatory power. It makes more sense to me, especially considering the fact that the peasant class was devalued in the eyes of the communists, who viewed them as a conservative and potentially subversive element. If there was an undercurrent of “personal” hostility in this act of political repression, it was hostility toward the peasant class rather than hostility toward ethnic Ukrainians.

Laura writes:

I am not familiar with those who are claiming it was purely ethnic genocide.

Felicie writes:

What other kinds of genocide are there? I Googled “Holodomor ethnic genocide” and got links to Wikipedia articles on the Holodomor debates that use the phrase “ethnic genocide.” Apparently, one side of this argument claims that the Holodomor was an attack on Ukrainian nationalism. I don’t share this view, although I don’t rule out a possibility that there were some haters of Ukrainian nationalism among the people who ordered the expropriation of grain.

Laura writes:

I don’t know much about the debate.

Jane S. writes:

For nearly 20 years, Ukranian-Americans have led campaigns calling for The New York Times to rescind the Pulizter Prize of Walter Duranty, by no means the sole Holodomor denier, but one of the most prominent. The fishwrap has refused. Somehow this never gets reported on by the mainstream media.

Elizabeth A. Malofie writes:

“In the opinion of other historians, the hypothesis that the Holodomor resulted from the draconian and punitive policy of the Soviet leadership, which wanted to punish peasants for their resistance to forced collectivization and did so by expropriating their stores of grain and thus condemning them to death, has a greater explanatory power.”

I’m a Uke, but I believe that Felicie is correct.  It was about punishing the farmers who didn’t want to lose their farms to the giant Soviet system. There are some of us who did not jump on the Ukrainians’ “let’s have our own holocaust, too” bandwagon.

Laura writes:

I guess I don’t get it.

Either way, it boils down to genocide of a specific people.

Henry McCulloch writes:

Thank you for your post about the Soviet regime’s campaign against the independent peasantry (often known as kulaks, and easily fit into a Marxist-Leninist frame as “enemies of the proletariat”), to which Ukrainians refer as the Holodomor.  It is a dark and frightening page in our history.  It is hard for me to think of parallels wrought by Europeans — except for the rough parallel of a decade or so later: the Nazis’ mass murders of Jews, Christian Slavs, devout Catholics, Gypsies and assorted others who did not fit their narrow template for acceptable humanity, and perhaps the vicious barbarities of the Thirty Years’ War earlier.  But more appropriate parallels are the mass slaughters of Chinese by Mao’s Communists in the sickeningly misnamed “Great Leap Forward” — appropriate only if one means by a great leap forward being hurled to one’s death in an abyss — and the mass Communist slaughters of the (anti-)Cambodian Khmers Rouges.  I do not for a moment deny the horrors of what the Nazis did all across Europe, but I think what Robert Conquest (whose The Harvest of Sorrow is the definitive account in English) calls the Terror-Famine may be without true parallel in European history.

From what I have learned of it, based largely on reading Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, I believe Felicie and Elizabeth A. Malofie have it right.  The Terror-Famine was exterminationist terror-warfare against a civilian population that Lenin — it starts with him, or even before; blaming it all on Stalin is too easy, and offers Communists an excuse they don’t deserve — Stalin and the rest of the Soviet Communist Party bosses feared as a population they could not sway to Communism.  It was not ethnic; it was class-driven.  The common denominators of this terrible class enemy were independent agriculture and small-scale free enterprise.  Ultimately, I do not believe the motive was genocidal, even if the death totals make it very nearly worthy of that term.  It was Marxist-Leninist class warfare it its purest form.  Stalin’s far better known purges of the later 1930s are a drop in the ocean of human suffering by comparison, and largely an internecine settling of scores amongst Communists.

If Conquest and Solzhenitsyn are to be believed, and I for one believe them, all of the Eastern Slavs (Great Russians; Ukrainians; Belorussians) suffered grievously.  The primary criterion for suffering was living in the fertile black earth belt that covers much of Southern Russia, Southern Belorussia, and so much of the Ukraine — geography largely accounts for the disproportionate – in percentage-of-population terms – losses Ukrainians suffered.  One could argue that the leading Old Bolsheviks hated Christian Slavs — especially the Russians themselves — even more than they hated each other.  Certainly Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were not Russian; neither were they Ukrainian or Belorussian.

And it was not only Slavs who were caught up in this man-made maelstrom.  In her first post, in addition to the Eastern Slavs I mention, Felicie notes that Northern Caucasians and Kazakhs were swept away – again because they lived on fertile black earth and were productive farmers.  Conquest — Solzhenitsyn, too — has much to say of another group that suffered terribly at the Communists’ hands in the Terror-Famine: the very industrious and productive Volga Germans.  Thanks to what the Nazis did not long after, the outside world has not offered them much sympathy, and it was easy for Stalin to portray them as a fifth-column that deserved anything they got.  That, as with almost everything the Communists said, was a lie.

The Ukrainians’ embrace of the Holodomor is understandable, but the attempt by some to make it theirs alone is tragic.  As horrible as is what befell Ukrainians, to limit looking at the Terror-Famine only to that is to minimize just how malicious and terrible it was.  And as Mrs. Malofie writes, I think it reflects the power of the image of the Holocaust and the desire of some Ukrainians to have a genocide of their own — but for what?  Moral one-upmanship against the Russians?  To acknowledge that the Ukraine’s sufferings were part of a greater suffering is not to minimize or discount them at all.

But — again — you are right to bring the Terror-Famine to our notice.  It was a harvest of Communism — and Communism, in many forms, is still alive and far too healthy in today’s world.

Laura writes:

Ah, I see. You are saying that the Ukrainians are denying the other victims of collectivization. Or at least some Ukrainians are.

I have never known it to be anything but a famine caused by Communism’s antipathy toward independent farmers.

Alex writes:

My two-year-old mother and her parents barely survived in their village in the Chernihiv region, thanks to a relative who gave them a sack of flour. They managed to hide it from the NKVD squads who were ransacking every house searching for hidden food, taking everything they found. They buried the sack in a safe place and made it last. They could not bake it into bread; they would have been found by the smoke from the chimney and the sentence for hiding food was ten years. So they mixed the flour with water and drank it. A great many in the village perished.

Life didn’t get much better after the artificial famine was over. The newly collectivized villagers were paid nothing for working on the collective farms, so people continued to starve until the German liberators came in 1941. People had no strength or motivation to get up in the morning to go slave on the collective farm, so every morning the armed commissars went around the village poking people with bayonets to make them get up and go to work for free, adults and children alike. My mother was one of those children, and she remembers everything. People in the villages were not allowed to have vegetable gardens, and every fruit tree was heavily taxed so people had to cut them down as nobody had any money at all. Everybody was thin as a rail and hungry all the time; people were surviving on nettle soup, rats and sparrows. Adults and children would sneak into the collective fields at night to “steal” some wheat stalks to grind into flour, but the fields were guarded and all who were caught got the standard ten years, and many were shot dead in the fields.

There was no escape from the collective farms because internal passports were needed in the USSR to travel from one place to another, but only city people could have them. Villagers were not issued passports until Khrushchev, and could not leave their village without a document issued by the local commissar.

But hey, these people weren’t black or Jewish, they were white Christian peasants, so why would the New York Times care about them?

Alex adds:

According to this source, of the 75 chiefs of regional and republican directorates of the Ukrainian GPU (Chief Political Directorate of the NKVD; the NKVD’s top directing body) during the Holodomor, 53 (70.7%) were Jewish and only 3 (4%) were Ukrainian. Of the 30 members of the Communist Party Committee (i.e. the ruling body) of the Secret Political Directorate of the GPU, 24 were Jewish.

In 1935, of the 90 top chiefs of the Ukrainian NKVD, 60 (66.67%) were Jewish, 13 (14.44%) Russian and 6 (6.67%) Ukrainian.

Ordinary NKVD troops were also largely Jewish. It was a Jewish revolution, after all, because Communism was a Jewish movement in the 19th and early 20th century. They were in charge of the USSR until Stalin’s purges later in the decade.

Steve Kogan writes:

Alex plays loose with words when he writes that the Bolshevik seizure of power “was a Jewish revolution.” The percentages he cites of Jews in Leninist-Stalinist organizations have nothing to do with the nature of the movement, which was virulently anti-clerical and  sought to obliterate all traditional institutions and values, except when it wished to exploit them for its own political ends. After Lenin’s death, as Eugene Lyons writes in Assignment in Utopia (1937), Stalin perverted the time-honored place of Russian Orthodox icons in religious worship and literally elevated his own image through millions of posters, paintings, photo portraits, and iconographic banners, with himself as the great vozhd, or leader, of Soviet Russia’s official state religion. To speak of Bolshevism as “a Jewish revolution” is as inappropriate to the subject as it is to speak of our founding fathers leading “a Protestant revolution”; and the idea that “Communism was a Jewish revolution in the 19th and early 20th century” is equally pointless. Worse yet, these notions have been circulating in anti-semitic propaganda ever since the 1920s, if not earlier. Hitler and his followers spoke of Bolshevism as a “Jewish conspiracy” (they said the same about western democracy and capitalism), and I have read Alex’s argument on any number of anti-semitic websites. Jew Watch gives you the full “documented” picture of “Communism as a Jewish revolution,” with an ever-present photo of Trotsky (born Jewish as Lev Bronstein) alongside all its articles, and the caption “Zionist Leon Trotsky of the Zionist USSR.” There are no corresponding  pictures of Lenin and Stalin. I write this not to impute Alex’s motives in any way, only to raise a cautionary note about the genealogy of his added points.

Alex writes:

Mr. Kogan wrote: “…the idea that ‘Communism was a Jewish revolution in the 19th and early 20th century’ is equally pointless.”

Facts are indeed pointless; they simply exist. But Mr. Kogan tells us that the fact that virtually all European Communists at the time, virtually all leaders of the Russian revolution, and virtually all members of the NKVD who organized and carried out the starving of millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants to death, were Jewish, does not make Communism at the time a Jewish movement or the Russian revolution a Jewish one.

And then, of course, Mr. Kogan plays the trump card that is sure to shut up anybody saying the wrong things about Jews: Hitler.

Mr. Kogan simply brushes the facts aside and cries anti-Semitism. This can work on Americans but not on a son of Ukrainian peasants who only by miracle survived the terror that Jewish commissars brought upon them.

You know what perpetuates anti-Semitism? Jews’ vehement, aggressive insistence that any and all criticism of them can only be motivated by irrational, groundless anti-Semitic hatred, the insistence of which Mr. Kogan just gave us a fine example.

Jewish commissars intentionally starved millions of my people to death, brought upon them untold sufferings which my own parents barely survived – and who is compared to Hitler? I am, for having the gall to mention this fact!

Since I’m Hitler’s moral equal anyway, I’ll just go ahead and mention one more anti-Semitic historical fact: Jews sold my people into Muslim slavery for hundreds of years (part I here and related information here). But I am sure this pointless fact also has nothing to do with anything, right? Is there somebody worse than Hitler to compare me to?

I’ll tell you who is worse than Hitler: the Jewish commissars who drowned Russia and Ukraine in blood, enslaved all who survived, and became the empire’s ruling class until Stalin purged them in the late 1930s. For my people they were indeed worse than Hitler.

Felicie writes:

Wow, the discussion has taken a dramatic but, somehow, judged from my previous experience, not completely unexpected turn. Alex’s accusations are slanderous, mean-spirited, and preposterous in their blanket generalization. It is one thing to ascribe certain characteristics to a certain group of people. Such stereotyping is not necessarily irrational, although it may be inaccurate, one-sided, or subjective. It’s a completely different thing to accuse a group of a conspiracy. Then you have to define the meaning of “collective agency” and “responsibillity.” If you say that group A is “responsible” for such and such actions, you need to explain what you mean by it. Who is the agent? Did the separate synagogues of religious Jews get together and decide to do something against a ceratain other group of people? Did secular ethnic Jews get together and decide to act against this group of people? If neither – how is this a conspiracy? To whom do you attribute blame or responsibility? If Lenin was bald, does it mean that bald people everywhere are responsible for what he did?

Felicie adds:

I would like to add something to what I said before. Alex writes that virtually all European communists and leader of the Russian revolution were Jewish. While my earlier point about collective agency still stands regardless of the percentage of Jews, I would also like to warn your readers about placing too much faith in the statistics cited by antisemitic websites. Often, they wildely exaggerate. Jews were prominent in the Russian communist movement, but the “virtually all” claim is untrue.

Here is the link to the Wikipedia article to the sixth Bolshevik congree elected right before the revolution, in August 1917. Of 30 people, 7 Jews (Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Uritsky, Joffe, Sokolnikov) plus lenin, who was 1/4 Jewish.

And this is a link to the Wikipedia article to the first Soviet government:

Trotsky – that’s all.

One can click on all the names and read the biography of each communist.

Laura writes:

In one of the discussions on this issue at VFR, Felicie made a similar point about Jews not acting in a concerted way during the Revolution. Lawrence Auster responded:

Here’s the core of your criticism of Solzhenitsyn:

I have a big problem with this argument: it insidiously suggests that Jews constitute some kind of a political entity that can act in an organized way and can therefore be assigned collective responsibility.

But is it not the case that the Jews are an entity? Do not the Jews regard themselves as an entity, a people, a religion, of which they are very proud? Yes, I understand Paul Johnson’s argument that the Jewish Communists had nothing to do with the Jewish religion and denied their own Jewish ethnicity. But at the same time, they came out of the Jewish people and shared the understandable obsession of many 19th century European Jews with solving the Jewish problem, which the Jewish Communists (or, as Johnson calls them, the non-Jewish Jewish Communists) thought they could do by creating, via Communism, a Single Mankind in which all nations and ethnicities, including the Jewish ethnicity, would disappear, and Jews would no longer be seen as different, and the persecution of them would cease.

So my point is, is it completely off-base to attribute the Russian Revolution, in some degree, to the Jews?

Alex writes:

Where did I write of any conspiracy, other than the fact that the famine was intentionally organized by confiscating all food from the peasants? Why are there words and phrases in Felicie’s comment in quotation marks as if I said them? Why does a group need to conspire in order for some of its members to share an ideology?

“To whom do you attribute blame or responsibility?” – To the individuals who planned and committed the atrocities, of course.

“If Lenin was bald, does it mean that bald people everywhere are responsible for what he did?” – This is beyond bizarre. Felicie is saying that mentioning that the individuals who killed millions of my people were overwhelmingly Jewish means that I am accusing all Jews everywhere of being just like those murderers. And she accuses me of slander?

A familiar pattern repeats. One side: inconvenient facts. The other side: cries of anti-Semitism, comparisons of the facts’ presenters to the worst people in history, framing of the presented facts as accusations of Jews in a collective conspiracy, and attribution of hateful motives for presenting the facts.

I’ll repeat: it’s this mad scramble to squash any mention of any Jewish misdeeds, and the aggressive and dishonest manner in which it tends to be done, that keeps anti-Semitism alive.

There is not a single people in history that has not committed its share of terrible acts. No exceptions. No, not even the Jews. When will Jews stop denying this simple truth?

For those who don’t speak Russian: the Web site from which the percentages of Jews in the Ukrainian NKVD come appears to me to be an Israeli one rather than anti-Semitic. The article’s author, named Shimon Briman, took them from a Ukrainian historian specializing in the Ukrainian KGB.

Alex adds:

And the purpose of Briman’s article is to say that it’s not helpful to investigate these events, as it “might be used for anti-Semitic propaganda and even negatively impact Ukraine’s relations with Israel.” Instead of disputing the facts, Briman also brings up Hitler’s magic name.

Laura writes:

Alex never spoke of a “conspiracy.” He said Jewish commissars intentionally starved farmers. Unless his facts are wrong, and Felicie has not disproved his contention that the Ukrainian commissars were largely Jewish, then what he said was not “slanderous, mean-spirited and preposterous.”

Felicie writes:

Laura, let me address the points you raise:

1.”Do not the Jews regard themselves as an entity, a people, a religion, of which they are very proud?”

Emphatically: no. Some Jews view themselves as a religion. Some view themselves as an ethnicity. Some view themselves as both. Among those, who view themselves as an ethnicity, many do not see themselves as an entity. Do people who are bald or fat or shorter than 5′ 7″ see themselves as an entity? Not necessarily. Some Jews are proud to be Jewish. Some are not. In a famous line from a poem by Boris Slutsky, the speaker says: “I wear within me as contagion this cursed race.” It expresses a sentiment shared by a non-negligible subset of Jews.

2. Jews that became Communist saw themselves overwhelmingly as internationalists (as opposed to being Zionist or religious). Were their motivations in joining the revolution affected by their experience as disenfranchised subjects of the Russian crown? I don’t doubt it. Did the agenda of these Communist Jews to create a Single Mankind have an added weight accrued to being Jewish, compared to the analogous agenda by non-Jewish communists? I think it’s a reasonable supposition. Does this imply that because of this, Communist Jews engaged in a deliberate policy of exterminating non-Jewish subjects? It doesn’t follow at all. There is no necessary connection between a desire to create an internationalist world, which has “no Greek nor Jew,” and a desire to exterminate other minorities.

3. Can we suppose that Communists of non-Russian ethnicity (not necessarily Jews) felt less empathy for the suffering of Russian and Ukrainian peasants? I think it is possible. I allow that some of them had an added motivation of their animus towards another ethnicity. But I absolutely do not allow that this was the main or even dominant motivation for the majority. To repeat myself, these people were internationalists. They were joined in a “band of brothership” with other bolsheviks as they were working toward the revolution. Ethnic hatred was not their key motivation, although people who see the world through a purely ethnic-interests paradigm might have difficulty understanding this point.

 Laura writes:

The idea that the collective identity of Jews is somehow comparable to the group identity of people who are bald, fat or short is just plainly ludicrous. Whether or not Jews are proud of being Jewish is not germane to this particular discussion, though it was brought up in passing by Mr. Auster. That’s beside the point. They certainly are conscious of their Jewish-ness, religiously and racially. And that is generally true even for those who are atheists.

You write:

Does this imply that because of this, Communist Jews engaged in a deliberate policy of exterminating non-Jewish subjects?

Who said it did imply that? 

You keep bringing up this red herring of Jews intending to eliminate Ukrainians, of Jews engaging in ethnic cleansing, when everyone in this discussion has acknowledged that Jews were partly responsible for the artificial famine because they were Communists and because the kulaks were obstacles to agricultural collectivization. No one is making an issue of this ethnic cleansing but you. It wasn’t even brought up in my original post.

You write:

Can we suppose that Communists of non-Russian ethnicity (not necessarily Jews) felt less empathy for the suffering of Russian and Ukrainian peasants? I think it is possible. I allow that some of them had an added motivation of their animus towards another ethnicity.

Okay, so it was at least in part ethnic cleansing after all!

Felicie responds to other points in previous comments:

1. No, I have not disproven Alex’s point that the Ukrainian comissars were largely Jewish. (Does he mean the bosses or does he mean the whole NKVD force)? But I gave links to at least some sources that show that his claim that virtually all Russian revolutionaries were Jewish. And what about people who caused Holodomor in other regions, not Ukraine? Were they also largely Jewish?

2. Alex did not use the word “conspiracy.” But how could his statements be reasonably interpreted? Let us say that the facts are as follows: all Communists, who were ethnic Jews, without exception (but did not conspire), killed millions of Alex’s people, and in addition, sold untold millions of his people into slavery. What of it? What is the implication of these facts? What do they mean? What is their significance? What conclusion can we draw from them? What should we do about it? I want Alex to spell it out.

Laura writes:

So if I say that Americans go to shopping malls often, does that imply that Americans conspire to go to shopping malls? No, it does not.

What is the significance of these facts?

They mean, if they are correct, that there was something about Jewish culture and beliefs that inclined them toward Communist fervor.

What should we do about it?

If these facts are true, we should admit they are true. There is no need to spell anything else out.

Alex writes:

Interesting how Felicie jumped in right away with her comment, the first after Laura’s post, dismissing “the claim that the Holodomor was an event that was specifically aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians” as Ukrainians, for being of the Ukrainian ethnicity – when no such claim was made in Laura’s post or on the page it links to. Or, to my knowledge, anywhere else by any serious people, and certainly not by me.

This behavior looks almost instinctual. The Jews’ invaluable monopoly on being victims of large-scale genocide motivated by ethnic hatred must be protected at all costs, even preemptively, even when nobody is disputing it – simply when there is a mention of another people’s mass murder on a similar scale.

Let’s conduct a simple thought experiment in spotting double standards. Felicie writes that the peasants were starved to death because the Communists “viewed them as a conservative and potentially subversive element. If there was an undercurrent of ‘personal’ hostility in this act of political repression, it was hostility toward the peasant class rather than hostility toward ethnic Ukrainians.”

Since I’m no better than Hitler, suppose hypothetically that I said that “I am one of those ‘skeptics’ when it comes to the claim that the” Holocaust “was an event that was specifically aimed at the ethnic cleansing of” Jews. Suppose I said that my moral equal persecuted Jews because after the Communist revolution in Germany in 1918-1919, in which Jews played the leading role, “he viewed them as a” leftist “and potentially subversive element. If there was an undercurrent of ‘personal’ hostility in this act of political repression, it was hostility toward” a group with proven leftist subversive tendencies “rather than hostility toward ethnic” Jews.

I wonder how that would be received.

Alex adds:

Felicie wrote: “What of it? What is the implication of these facts? What do they mean? What is their significance? What conclusion can we draw from them? What should we do about it? I want Alex to spell it out.”

This is a transparent attempt to provoke her opponent into saying broadly generalized things that she would denounce as anti-Semitic, allowing her to dismiss everything else her opponent has said as motivated by anti-Semitism.