Holodomor

The Holodomor was the Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933 that killed millions of innocent men, women, and children by starvation. As part of the USSR's forced collectivization project, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to punish Ukrainians for resisting political, economic, cultural, and social subjugation after Soviet occupation of the Ukrainian People's Republic from 1917 to 1921. The Soviet regime confiscated grain from Ukrainian farmers while continuing to export Ukraine's grain to the rest of the world, purposefully starving villagers in what had been the breadbasket of Europe. A letter sent to Stalin on April 28, 1932, from Horby in the Kremenchuck region pleaded that collective farm workers had not had a single pound of bread since January 1, 1932, that famine was widespread among the common folk, and that children were suffering cramps and dying months before the harvest. At the height of the Holodomor in June 1933, 28,000 people were dying every day in Ukraine. For decades the USSR denied that the Holodomor took place and denied the regime's role in the famine, and an independent Russian Federation has continued that denial. Archival documents from the KGB record the violence and horror of the Soviet regime's actions to engineer the Holodomor and its attempt to suppress the national identity of Ukrainians, including deporting and executing Ukraine's religious, intellectual, and cultural leaders who spoke of it. Raphael Lemkin described the Soviet actions against Ukrainians as a case of genocide, the destruction not only of individuals but of a culture and a nation. Beginning with the invasion and attempted annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and again with Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Moscow used grain and food as a weapon of war, affecting millions in Ukraine and millions more throughout the world.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States