MIn mid-October, the Russian state news agency Ria Novosti circulated a short video showing the dismantling of the monument to the victims of the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Russian-occupied Mariupol. Commenting on the pictures, a historian explains that, according to historical sources, the south of Russia and the Soviet Union was regularly hit by famine at intervals of several decades. “It wasn’t Ukraine at all that suffered the most from the hunger of 1932-33,” he continues, adding that other regions of the Soviet Union were much worse hit.
A young woman says it’s not a monument being demolished, but “a symbol of political disinformation.” In Ukraine, the idea of a genocide, the Holodomor, was forced on young people in history classes at school. “No teachers, no textbook has described what really happened,” she says. That was “unfortunately everything was hidden from the eyes of the people”.
The statements in the short film lead to the heart of a Russian-Ukrainian dispute about the past, in which the Bundestag is now also taking a stand: On Wednesday, a resolution tabled jointly by the Greens, SPD, FDP and CDU/CSU is to be voted on which recognizes the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
The news was well received in Ukraine, with Russia’s ambassador in Berlin claiming it was a “Russophobic” revision of history. For nearly two decades, Ukraine and Russia have tried to make their interpretation of the famine of the 1930s the dominant one internationally. What from the Ukrainian point of view is genocide committed by the Soviet Union using hunger as a weapon is presented in Russia as a misfortune suffered jointly by the peoples of the Soviet Union, which is being used by anti-Russian forces to incite Ukrainians against the Russians.
Seven million people died in the famine
It’s about one of the most terrible events of the 20th century. Around seven million people died in a famine in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Most of the victims were in Ukraine, where historians estimate that around four million people died. Relative to population, Kazakhstan was hit the hardest. Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people perished there – about 40 percent of all Kazakhs. There were also numerous starvation deaths on the Volga and in the Kuban region in southern Russia.
There is a broad consensus among historians as to the cause of the great hunger: it was caused by the policies of the Soviet leadership around Stalin. The forced collectivization of agriculture from 1929 had led to a dramatic fall in yields. The communist activists sent from the cities to the countryside for collectivization lacked agricultural knowledge, the peasants fiercely resisted the confiscation of their property, and the most powerful strata of the villagers had been exiled as “kulaks” or murdered.