Red famine: Stalin’s war on Ukraine

During the horrific famine of 1932–3, did Ukrainian peasants die because they were Ukrainians or because they were peasants? This blunt question is at the heart of scholarly debate on the famine: while some believe that the famine was a deliberate attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism (and thus can be considered an act of genocide), others see it as a product of Soviet agricultural mismanagement and Bolshevik indifference to the peasants’ fate. Terry Martin suggests a compromise he calls the ‘national interpretation of the famine’. He argues that the famine originated in the sphere of Soviet agricultural policies. However, Moscow interpreted Soviet Ukraine’s failure to meet its (impossible) grain quotas as an act of national defiance. The Bolsheviks introduced harsher measures targeting the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that transformed the widespread starvation of 1932 into the horrendous famine of 1933.(1)