The European Parliament voted on Thursday to recognise the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 — frequently known as the Holodomor — as a state-sponsored genocide committed by Stalin’s Soviet Russia.
Elected representatives within the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to recognise the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 as a genocide committed by Soviet Russia against the Ukrainian people.
More commonly known as the Holodomor — a term reportedly derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination — the man-made famine is thought to have killed around four million people in the country.
In a statement published by the European Parliament on Thursday, the body says that it now recognises the event as a genocide inflicted by the Soviet Union under dictator Joseph Stalin against Ukraine.
“MEPs strongly condemn these acts, which resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, and call on all countries and organisations that have not yet done so to follow suit and recognise it as genocide,” the press release on the parliament’s website reads.
The statement goes on to link the mass murder of mostly-Ukrainian peasants to the Russian Federation’s ongoing invasion of the country, with it accusing the Vladimir Putin regime of trying to “liquidate Ukraine as a nation state” as well as destroy “the identity and culture of its people”.
Holodomor Redux: Pope Francis Ties Putin’s War to Stalin’s Starvation Genocidehttps://t.co/LxdXK99N4z
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According to a post by Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, the Holodomor is described as not merely being “caused purely by natural climate conditions or failures of collectivization”, but that the man-made conditions for the famine were “intentionally exacerbated and used by Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry”.
Overall, the famine is described by the research institute as being “the most lethal in European history”, putting the death count at over three million people, while Encyclopedia Britannica claims that the number of people who died in Ukraine was closer to four million.
“Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine,” an article in Encyclopedia Britannica detailing the famine reads. “The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population.”
However, the publication notes that the Soviets set food export quotas for the region at “an impossibly high level”, routinely deploying agents to search for and confiscate food hidden by desperate farmers, many of whom attempted to resist the communist “collectivization” measures employed by their colonial masters.
“The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief,” the article continues. “In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period.”
By the time the famine finally ended in 1933, the encyclopedia reports that ” [t]he traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed”, with the soviets importing Russian migrants to replace the now-dead native Ukrainians.
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