The Holodomor: a man-made famine, not a natural disaster

The myth

In a typical dispute, the opponent denies the very definition: supposedly “there was no so-called Holodomor,” the famine was everywhere, and to call it man-made is wrong^[1]. The logic is simple: if a famine arises from drought and crop failure, then it is a natural disaster, not a crime, and there is no question of any targeting of Ukrainians.

Natural famine versus man-made

The key to refutation lies in distinguishing two different events. A famine did occur, but the Holodomor was a man-made famine, caused not by natural factors. A telling counter-example is the famine of 1921–22: it really did have a natural component (a very dry summer) alongside the actions of the Bolsheviks, and that is precisely why no one calls it a Holodomor^[2].

By contrast, the famine of late 1932 — the first half of 1933 cannot be explained by any natural factors: the harvest was normal, and 1931 was an exceptionally good year. The mass death on the territory of Ukraine, where up to 4 million people died, was brought about solely by the actions of the Communist Party led by Stalin — above all by inflated grain-procurement quotas that swept all the grain out of the villages^[3]. (Academic estimates of direct losses range from 3.5 to 4 million; this figure rests on the work of historians, not on “television.”)

The procurement crisis had, moreover, been maturing for years. From 1924 onward, collective-farm data recorded that peasants were cutting back their sowing: handing grain over to the state at low procurement prices had become unprofitable, so they sowed less and less. The good harvests of 1923, 1925 and 1928 only sharpened the problem — when the harvest is large the price falls, and in the NEP years the state bought grain at deliberately low state prices, so peasants simply refused to sell. Until 1928 the authorities still made concessions and raised procurement prices; but once Stalin came to the helm, he declared the peasants themselves to blame and set a course of seizing grain by force — an experience of forced requisitioning he had had since the defence of Tsaritsyn^[24]. Thus the NEP “price scissors” grew into the extraordinary grain procurements, and those, in turn, into terror by famine.

Not only Ukraine: the Kazakh parallel

That the cause was political rather than natural is also evident from the geography. The same course — forced procurement — led in Kazakhstan to a catastrophe known there as the “Asharshylyk”: around 40 %, and by the estimate in the video up to half of the Kazakh population, perished; this too is considered a man-made famine^[4]. By contrast, there was no famine on this scale on Russia’s own territory in 1932–33. The disaster struck not “the whole USSR evenly,” but specific grain-growing regions with a particular population — those from which grain and livestock were confiscated.

The substitution: the Holodomor is not the Volga famine of 1921

Hence the typical substitution: the opponent conflates the Holodomor with the famine in the Volga region of 1921–23. But what is called the Holodomor in Ukraine is exclusively the man-made famine created by the Soviet authorities in 1932–33; to equate it with the natural famine of the previous decade is an error that erases the difference between a natural disaster and a man-made crime^[5].

What is more, the Bolsheviks themselves acknowledged this difference by their own conduct. The Soviet — still Leninist — authorities did not conceal the famine of 1921–23: they officially appealed to the world community for help — “we cannot cope by our own means” — and this is recorded even in Lenin-era documents^[23]. Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) responded to that appeal and in 1921–1923 fed millions of people in the famine-stricken Volga region (at its peak, about 10–11 million daily). That famine is reflected in Soviet literature too: Dribnytsya recalls Lev Kassil’s novella “Konduit and Shvambrania” — an autobiographical book about Pokrovsk (across the Volga from Saratov, in the Volga region), where the famine of the end of the Civil War breaks into the children’s childhood, and the narrator’s schoolmate faints from exhaustion^[23]. The famine of 1932–33, by contrast, the authorities denied and concealed: there was not a single appeal for international aid; instead, on 22 January 1933 a directive was issued forbidding peasants to leave Ukraine and the Kuban “for bread” — the borders were sealed, while grain continued to be exported. It is precisely this opposition in conduct — an open plea for rescue in 1921 versus silencing and blockade in 1933 — that is one of the most direct proofs of intent.

Another substitution: the invented “famine in Galicia”

A related device is not to compare the Holodomor with the Volga region but to “blur” it with the claim that there was a famine in interwar Galicia (in Poland) too: supposedly people were dying on this side of the Soviet-Polish border as well, so there is nothing “targeted at Ukrainians” here. This is exactly the thesis a passer-by brings to Dribnytsya: Russians had told him several times that in the territory of Galicia in the interwar 1930s there was supposedly a famine too^[25].

Factually, this does not hold up. Interwar Galicia belonged not to the USSR but to Poland (the Second Polish Republic), and there was no mass famine there in the 1930s. The Galician town and countryside of that time are widely reflected in memoirs, the press, and literature — the interlocutor himself recalls how vividly the “restaurant life” of interwar Lviv is portrayed — and the picture of well-fed everyday life is utterly at odds with mass death by starvation. This does not deny poverty, labor emigration, or isolated social protests — but that is an entirely different reality from the dying-out of whole villages across the Soviet border.

So where did the thesis itself come from? Dribnytsya cautiously suggests a specific source: at some point a pro-Soviet (in political orientation) newspaper in the Commonwealth ran a single publication, paid for by the Soviet side, about “some famine or other” — made, in his version, deliberately to drown out the news of the real famine coming from Soviet Ukraine^[25]. Dribnytsya does not give the exact attribution of this article — the newspaper’s name, the date — and admits himself that he does not remember, so it is hard to verify; we therefore present this as his conjecture, not an established fact. But the substance does not depend on it: there was no mass famine in interwar Galicia in the 1930s, and a single newspaper item “is not confirmed by any other sources”^[25]. The same evidentiary standard applies here as throughout the analysis: an event becomes a historical fact only when it is attested by several independent sources — and that is precisely what the myth of a “Galician famine” lacks, whereas the Holodomor in the Ukrainian SSR is documented by thousands of testimonies, by demography, and by archives.

What Soviet historiography denied — and what the sources say

It is no accident that Soviet historiography denied the famine altogether: it “never happened,” and this was asserted for decades, until even the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine began to acknowledge the fact^[6]. That is why reliance on sources is decisive here. Among them are the report of the U.S. Congress Commission (published in 1988) with eyewitness testimony, the works of American historian James Mace, the research of Doctor of Historical Sciences Stanislav Kulchytsky (who began studying the subject back in the USSR), and the contemporary works of Hennadii Yefimenko^[6]. The classics of the subject also include the work of British historian Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), which Dribnytsya recommends as a starting point^[18]. Denial of the man-made nature of the famine, as a rule, rests on no scholarly work at all — only on “prejudice.”

The silencing was not confined to 1932–33. Official historiography did not write about the man-made famine at all — it spoke only of “food difficulties”; in the same way it concealed the postwar famine of 1946–47, in which, by the estimate given in the debate, up to a million people died in Ukraine alone (including indirect losses)^[19]. Academic estimates of the death toll of that famine in the Ukrainian SSR are more modest — from roughly 300,000 to, at times, nearly a million — but the fact of the famine itself was likewise hidden by the Soviet account behind the euphemism of “difficulties."

"900,000 by the ZAGS”: the deniers’ favorite figure

A distinct variety of denial is not to reject the famine but to shrink it to something imperceptible. A telling example is the video by Klim Zhukov together with “Goblin” (Dmitry Puchkov) in the “History of the 20th Century” series: there all the victims of the Holodomor are reduced to about 900,000 of “excess mortality,” counted only from church books and ZAGS records, and this figure is presented as “everyone who died”^[22]. Dribnytsya calls this pure propaganda and notes that a professional rebuttal is within the power of historian Hennadii Yefimenko, a specialist in the Soviet period^[22].

The flaw here is methodological. First, “church books” for 1932–33 are an anachronism: the registration of civil-status acts in the USSR was handed over to state bodies (ZAGS) back in 1918, so no church registers were kept by then. Second, ZAGS registration itself collapsed during the famine: at the height of mass death, registration could not keep up or was not carried out at all, people were buried in common pits without documents, and part of the deaths were deliberately not recorded. So a count “only of the registered” gives not the real number of victims but the scale of the undercount. The real direct losses are reconstructed by the demographic method — comparing the 1926 and 1937 censuses and reconstructing births and deaths — and it yields 3.5–4 million dead in Ukraine; it is no accident that even the video itself admits that demographers “give more,” and the largest figure named there for total demographic losses (including the unborn) is around 12 million. Reducing everything to 900,000 is possible only by deliberately taking the most understated of the possible counters.

The classified 1937 census: how the demographic trace was hidden

The silencing was not only verbal — the state also falsified the statistics themselves. In a friendly conversation, Dribnytsya recalls the fate of the All-Union population census: the census of the 1930s was classified, and this was “connected with the Holodomor, of course, and with the repressions”; those who had carried out the “previous” census were repressed, and in their place “people were chosen who drew the figures the authorities needed,” and the census itself was redone about two years later^[20]. The historian gives the assessment “they drew the figures Stalin needed” from memory and rather briefly — so it is worth restoring the exact chronology.

The census was held on 6 January 1937, and within ten days it was declared “wrecking”: it revealed an enormous demographic deficit — a shortfall of millions of people, made up of the victims of the Holodomor and the collapse of the birth rate. The population of the USSR was counted at about “162” million — substantially less than Soviet forecasts, which rested on inflated expectations of growth, had predicted. The census materials were classified for decades, and its organizers — the head of the USSR state statistics Ivan Kraval, the head of the census bureau Olimpii Kvitkin (shot in 1937), and the statistician Mykhailo Kurman — were arrested; some of those who ran it were executed. A new census was held in January 1939, and it produced politically acceptable, inflated figures for population “growth.” In other words, the state not only engineered the famine but also deliberately rewrote the demographic statistics to conceal its scale — evidence of intent, not of “natural disaster.”

This is not the site’s own conjecture: Dribnytsya names the sources to check directly — historian Hennadii Yefimenko, a specialist in Soviet Ukraine, and numerous articles on the site of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) and the Institute of History of Ukraine^[21]. It was Yefimenko who compiled the published collection of documents on the repressed 1937 census.

Why: a motive, not chance

If the famine was man-made, the main question arises — why. The answer that distinguishes the Holodomor from an ordinary crop failure lies in the realm of politics, not weather. The collectivization of 1929–30 triggered a wave of peasant uprisings, and the most numerous of them were precisely in Ukraine^[7]. At first Stalin temporarily backed off with his article “Dizzy with Success” (1930), and the protests subsided; but already in the autumn of that same year a resolution on the pace of collectivization was issued, ordering Ukraine to “take one of the first places” — the Ukrainian countryside was to pass through the crucible of collectivization by 1933^[14]. Stalin ordered Ukraine driven into collective farms, well aware that it would rise up again. He regarded the Ukrainian national movement as the greatest threat to the USSR, so the terror by famine was directed precisely at the Ukrainian lands^[8].

To the political motive was added an economic one. The USSR was carrying out forced industrialization, for which it needed to buy machine tools and equipment in the West — and therefore to earn hard currency. This came from exports: grain (along with timber and minerals) was shipped abroad even when people were dying of hunger in the villages. So grain was taken from the peasants for sale as well^[11]. The famine was not a side effect but a means of simultaneously breaking resistance and extracting a resource.

Hence the mechanism itself: from November 1932 to February 1933, villages were surrounded and everything edible was confiscated, down to the grain from the oven and the seed stock, so that people would die. In parallel, dekulakization was under way: “kulaks” were divided into three categories — execution, deportation to another republic, resettlement within the republic — with all their property confiscated^[9]. These were not the consequences of a crop failure but a planned operation against a specific stratum on a specific territory.

That is precisely why the event is qualified as genocide: the parliaments of many countries have recognized the Holodomor as such^[10]. Tellingly, Raphael Lemkin — the jurist who actually introduced the term “genocide” (1944) — in his 1953 work analyzed the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a classic example of Soviet genocide.

The “black board”: the mechanism of terror by famine

The terror by famine had a concrete administrative instrument — the “black board”. Officials from the city would arrive in a village and issue an ultimatum: join the collective farm and surrender all property — or the village would be placed on the “black board”^[15]. A village so listed found itself under blockade: no one could enter or leave; Komsomol members and communists went from yard to yard and swept up everything there was — down to the stores in the oven — that is, they deliberately destroyed all the food. Within a few weeks the village simply died out from hunger^[16]. This was terror by famine in its purest form: a starving person no longer thinks about resisting the authorities.

In the debate Dribnytsya asserts that the practice of “black boards” was applied only on the territory of Soviet Ukraine^[15]. This calls for a clarification. The “black board” regime was indeed introduced by a resolution of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U of 18 November 1932, and it was pointedly aimed at the Ukrainian peasantry — but it was not confined to the administrative borders of the Ukrainian SSR: historians (in particular, Doctor of Historical Sciences Heorhii Papakin) record “black boards” also in the Kuban and the North Caucasus in areas of compact Ukrainian settlement, and partly in the Lower Volga. In other words, it was a practice directed against Ukrainians as such, not merely within the Ukrainian SSR — which makes its purposeful, rather than “natural,” character all the more evident.

The scale of this operation was not local. Overall the man-made famine claimed up to 4 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, and by the spring of 1933 collectivization had swept up as much as 70% of Ukrainian peasants; nowhere else was this practice applied in such a form^[17]. It is precisely the combination of blockading villages, the total confiscation of food, and coercion into collective farms that distinguishes the man-made Holodomor from any “natural” crop failure.

The Holodomor in the context of the 20th century

The man-made famine of 1932–33 was not an isolated episode. Historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes that Ukraine found itself at the epicenter of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century: the First and Second World Wars, communist terror, three famines, and mass deportations^[12]. In his work “Bloodlands” (2010), Snyder places Ukraine within the broader space of Eastern Europe — the lands between a notional West and a notional Russia, where millions died systematically from deliberate policy rather than from combat^[13]. In this framework the Holodomor appears not as a chance disaster nor as a “famine that was everywhere,” but as one of the central crimes of the era — alongside the Great Terror and the Nazi murders, but with its own purposeful logic directed against the Ukrainian countryside.

What this means

The argument over “natural or man-made” is not a terminological trifle. If the famine was natural, then there is neither a culprit nor intent; if it was man-made, then there are both policy and responsibility. The facts stand on the side of the latter: a good harvest on the eve, selective geography along the line of grain procurement, decades of official denial, and recognition as genocide at the level of the U.S. Congress Commission. The Holodomor was not a whim of the weather but the consequence of decisions made in Moscow.