Holodomor genocide question

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Holodomor genocide question explores the facts whether the Holodomor, the disastrous famine in 1933 that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine, was an ethnic genocide, a natural catastrophe or democide. ^{[1] [2][dubious – discuss]}

Currently there is no international consensus among scholars or politicians on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide. ^[3][4] As of April 2008, the parliament of Ukraine and the governments of several countries have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.^[5]

Contents 1 What is Genocide? 2 What is Democide? 3 Background Holodomor 4 Genocide debate: Ukrainian position 5 Genocide debate: Russian position 6 Genocide debate: Israeli/Jewish position 7 Genocide debate: other countries and international organizations 8 Scholarly debate 8.1 Genocide conclusions 8.2 Enviromental factors conclusions 9 References

[edit] What is Genocide?

See also: Genocide definitions

Genocide definitions contains a list of scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide,^[6] a word coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.^[7] While there are various definitions of the term, Adam Jones, has written that the majority of genocide scholars consider that "intent to destroy" is a requirement for any act to be labeled genocide, and that there is growing agreement on the inclusion of the physical destruction criterion.^[8]

Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial.

[edit] What is Democide?

See also: Democide

Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel for "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder". Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide, and it has found currency among other scholars.^[9][10][11]

According to Rummel, genocide has three different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes nonlethal acts that in the end eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. It is to avoid confusion regarding what meaning is intended that Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.^[12]

Rummel defines democide as "The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder". For example, government-sponsored killings for political reasons would be considered democide. Democide can also include deaths arising from "intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life"; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition. Capital punishment, actions taken against armed civilians during mob action or riot, and the deaths of noncombatants killed during attacks on military targets so long as the primary target is military, are not considered democide.^[13]

[edit] Background Holodomor

See also: Holodomor

The Ukrainian famine (1932–1933), or Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор) (literally in Ukrainian, "death by hunger"), was one of the largest national catastrophes in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation.

The word comes from the Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’, and mor, ‘plague’,^[14] possibly from the expression moryty holodom, ‘to inflict death by hunger’. The Ukrainian verb "moryty" (морити) means "to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody". The perfect form of the verb "moryty" is "zamoryty" — "kill or drive to death by hunger, exhausting work". The neologism “Holodomor” is given in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language as "artificial hunger, organised in vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population"^[15] Sometimes the expression is translated into English as "murder by hunger."^[16]

The reasons of the famine are the subject of intense scholarly and political debate. Some historians claim the famine was purposely engineered by the Soviet authorities to attack Ukrainian nationalism, while others view it as an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during Soviet industrialization.^[17]

The aftermath of Holodomor and its effects on the Ukrainian population can be seen more clearly by comparing the rate of population growth of the various ethnic groups within the Soviet Union when comparing the the Soviet census of 1926 with the 1937 census^[18].

Comparison of populations of the most numerous ethnic groups within the USSR according to the Soviet census of 1926-1937^[19]

Ethnicity	1926	1937	1937 in % compared to 1926
Russians	177 792 124	93 933 065	120,7%
Ukrainians	31 194 976	26 421 212	84.7%
Belarusians	4 738 923	4 874 061	102.9%
Uzbeks	3 955 238	4 550 532	115%
Tatars	3 029 995	3 793 413	125.2%
Kazakhs	3 968 289	2 862 458	72.1%
Jews	2 672 499	2 715 106	101.6%
Azerbajanians	1 706 605	2 134 648	124.1
Georgians	1 821 184	2 097 069	115.1%
Armenians	1 568 197	1 968 721	125.5%

[edit] Genocide debate: Ukrainian position

On November 28, 2006, the Government of Ukraine passed a law classifying the Holodomor as genocide ^[20]. Another bill sought to criminalize those disputing that the Holodomor was genocide, but such a law has never been adopted by the Ukrainian parliament. The law would make denying that the Holodomor was "an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people" equal to denying the Holocaust an act of genocide against the Jews. The maximum punishment proposed would be 100-300 "gross salaries", and a prison sentence of up to 2 years ^[21].

[edit] Genocide debate: Russian position

The Russian Federation accepts historic information about the Holodomor but rejects the argument that is was ethnic genocide by pointing out the fact that other Soviet citizens also died because of the Holodomor. On 2nd of April, 2008 - a new Russian bill was passed stating there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. This was in response to the 2006 Ukraine's parliament recognition that the Holodomor, which claimed the lives of around 3 million people, was an act of genocide by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian people. The declaration adopted by Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, condemned the Soviet regime's "disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals", along with "any attempts to revive totalitarian regimes that disregard the rights and lives of citizens in former Soviet states." yet stated that "there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds." ^[22]

According to a Moscow Times article: "The Kremlin argues that genocide is the killing of a population based on their ethnicity, whereas Stalin's regime annihilated all kinds of people indiscriminately, regardless of their ethnicity. But if the Kremlin really believed in this argument, it would officially acknowledge that Stalin's actions constituted mass genocide against all the peoples of the Soviet Union." ^[23].

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature and historian, opined in Izvestia that Holodomor was no different from the Russian famine of 1921 as both were caused by the ruthless robbery of peasants by Bolshevik grain procurements. According to him the lie of the Holodomor being genocide was invented decades later after the event and Ukrainian efforts to have the famine recognised as genocide is an act of historical revisionism that has now surpassed the level of Bolshevik agitprop. The writer cautions that the genocidal claim has its chances to be accepted by the West due to the general western ignorance of Russian and Ukrainian history.^[24]

[edit] Genocide debate: Israeli/Jewish position

Many Jewish people express the idea that the Holocaust was unique and lack of willingness to officially recognize that other tragic events as genocide such as the Holodomor are no less painful for Ukrainians, than the Holocaust is for Jews.^[25] Shimon Peres, President of Israel, has a position on genocides having said: "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide."^[26][27] He has made similar statement about the Holodomor.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Genocide debate: other countries and international organizations

Several countries and international organizations made public statements addressing the Holodomor and recognizing it as a tragedy. Some went further as to recognize it as genocide, or a crime against humanity.

In the framework of international organizations, such resolutions were adopted by

• Baltic Assembly ^{[28] [29]}
• General Assembly of the United Nations ^{[30] [31]}
• Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe ^{[32] [33] [34] [35]}
• Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ^{[36] [37]}
• United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture^{[38] [39] [40]}

Highlighted below are recognitions of Holodomor-Genocide as expressed by parliaments, Heads of Government and Heads of State of the following countries:

• Argentina^{[41][42][43][44]}

• Australia ^{[45] [46]}

• Brazil ^{[47] [48]}

• Canada ^{[49] [50] [51]}

• Chile ^[52]

• Colombia ^{[53] [54]}

• Ecuador ^{[55] [56]}

• Slovakia ^{[57] [58]}

• Spain ^{[59] [60]}

• USA ^{[61] [62]}

[edit] Scholarly debate

[edit] Genocide conclusions

Yaroslav Bilinsky Professor Emeritus Political Science and International Relations University of Delaware writes in the Journal of Genocide Research (1999) in a review of Holodomor literature he concludes:

" Political usage should not override scholarly logic, especially political usage which is just being established in independent Ukraine, arguably seven years late. My argument, however, is that both logic and political usage in Ukraine point in one direction, that of the terror-famine being genocidal. Stalin hated the Ukrainians, as accepted as a fact by Sakharov, revealed in the telegram to Zatonsky and inferred from his polemics with the Yugoslav communist Semich. Stalin decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture and under the cover of collectivization teach the Ukrainians a bloody lesson. Had it not been for Stalinist hubris and the incorporation of the more nationalistlcally minded and less physically decimated Western Ukrainians after 1939, the Ukrainian nation might have never recovered from the Stalinist offensive against the main army of the Ukrainian national movement, the peasants." ^[63]

James E, Mace, a Ukrainian historian of American-Irish origin wrote:

"For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as the most terrible part of a consistent policy carried out against them: the destruction of their cultural and spiritual elite which began with the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the destruction of the official Ukrainian wing of the Communist Party, and the destruction of their social basis in the countryside. Against them the famine seems to have been designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism."^[64]

Kyiv Post reports on Stanislav Kulchytsky:

So what actually happened in Ukraine in 1932–1933? And did it really amount to “genocide”?

...

Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky argues the way Stalin dealt with the Ukrainian countryside lifted the events out of the category of merely a famine and into the realm of genocide. In the fall of 1932, on orders from Moscow, government troops came to villages requisitioning grain to meet Stalin’s unrealistic quotas. At gunpoint they took away grain, even when peasants did not have enough for themselves. Those peasants who had no grain were deprived of other food stocks. Those who resisted were shot. Then a Jan. 22nd, 1933 directive from Stalin and Molotov sealed off Ukrainian borders to prevent famished peasants from escaping.^[65]

[edit] Enviromental factors conclusions

Historian David Marple commenting of the Holodomor debate states:

”There are no English-speaking historians working exclusively on Ukrainian aspects of the famine. Indeed the leading authority, in terms of output, appears to be Mark Tauger. Tauger subscribes to what he calls the "environmental school"; in other words, that climatic conditions resulted in famine, and the Stalin government took some steps to alleviate it.” ^[66]

[edit] References