They were declared enemies of the state, to be eliminated as a class. The wealthy and successful farmers who opposed collectivization were labeled "kulaks" by Soviet propaganda ("kulak" literally means "a fist"). Tens of thousands of farmers were arrested for participating in anti-Soviet activities, shot, or deported to labor camps. The Soviet secret police (GPU) and the Red Army ruthlessly suppressed these protests. Historians have recorded about 4,000 local rebellions against collectivization, taxation, terror, and violence by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. They were forced to surrender their land, livestock and farming tools, and work on government collective farms (kolhosps) as laborers. The majority of rural Ukrainians, who were independent small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted collectivization. Grain exports would be used to fund the USSR's transformation into an industrial power.
Collectivization gave the Soviet state direct control over Ukraine's rich agricultural resources and allowed the state to control the supply of grain for export. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and Ukrainian Communist Party functionaries who had supported pro-Ukrainian policies were executed by the Soviet regime.Īt the same time, Stalin decreed the First Five Year Plan, which included the collectivization of agriculture, effectively ending the NEP. To prevent "Ukrainian national counterrevolution," Stalin initiated mass-scale political repressions through widespread intimidation, arrests, and imprisonment. Feeling threatened by Ukraine's strengthening cultural autonomy, Stalin took measures to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and the Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elites to prevent them from seeking independence for Ukraine. Video: Timothy Snyder: Ukrainian History as World History: 1917-2017 Causes of the Holodomorīy the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The goal for the introduction of both NEP and Ukrainization was to increase support for the Soviet regime in Ukraine. Beginning in 1923, the Soviet authorities also pursued a policy of indigenization, which in the Ukrainian SSR took the form of Ukrainization, a policy of national and cultural liberalization that promoted Ukrainian language use in education, mass media, and government. The NEP was intended to provide greater economic freedom and permit private enterprise, mainly for independent farms and small businesses. Then the USSR sanctioned the requisition of all surplus agricultural products from the rural population, resulting in economic collapse.ĭiscontent among the farmers forced Lenin to halt the requisitions and bring in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March of 1921. The bulk of Ukrainian territory was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, or USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and by 1922 Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). The Ukrainian People's Republic fought the Bolshevik Red Army for three years (1918-1921) but lost its fight for independence. In the aftermath of World War I and the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in February 1917, Ukraine set up a provisional government, declaring itself the independent Ukrainian People's Republic in January 1918. Ukraine Before the Holodomorīeginning in the 18th century, Ukrainian territories were divided between the Austrian and Russian Empires. Through a study of the Holodomor (which has been referred to as the Great Famine), students can come to understand that the Holodomor is an example of how prejudice and a desire to dominate and control a particular ethnic group can lead to the misuse of power, mass oppression, and genocide.
Historians agree that, as with other genocides, the precise number will never be known. The most detailed demographic studies estimate the death toll at 3.9 million. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher). The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. In 19, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. What is especially horrific is that the withholding of food was used as a weapon of genocide and that it was done in a region of the world known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’.” – Prof. "In the case of the Holodomor, this was the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment (for survival).
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