Ukrainian Famine

Famines due to crop failure, warfare, and drought have recurred throughout history in Ukraine, including one induced by severe drought and military requisitions in 1921-1922 that resulted in only one-third the normal harvest. The result in 1921-1922 was one million dead, from a combination of hunger and infectious disease.

But the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was caused exclusively by deliberate Soviet Stalinist policy rather than by climate, specifically in order to:

• break peasant resistence to collectivization
• destroy Ukrainian village culture
• forcibly trade grain for machinery

Estimates of Ukrainian dead from the famine of 1932-1933 range from two million to six million, and this event constitutes a planned genocide nearly comparable to the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis a decade later.

Reference

"Encyclopedia of Ukraine" Volodymyr Kubijovyc, editor, University of Toronto Press 1984, Volume 1, pages 853-855, Famine article, ISBN 0802033628