The Hunger

1929

Grain and meat. In 1929 the Party launched the First Five-Year Plan to remake industry and farming, and peasants and herders were pushed into collective farms. Famines followed in several regions, and historians count them in the plural. This story follows Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Russian Volga and North Caucasus, and first asks how many died.

1933

How many? Sarah Cameron gives 5.5 to 6.5 million dead for the Union, Nicolas Werth 6.5 to 7 million, and Russia’s State Duma some 7 million. The Law Library of Congress, taking its figure from Robert Conquest, gives about 14 million. Levchuk’s demographers count 3.9 million for Ukraine and 3.3 million for the Russian republic, before Werth’s 1.3 to 1.5 million for Kazakhstan. A joint statement at the UN in 2003, backed by Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the U.S., gives 7 to 10 million for Ukraine alone. The demographers reconstruct populations; the Duma and the UN statement give no method.

1930

Asharshylyk. In Kazakhstan the famine is known as Asharshylyk. Many Kazakhs were nomads who moved with their herds along set routes, and in 1929 and 1930 activists in certain regions began to settle them and put them on collective farms at once. Cameron dates the start of hunger to the winter of 1930, a year before other parts of the Union. It struck Russian and Ukrainian peasant communities in the republic too, she writes, but hit the nomads with particular intensity. Filipp Goloshchekin led the republic’s Party for much of the famine.

1931–1933

Herds and flight. In 1930 Kazakh herders were named the Union’s main suppliers of meat, Werth writes, and RFE/RL reports a mass requisition of livestock. Historians differ on the main spark: Matthew Payne stresses forced sedentarisation, Niccolò Pianciola the grain procurements. More than 1.1 million people left in 1931–33, many for Xinjiang. Nurtazina reports Talas Omarbekov’s account that border guards had orders to shoot refugees, and Tatimov’s that two died for every refugee who survived; Cameron adds that border closures may have been developed in one famine and used in another.

17 Sep 1932

Moscow knew. Stalin and Goloshchekin wrote to each other regularly, and Stalin knew how bad it was. On 17 September 1932, nearly three years in, the Central Committee authorised limited concessions: nomads could own animals, and food aid was to be sent. Cameron adds that at several key points Stalin knew and offered no concessions. In early 1933 Moscow fired Goloshchekin, and the famine went on until 1934.

2016

Was it planned? Cameron writes that the five Western scholars of the Kazakh famine agree Moscow used famine to bring Kazakhs under Soviet rule, but disagree on how far it foresaw the scale. Werth calls the famine “unplanned”, the result of destroying the herding economy and aggravated by local officials’ prejudice. Of the five, only Payne calls it genocide; Cameron’s own view is that it does not fit the UN definition but may fit broader ones. Historians and politicians in Kazakhstan have called for it to be recognised as genocide, RFE/RL reports.

7 Aug 1932

The law of 7 August 1932. Across the Union, taking state or collective-farm property now meant death or, where there were extenuating circumstances, at least ten years in prison. The Law Library of Congress says it served the grain procurement set for Ukraine and became in practice a tool against people gleaning harvested fields. The same report says no formal legal act proves an organised campaign to wipe out Ukrainians, but that these documents are generally recognised as the legal background to actions that led to mass death.

Oct 1932

Blacklists. In the autumn of 1932 extraordinary committees went out: Molotov to Ukraine and Kaganovich to the North Caucasus, say Levchuk and colleagues; Werth puts both men in Ukraine and the Kuban. Farms, villages and districts that missed their plan were blacklisted, with fines in kind and the confiscation of all foodstuffs. The blacklists also reached the Volga, Werth writes, but Levchuk’s team finds them far less sweeping there than in Ukraine.

22 Jan 1933

The border closes. On 22 January 1933 the Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars ordered a stop to the mass exit of peasants from Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The Library of Congress says it banned train tickets for local people and ordered police and military units to catch those who tried to leave; on 16 February the ban was extended to the Lower Volga, where detentions were much fewer. Werth quotes Stalin’s own telegram of that date. The Senate says he ordered the borders sealed; the 2010 Kyiv ruling says he and Molotov signed the directive.

6 May 1933

Stalin’s words. On 6 May 1933 Stalin wrote to Mikhail Sholokhov that the farmers’ tacit, bloodless sabotage was a “silent” war against Soviet power: “War by starvation”. His sentence accuses the farmers of waging it. Werth reads that letter, a speech of 27 November 1932 calling for a “knock-out punch”, and a letter from Stanislav Kosior in March 1933 as showing that the leadership meant famine to teach peasants a lesson. That is Werth’s reading, not a quoted order.

1933

The Volga and the Caucasus. The Duma named the Volga, the Central Black Earth region, the North Caucasus, the Urals and part of Western Siberia, in the Russian republic of the time, which also held the Crimea. Levchuk’s team counts 3.3 million direct losses there, 32 per 1,000 people against Ukraine’s 133. The Volga German republic, Krasnodar and Saratov lost 207, 141 and 132 per 1,000. Werth puts the Volga’s rate at up to five percent and finds “clearly no national issue” there; Levchuk’s team says nationality mattered in some regions, as in Krasnodar and the Volga German republic, and that Saratov also had high losses.

1933

Counting Ukraine. Demographers at Kyiv’s Ptoukha Institute and the University of North Carolina count 3.9 million excess deaths and 0.6 million lost births, losses equal to 15.3 percent of Soviet Ukraine’s people in 1933 with births included. Meslé and Vallin give 2.6 million deaths and 1.1 million lost births. President Yushchenko has said up to 10 million died, historian Stanislav Kulchytsky about 3.5 million; the demographers call estimates that high anecdotal and questionable. At the June 1933 peak Wolowyna counts 28,000 losses a day in Ukraine, against 12,000 in Russia in July.

1933

Counting Kazakhstan. Most Western scholars say about 1.5 million died; Davies and Wheatcroft give 1.3 to 1.5 million. That is about a quarter of the republic’s people by Cameron’s count and roughly a third by RFE/RL’s; Cameron’s third is of Kazakhs, not of all the people. Scholars in Kazakhstan go higher: 1.75 million deaths, 42 percent of Kazakhs, in a 1989 study that counts a loss of about 2 million, and 2.5 million in Tatimov and Aliev. Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic. By the Kyiv demographers’ reckoning, Ukraine lost the most people but Kazakhstan the larger share.

31 Mar 1933

What the world was told. On 29 March 1933 Gareth Jones, a former secretary to David Lloyd George, told the press of villages where the cry was “There is no bread. We are dying.” Two days later the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty called it a “scare story”. He wrote that conditions were “definitely bad” in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga, that Kazakstan’s nomads had seen “the most deplorable results”, and that there was “no actual starvation or deaths from starvation” but widespread mortality from diseases of malnutrition. Jones replied in the Times that he stood by his statement.

1937

The silence. Applebaum says the Soviet system tried to cover up the famine at once, even hiding a census of 1937 that showed large numbers of deaths. Rudnytskyi’s team writes that for many years the Soviet government blocked access to demographic information. Cameron adds that Soviet publications said little of the Kazakh famine, and that in 2016 Kazakhstan’s secret police archives, and some leaders’ personal files, were closed to most researchers.

Nov 1932

The case for genocide. Its argument is that several things came together, aimed at one republic. Applebaum lists blacklists, a cordon round Ukraine’s border, measures against Ukrainian institutions and language, and an end to Ukrainisation. Werth adds a campaign against “Ukrainian nationalism” with some 200,000 arrests in 1932–33, and the confiscation of all foodstuffs. Rudnytskyi’s team writes that the famine in Ukraine and the Kuban had also a national and ethnic component, citing Kulchytskyi and Graziosi. Applebaum says plainly that it was intended to kill more people in Ukraine. Werth writes that the pioneering works of Robert Conquest and James Mace made historians take up the question.

9 Dec 1948

The word. Article II also lists “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word, wrote in 1953, as a Senate resolution quotes him, that the Soviet case was “a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation”; the essay itself was not read for this story. Applebaum says she is “very happy to call it a genocide” in Lemkin’s sense but that it is harder in international law, because the Convention was written with the Soviet Union’s help and the Soviet side wanted the Ukrainian famine left out. The dispute turns on intent, and on whether a national group was the target.

15 Dec 2022

Those who say genocide. Ukraine’s law of 28 November 2006 states that the Holodomor was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. In 2010 the Kyiv Court of Appeal ruled that Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and four others committed genocide, and closed the case because all were dead; there was no trial. A 2018 Senate resolution recognised the finding of the commission Congress set up in 1985, and on 15 December 2022 the European Parliament voted 507 to 12, with 17 abstentions, to recognise it as genocide. Other parliaments have voted too; this story did not count them.

2 Apr 2008

What Russia’s Duma said. On 2 April 2008, by 370 votes to 56, the Duma said that repressive grain measures worsened the crop failure of 1932, that “there is no historical evidence” the famine was organised along ethnic lines, and that millions of Soviet citizens of many peoples were its victims. It also “strongly condemn[ed] the regime which disdained human life”, and backed the 2003 UN statement. One view, as Levchuk’s team describes it, is that there was no Ukrainian national factor, only a common tragedy of excessive procurements. The team answers that a claim of “fairly similar consequences” in both republics “is not supported by demographic evidence”: relative losses were four times higher in Ukraine.

2008

Historians who doubt it. Kuromiya’s 2008 essay takes up a debate started by R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft’s 2004 book, with Michael Ellman and Mark Tauger; that book could not be read for this story. Levchuk’s team summarises their view as an absolute shortage of food, and notes that Ukraine and the North Caucasus got the biggest quota cuts, 35 and 30 percent, and that food aid went to Ukraine in 1933. The Library of Congress says the documents historians use “do not indicate the extinction” of Ukrainians. Werth replies that the aid was negligible, going to those who could work. Kuromiya ends by stressing the international context.

Oct 2025

Kazakhstan’s answer. A state commission of 1992 looked at the famine; Cameron says it ruled it a genocide, RFE/RL that it called it “ethnocide”, and Kazakhstan then postponed a formal assessment. At the Astana memorial in 2012 Nazarbayev urged remembrance but warned against politicising it, and in 2021 Tokayev asked for research “without slogans or sensationalism”. Kazakhstan’s leaders have described the famine as the result of misguided Soviet policies, not an intended crime. In October 2025 Astana’s city administration replaced “Holodomor” with “famine” on a plaque, citing bilingual consistency; critics see an attempt to downplay Soviet responsibility. Cameron says official fears of souring relations with Russia may explain why attention faded.

8 Dec 1991

After the Union. Cameron writes that discussion of the Kazakh famine exploded into public view only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet Union began to crumble. On 1 December 1991 Ukraine voted on independence, a week before the Belovezha Accords. Applebaum says the revived memory of the famine was “an important motivation” for Ukrainians, though she sees other reasons too, and that the revival of the Ukrainian idea “did help undermine the Soviet Union”. That is her view, not a finding.