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Basic Facts About The Holodomor

28,000people died per day at the height of the Holodomor in June of 1933 1

31%were children under the age of 10 2

1/3of all villages were blacklisted, blockaded and left to die

1 Source: Wolowyna, O. et al. 2020. “Monthly Distribution of 1933 Famine Losses in Soviet Ukraine and Russian Soviet Republic at the Regional Level.” Nationalities Papers, vol. 48, no. 3.

2 Source: Demography of a man-made human catastrophe: The case of massive famine in Ukraine 1932–1933

More facts about the Holodomor

For Educators

This section provides teachers and students with basic information, a historical background, comprehensive timeline, maps, excerpts from literature, and quotations on the Holodomor.

Teaching Materials

Contains a variety of lesson plans, interactive activities, and assignments for students in grades 6 to 12 targeting subjects of history, social justice, civics, politics, law, world issues, and religious education.

Learning Activities

This section provides teachers and students with websites, a list of documentaries, and print materials that are recommended for student research and classroom use.

Resources

Quotes

  • This is why, on the basis of the changed situation, we consider that local Ukrainian nationalism is the principle danger in Ukraine at the present time.

    Kossior, S.V.
    The Results and Immediate Tasks of the National Policy to Ukraine, Nov. 19, 1933

  • A genocide begins with the killing of one man – not for what he has done, but because of who he is.

    Kofi Annan
    Secretary General of the United Nations (Nobel Lecture, 2001)

  • What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. As long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek independence, so long [as] Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart of Sovietism ... For the Ukrainian is not and has never been, a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion — all are different.”

    Raphael Lemkin
    Father of the term genocide. Author of the UN Convention. Speech made before the American Ukrainian Community in New York City, 1953
    Lemkin, R. (2008). “Appendix A, Speech: ‘Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine.’” In Luciuk, Lubomyr Y.; Grekul, Lisa (eds.). Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, 235–242.

  • This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling powers.

    Wasyl Hryshko
    Survivor of the Holodomor. The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933. Toronto: Bahriany Foundation, Suzhero, Dobrus, 1983

  • The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by-product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw.

    Norman Davies
    Europe: A History, Oxford

  • 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 survivial). 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. Andrea Grazioci
    University of Naples

  • The famine was brought about in Ukraine in order to reduce the number of Ukrainians, resettle in their place people from other parts of the USSR, and in this way kill all thought of independence.

    Prokopenko
    Party member, government Soviet plenipotentiary. 1933

  • I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, ….to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such.

    Prof. James Mace
    Holodomor scholar

  • They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.

    Malcolm Muggeridge
    British foreign correspondent, 1933

  • After unanimously approving a report acknowledging the Holodomor as genocide, the PACE Assembly (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) said, “The methods used and statements made at the highest level in the context of Russia’s ongoing full-scale war of aggression again show a desire to ‘deny the Ukrainian people’s very right to exist as an independent nation.’”

    The parliamentarians pointed to the massacres of Bucha and Irpin, the use of powerful weapons in heavily populated areas, the targeting of civilian infrastructure by Russia, the ‘filtering out’ and torture of Ukrainian political and cultural elites, the systematic destruction of the spiritual legacy and cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people, the use of food as a weapon, and the forcible deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children as evidence of this new genocidal threat.

    PACE Assembly
    https://pace.coe.int/en/news/9625/ninety-years-on-from-the-holodomor-ukraine-once-again-faces-the-threat-of-genocide

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