The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Since the 1990s the term has been adopted by anti-Communists due to its similarity to the Holocaust in an attempt to promote the narrative that the Communists killed the Ukrainians while the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.
About Holodomor in brief
The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. Since 2006, the famine has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Since the 1990s the term has been adopted by anti-Communists due to its similarity to the Holocaust in an attempt to promote the narrative that the Communists killed the Ukrainians while the Nazis killed 6 million Jews. The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor and by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the U.S. and Canada by 1978. In English, the word has also been referred to the famine as the artificial terror famine, and terror-genocide as well as the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. It is a compound of Ukrainian words holod, ‘hunger’; and mor, ‘plague’ and means ‘to inflict death by hunger’ or’murder by hunger or starvation’ The term was used to create a ‘victimized national narrative’ in order to obscure the ‘dark’ sides of Ukraine’s national history and counter accusations that their fathers collaborated with the Germans to counter the Nazi war crimes of World War II.
In Ukraine, the first official use of the word was a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, on the occasion of the republic’s 17th anniversary. The term may have first appeared in print on 18 July 1988, when his article on the topic was published. It has been described as ‘artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country’s population.’ In 2010, the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv amounted to 10 million, with 3. 9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6. 1 million birth deficits. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A United Nations joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished. Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3. 3 and 7. 5 million. They note that the term ‘Holocaust’ is not explained at all in that it was introduced and popularized by the Ukrainian di aspora in North America before Ukraine became independent and that that that term ‘the Holocaust’ was not used at all at the time. They further note that the term Holododor has been used to. create a. national narrative and obscure the Jewish narrative with the ‘compete and counter-compete’ of the Holocaust with the Jewish narratives.
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This page is based on the article Holodomor published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
