The Holodomor: Stalin's Famine in Ukraine, 1932–33

By D. R. Ashworth · November 24, 2024 · Updated October 17, 2026 · 9 min read

• Soviet Union
• Famines
• Camps and Repression

The Holodomor — Ukrainian for “death by hunger” — was the famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine and the largely Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus. It killed roughly four million people. Bad harvests played a part, but the scale of the dying was the work of Soviet policy: Moscow demanded grain that Ukrainian villages did not have, punished the villages that fell short by taking what food remained, and then forbade starving peasants to leave in search of bread. Demographers now put the number of excess deaths in Soviet Ukraine at about 3.9 million.

This article sets out what happened, how historians count the dead, and how the Soviet state hid the famine for more than half a century. It then weighs the debate over whether the Holodomor was genocide — and explains why we conclude that it was.

Collectivization and the wider Soviet famines

From 1929 Stalin forced the Soviet Union’s peasants onto collective farms and deported the better-off farmers branded “kulaks”. Collectivization wrecked agriculture across the country, and in 1931–33 famine struck several regions at once. In Kazakhstan, where nomadic herders were forcibly settled, between 1.1 and 1.4 million people died — almost a third of the Kazakh population (Werth). The historian Andrea Graziosi describes these as a set of related Soviet famines, of which the Ukrainian one became distinct in both scale and cause (Graziosi).

What made Ukraine different was what the regime decided to do once hunger had begun.

The 1932 grain plan

For 1932 Ukraine was ordered to deliver 356 million poods of grain — about six million tons. Ukrainian leaders Vlas Chubar and Hryhorii Petrovskyi warned of hunger and asked Moscow for emergency food aid; their requests went unanswered. On 21 June 1932 Stalin and Molotov wrote to the Ukrainian leadership that “no decrease in deliveries owed by the kolkhozes and the sovkhozes will be tolerated” (Werth).

On 7 August 1932 a new law made the theft of “social property”, including grain from collective farms, punishable by ten years in a labor camp or by death (Werth).

The decree of 14 December 1932

In mid-December the grain campaign was fused with an attack on Ukrainian national life. A decree of 14 December 1932 ordered the arrest and, if necessary, execution of collective-farm heads and local officials who fell short of procurement targets. In the Kuban it ordered officials to switch official correspondence and schooling “immediately from Ukrainian to Russian”, halted Ukrainian-language publications, and had the secret police deport the overwhelmingly Ukrainian settlement of Poltavskaia to the far north. The historian Serhii Plokhy calls the decree “a direct assault on the Ukrainian political elite” (Plokhy).

Blacklists, searches and seized seed grain

When procurements fell behind in the autumn, the regime treated the shortfall as sabotage. Villages judged most “rebellious” were placed on a “blackboard” — a blacklist. Their state stores were emptied, all trade was stopped, credits were called in, a special levy was imposed and alleged saboteurs were arrested (Werth).

Arrests ran into the tens of thousands: some 20,000 people were arrested in November 1932 for “sabotage of collections” and more than 30,000 for theft of social property. On 29 December collective farms that had not met the plan were given five days to hand over even their seed reserves, and from 1 January 1933 hidden grain stocks were prosecuted under the August law (Werth). Taking the seed grain left many villages with neither food for the winter nor seed for the spring.

Sealing the villages: January 1933

As peasants began to flee the starving countryside, Stalin drafted a secret directive on 22 January 1933 to stop the exodus from Ukraine and the Kuban. Police patrols were posted at stations and on the roads; the next day the sale of train tickets to peasants was suspended, and rural soviets were soon barred from issuing travel documents. In the last week of January about 25,000 people were intercepted. Over two months more than 225,000 were stopped — and 85 percent of them were sent back to their villages, where there was no food (Werth).

The Kuban, an administrative region of the Russian republic populated largely by Ukrainians, was treated with particular severity: the populations of three Cossack settlements, more than 45,000 people, were deported wholesale to Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan (Werth).

How many died

The dying peaked in the first half of 1933. About 90 percent of all direct famine deaths in Soviet Ukraine occurred in that one year (Rudnytskyi et al.).

Counting the dead is difficult because the state did not want them counted: at the famine’s peak, only about a third of deaths were even registered (Werth). Historians therefore reconstruct the losses from census and vital-statistics data.

The losses fell overwhelmingly on the countryside: excess deaths equalled 16.5 percent of Ukraine’s rural population in 1933, against 4 percent in the towns (Rudnytskyi et al.). Before Soviet archives opened, outside estimates ranged far more widely, and some public statements still cite figures of seven million or more. Such higher numbers usually cover the whole Soviet Union or add lost births to deaths; the archive-based reconstructions above are the most reliable figures for Ukraine itself.

Hiding the famine

The regime that caused the famine also worked to erase it — a pattern of concealment that began while people were still dying.

• Denial. The Soviet government refused to admit that the famine existed at all (Plokhy). It was not officially acknowledged until December 1987, in Soviet Ukraine (Werth).
• Uncounted deaths. At the famine’s peak only about a third of deaths were registered by the state, leaving most of the dead out of the official record (Werth).
• Too little, too late, in the wrong places. When the state finally released some aid in 1933, it arrived too late, was insufficient, and went mainly to collective farms and the southern grain regions; people in the worst-hit areas of central Ukraine “were left to die” (Plokhy).

Western reporting was divided. On 29 March 1933 the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, back from a trip through the Soviet Union, issued a report from Berlin describing the famine he had seen. Two days later Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, answered him in an article headlined “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving”: “There is no actual starvation or death from starvation,” he wrote, “but there is widespread mortality from disease due to malnutrition” (Duranty).

Four years later the regime went further to bury the evidence. The 1937 census found far fewer people than official figures claimed. It was entirely suppressed, and the officials who organized it were arrested and executed — largely, as the historian Catherine Merridale shows, because the census exposed the scale of mortality in the famine (Merridale; The Lost Census).

The documentary record has grown since the Soviet collapse. In November 2006 Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, put about 5,000 pages of declassified secret-police material on display, including orders and directives, reports on repression in the countryside, criminal case files and censored peasant letters (KHPG).

Was it genocide?

That the famine was man-made is not seriously disputed. The debate is about intent: whether Stalin set out to destroy Ukrainians as a national group, which is what the legal definition of genocide requires, or whether he was ruthlessly pursuing grain and the subjugation of the peasantry wherever it lived.

The case for genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the word “genocide”, called the Soviet assault on Ukraine — including the famine — a case of genocide in a speech in New York in 1953 (National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide). The U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine reached the same conclusion in its 1988 report to Congress. Ukraine’s parliament recognized the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people in a law of 28 November 2006 (KHPG), and on 15 December 2022 the European Parliament did likewise, by 507 votes to 12 (European Parliament).

Among historians, Andrea Graziosi argues that the Soviet famines began as an unintended result of Stalin’s own policies, but that from the second half of 1932 Stalin deliberately used hunger against Ukraine, and that this can properly be called genocide (Graziosi). Nicolas Werth reaches a similar conclusion: Stalin’s intentional actions against the Ukrainian peasantry from late summer 1932 can be defined as genocide, even though they did not aim to exterminate the Ukrainian nation in its entirety (Werth). Michael Ellman argues that Stalin pursued a multi-pronged policy of state terror in 1932–33 in which starvation served as a cheap substitute for deportations (Ellman).

The case against. R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, economic historians of Soviet agriculture, call Stalin’s policies “ruthless and brutal” but find no serious grounds for the view that he pursued a conscious policy of starving the peasants (Davies and Wheatcroft). In their reading, the famine was the consequence of Stalin’s policies rather than their purpose. Other historians accept that the famine was deliberately aggravated but see the peasantry as a social class, rather than Ukrainians as a nation, as its main target (Werth).

Why we conclude it was genocide

Genocide is defined by intent: the intent to destroy a national group, in whole or in part. Stalin left no order saying “starve the Ukrainians”, and the debate turns on whether intent can be shown without one. We believe it can, because the regime’s own decisions in 1932–33 form a pattern that admits no other reasonable reading.

1. It knew. Ukraine’s own leaders warned Moscow of hunger and asked for food aid in 1932. The answer was that “no decrease in deliveries… will be tolerated” (Werth).
2. It took the means of survival. Villages that fell short were blacklisted and cut off from trade, and at the end of December even seed grain was confiscated (Werth). Whatever these measures yielded in grain, their effect was to strip food from people who were already starving.
3. It aimed at Ukrainians. The blockade of January 1933 was imposed on Ukraine and the Ukrainian-populated Kuban, trapping their peasants inside the famine zone (Werth). The decree of 14 December 1932 joined the grain campaign to the reversal of Ukrainian-language schooling and publishing in the Kuban and to a purge of Ukrainian officials (Plokhy). The famine and the assault on Ukrainian national institutions were carried out together, by the same decisions.
4. It hid what it had done. The regime denied the famine, left most deaths unrecorded, suppressed the 1937 census and executed the statisticians who conducted it, and acknowledged the catastrophe only in 1987 (Plokhy; Werth; Merridale). A government that believed it had suffered a natural disaster would not have needed to conceal it for half a century.

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word, held that genocide includes the destruction of a nation’s elites, institutions and culture as well as mass killing. By his standard, as Plokhy observes, the Holodomor “readily fits the definition” (Plokhy). It also meets the narrower test of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which covers “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (United Nations).

Davies and Wheatcroft are right that the Soviet famines did not begin as a plan to kill Ukrainians, and that peasants elsewhere also starved. But the question is not how the famine began; it is what the regime chose to do once it knew Ukrainians were dying in their millions. It chose to take their remaining food, seal them in, attack their national institutions, and hide the result. On that record, we conclude — with Lemkin, Graziosi, Werth, the 1988 U.S. Commission, Ukraine’s parliament and the European Parliament — that the Holodomor was genocide.

Further reading on this site

• Soviet forced population transfers — the deportation of whole peoples under Stalin.
• The Great Chinese Famine, 1959–1961 — the deadliest famine of the twentieth century, also caused by communist policy.
• All articles on famines and on the Soviet Union.