An Echo of the Holodomor

T he legislature of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region has voted to “expropriate the excess harvest” of farms in Russian-occupied Ukraine, reports Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal.

This is a policy that has some precedent.

The Ukrainian language has a word for carrying out political mass-murder by means of starvation: Holodomor. This word exists as a name for what the Russians did to the Ukrainians in 1932–33, when Ukraine was a not-entirely willing constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Socialist central planning achieved in Soviet agriculture what it achieves everywhere — shortages caused by the misallocation of resources — resulting in a collapse of the grain and potato harvests in the early 1930s. The socialist rulers in Moscow saw both a potential threat to their regime and a political opportunity, and so food was taken away from Ukrainian-populated areas and redirected toward Russian cities. The Russian elites and urban populations were fed, and the man-made famine was used as a political weapon to crush independence-minded anti-Soviet movements in Ukraine.

Nobody knows how many millions of people died in that famine. Estimates run as high as 10 million.

Some 200,000 people were imprisoned for “theft” under a special law adopted at the time; their “crime” was searching through agricultural waste for anything edible. Entire municipalities and regions were stripped of everything from grain to livestock as punishment for trumped-up political crimes. Moscow introduced a new internal-passport system to keep those being starved to death from leaving their towns and villages to seek food. Ukrainians attempting to flee the artificial famine zone were gunned down by Soviet troops. Soviet propaganda insisted that the Ukrainian farmers were dangerous traitors who were sheltering “kulaks,” Moscow’s all-purpose label for political enemies in the peasant classes.

The German-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was on the scene, having been granted permission to travel through the Soviet Union for the purpose of writing a pro-Soviet propaganda novel. What he saw was desperate mothers trying to pass their cadaverous, starving children through the windows of trains to strangers in the hope that they might be carried off to some place less hellish than the workers’ paradise.

(You can read about this and much more in Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine.)

The Soviet Union was committed to the worldwide workers’ revolution for about five minutes, after which it became what Russia still is today: a grotesque police state organized around Russian nationalism and kleptocracy, whose rulers rely on murder, torture, and state terrorism to maintain their power. Moscow isn’t Ukraine’s enemy or NATO’s enemy — Moscow is the enemy of all civilized peoples and countries. The Holodomor of the 1930s was intended in part to wipe out Ukrainian identity as a political force, and the current war in Ukraine has much the same goal, as Putin himself has so eloquently explained. There is no Ukraine and there are no Ukrainians, as far as he is concerned.

Perhaps it is only symbolic that the Krasnoyarsk legislature should so obviously evoke the Holodomor — approvingly — as Russians once again do their worst in Ukraine: murdering, raping, torturing, stealing, burning. But symbolism matters, and here, it speaks to intent.

Ukrainian forces are conducting operations inside Russia, as of course they should be, and are having more success in their efforts than the Russians would like to admit. The United States and our NATO allies should be clear-eyed about the fact that the weapons and intelligence we are providing to the Ukrainians are being used in that way, and should understand that sooner or later, Vladimir Putin and his wretched junta will decide that this amounts to a plain act of war and respond in some way that seems fitting from Moscow’s depraved and isolated point of view. We should be ready for that, and we should think carefully about what our own response is going to be.

President Joe Biden has pledged to defend “every inch” of NATO territory — and Putin already has made it clear what he will do if given an inch. President Biden is going to be tested, but he does not have a great deal of credibility in this matter, and neither do his Republican rivals: They remain committed to Donald Trump, who could not have made more plain or emphatic his contempt for NATO and its underlying principles of collective defense. If the world is looking to America for leadership in this crisis, the world is likely to be disappointed. We have the great luxury of not having been forced to learn the lessons that the Ukrainians have learned.

They are lessons we keep failing to learn, a fact in which there is both discredit and danger.