The Holodomor: The Brutal Terror-Famine Inflicted on Millions of Ukrainians by the Soviet Union

The Holodomor was part of a larger Soviet famine that affected other grain-producing regions of the USSR in the same period, but Ukraine, as one of the Soviet Union's most important agricultural producers, bore the brunt of the crisis. The famine was not a result of natural disasters but of Stalinist policies, such as forced collectivization, that wreaked havoc on Ukraine's agricultural systems. The Ukrainian people, most of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, faced the unimaginable toll of starvation in what remains one of the most catastrophic peacetime events in Ukrainian history.

Ukraine, along with 15 other countries, officially recognized the Holodomor as a genocide perpetrated by the Soviet regime against the Ukrainian people, a stance that has been supported since 2006. The question of how many people perished remains a subject of debate. A joint declaration made to the United Nations in 2003 suggested that between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians died during the famine. However, current estimates by scholars tend to range from 3.5 to 5 million deaths.