The Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomors is celebrated mainly in modern Ukraine, but other states also have the right to hold such events. In particular, the famine in the USSR that took place in 1932-1933 actually covered the territories of Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, Western Siberia, Belarus and Ukraine. To a lesser extent, this disaster affected Armenia and Azerbaijan, the eastern regions of the USSR at that time, as well as the Moscow region and territories further north, although they were consuming, not producing agricultural products.
Famine in Russia was several times a century
In Russia in the pre-revolutionary period, the hungry years were not at all a rarity. So, it is believed that the lack of food was noted in 1880, 1892 (a particularly hungry year), 1891, 1897-1898, the same situation was in 1901, 1905-1908, 1911 and 1913. But the memory of the victims of the Holodomor was not honored at that time, since, despite the poor harvests, there were no mass casu alties among the population. Butthere was a sufficient reduction in its life span due to the use of surrogates instead of full-fledged products. It is worth noting that the state made attempts to stop the consequences of crop failures by creating grain reserves and providing them to those in need in famine years. In particular, this system worked especially well in 1911.
Victims of the first famine under the Soviet regime
The situation was somewhat different after the Great October Socialist Revolution, which was followed by the Civil War. Moreover, the overthrow of the tsarist regime was preceded by the First World War. Due to the crisis of power and the chaos prevailing in the country, the first famine in Soviet times was registered in 1921-1922, when a severe drought broke out, which increased the existing organizational and military problems. The main affected areas then were the Volga region and the Southern Urals. A day of remembrance for the victims of the Holodomors has not been established in Russia on this occasion, although the number of victims is impressive - 5 million people. The situation was so dire that the Bolshevik government accepted the help of Western countries and confiscated many church valuables under the guise of helping the starving.
The system is to blame for the death of people?
The memory of the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 is revered especially because during this period there were no natural prerequisites for such a situation - these years, unlike 1921, 1946, were not lean. Therefore, the communist regime is blamed for the death of millions of people (in accordance with the officialversion). It is based on the fact that since 1927 the government of the USSR has been developing plans for complete collectivization in agriculture by coercive methods, since with 95% loading of the sown areas, the yields were about half of the pre-war norm. Pressure was planned on the we althy part of the farmers, which, after its implementation, led to the fact that able-bodied youth fled to the cities, and about 2 million of the most intelligent workers were sent to the eastern regions of the country (where hunger manifested itself to a minimum).
The ruin of the "fists" led to a drop in the qualifications of the workforce
The Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor, unfortunately, can indeed be celebrated in connection with the long-standing mistakes of the Soviet leadership, since such a policy led to a significant shortage of draft power and a significant deterioration in the qualifications of agricultural workers in the most promising regions of the country already by the sowing season of 1931. The lack of quality farming skills among the collective farmers who remained in the field led to the fact that the fields were not well cultivated (even Red Army units were sent for weeding), and up to one-fifth of the entire crop was lost during harvesting.
Loss of half of the harvest and two million victims in Kazakhstan
The Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine could never have been established if in 1932 in this, at that time, Soviet republic, about 40 percent of the entire grain harvest had not been left in the vine. At the same time, almost the same figure (about 36%) was recorded insources for the grain-growing territories of the Lower and Upper Volga. Therefore, Ukraine in its misfortune of that time has "brothers in misfortune" - Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan. A feature of Ukraine is that the famine of those years covered almost its entire territory, so some local historians mistakenly believe that it was a directed genocide against the Ukrainian nation. In Kazakhstan, where no day of remembrance for the victims of the famines is celebrated, about 2 million people died from food shortages during the same period, while almost half of the indigenous people then left their place of residence and left for other regions.
Seizure of agricultural products was accompanied by repressions
When is the memory of Holodomor victims celebrated in Ukraine? The date of this event was set by Ukrainian President L. Kuchma and falls on the last Saturday of November (since 1998). Since 2000, on this day, not only the memory of the victims of the famine years has been honored, but also the memory of the victims of repression, of which there were a lot throughout the former USSR in the 30s of the 20th century. In particular, in 1932-1933, during the famine, the law “On Five Spikelets” was adopted, when for the attempts of starving people to find several stalks of grain in the field they could be shot (more than two thousand sentences were carried out) or convicted (about 52,000 people). And all this happened against the background of the mass seizure of agricultural products by the most inhuman methods. People were evicted, beaten, shot, frozen, buried waist-deep in pits, tortured, forced to drink water mixed with kerosene,destroyed their houses, etc. Thus, about 593 tons of grain were obtained.
Huge variation in death estimates
The memory of the victims of the Holodomor in all regions of many countries is honored today, as they were relatives of some of the living. And what happened then should not be forgotten, because the events of those years were more than tragic. In Ukraine in 1933, the death rate in some regions reached one hundred percent, up to 25 thousand died per day, and the total number of victims was - according to various estimates - from 4.6 million people (data from French researchers) to ten million (data from the US Congress, possibly, in the USSR as a whole). The exact figures are unlikely to be known sometime, since Soviet statistics have ceased to take into account the victims since April 1933, when their number approached 2.42 million people only in Ukraine. In addition, it is estimated that one million Ukrainian babies were not born during these years due to the famine.
Modern people should honor the memory of the victims of the Holodomor. Photos of those terrible years often show us cannibals from different parts of the former USSR with the remains of their victims. In total, about 2,500 episodes of cannibalism (murder for later consumption) and eating the corpses of the dead were officially recorded in Ukraine (again, until April 1933). Such events should not be repeated, especially since in modern reality hundreds of millions of people on the planet suffer and die from malnutrition.
Day of Remembrance of Holodomor Victims to the presenttime has become partly a topic for speculation of various kinds. For example, President of Ukraine V. Yushchenko issued a law in which the famine in Ukraine (at that time) is considered genocide, and its public denial is punishable by law as an illegal act aimed at humiliating the dignity of the Ukrainian nation, desecrating the memory of millions of victims. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation believes that the recognition of the famine as genocide is one-sided, since not only Ukrainians, but also many other nationalities suffered.
Ukrainians just honor the memory of the victims of the Holodomor. 2014 was no exception for this - in many cities, relevant events were held with the laying of flowers at the monuments to the victims of this tragedy.
Additional version about the causes of high mortality in 1932-1933
Unofficial studies of that difficult period of Soviet history recorded one rather curious fact - among the dead people there were a certain number of those who did not lose weight to a skeletal state from hunger, but, on the contrary, were very swollen. This is a feature of the famine of 1933, which is not found either in 1921, or in 1946 lean years, or even in besieged Leningrad. Cases of swelling have even been reported in families with hidden food supplies, which is believed to indicate the presence of toxins in the available food, as an option - of fungal origin. In particular, in those years, such a disease of bread as “rust” was officially recorded in the fields of all Eastern Europe, whichhit up to half of the crop in some areas, including Ukraine. Therefore, it is possible that some people died not from hunger, but from intoxication caused by the poor quality of the harvested crop, which does not detract from the overall scale of this tragedy. The memory of the victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics must be properly observed so that such events never happen again.
