Scope and duration The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR as well as the
Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (a part of the
Ukrainian SSR at the time) in spring 1932, and from February to July 1933, with the most victims recorded in spring 1933. The consequences are evident in demographic statistics: between 1926 and 1939, the
Ukrainian population increased by only 6.6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16.9% and 11.7% respectively. The number of
Ukrainians as ethnicity decreased by 10%. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons of grain, as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in towns were drastically cut back, and in winter 1932–1933 and spring 1933, people in many urban areas starved. Urban workers were supplied by a
rationing system and therefore could occasionally assist their starving relatives in the countryside, but rations were gradually cut. By spring 1933, urban residents also faced starvation. It is estimated 70% to 80% of all famine deaths during the Holodomor in eight analyzed Oblasts in the Soviet Union occurred in the first seven months of 1933. The first reports of mass
malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of
Uman, reported in January 1933 by
Vinnytsia and
Kyiv oblasts. By mid-January 1933, there were reports about mass "difficulties" with food in urban areas, which had been undersupplied through the rationing system, and deaths from starvation among people who were refused rations, according to the December 1932 decree of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. By the beginning of February 1933, according to reports from local authorities and Ukrainian
GPU (secret police), the most affected area was
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which also suffered from epidemics of
typhus and
malaria.
Odesa and Kyiv oblasts were second and third respectively. By mid-March, most of the reports of starvation originated from Kyiv Oblast. By mid-April 1933,
Kharkiv Oblast reached the top of the most affected list, while Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Vinnytsia, and
Donetsk oblasts, and Moldavian SSR were next on the list. Reports about mass deaths from starvation, dated mid-May through the beginning of June 1933, originated from
raions in Kyiv and Kharkiv oblasts. The "less affected" list noted
Chernihiv Oblast and northern parts of Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts. The Central Committee of the CP(b) of Ukraine Decree of 8 February 1933 said no hunger cases should have remained untreated.
The Ukrainian Weekly, which was tracking the situation in 1933, reported the difficulties in communications and the appalling situation in Ukraine. Local authorities had to submit reports about the numbers suffering from hunger, the reasons for hunger, number of deaths from hunger, food aid provided from local sources, and centrally provided food aid required. The GPU managed parallel reporting and food assistance in the Ukrainian SSR. Many regional reports and most of the central summary reports are available from present-day central and regional Ukrainian archives.
Causes Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the
cause of the famine was man-made. The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as
R. W. Davies and
Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of... natural causes", though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies. Among contemporary historians it is debated whether the famine was an intended result of such policies, whether the Holodomor was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by
Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid
Soviet industrialisation and
collectivization of agriculture. A middle position, held for example by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their
nationalist sentiments. Some scholars suggest that the famine was a consequence of human-made and natural factors. The most prevalent man-made factor was changes made to agriculture because of rapid
industrialisation during the
First Five Year Plan. There are also those who blame a systematic set of policies perpetrated by the Soviet government under
Stalin designed to exterminate the Ukrainians.
Low harvest According to historian
Stephen G. Wheatcroft, the grain yield for the Soviet Union preceding the famine was a low harvest of between 55 and 60 million tons, likely in part caused by damp weather and low traction power, yet official statistics mistakenly reported a yield of 68.9 million tons. (A single ton of grain is enough to provide a good bread ration containing kCal per person for three people for one year.) Historian Mark Tauger has suggested that drought and damp weather were causes of the low harvest. Mark Tauger suggested that heavy rains would help the harvest while Stephen Wheatcroft suggested it would hurt it, which Natalya Naumenko notes as a disagreement in scholarship. Another factor which reduced the harvest suggested by Tauger included endemic plant rust. However, in regard to plant disease, Stephen Wheatcroft notes that the Soviet extension of sown area combined with lack of crop rotation may have exacerbated the problem, which Tauger also acknowledges in regard to the latter. This idea was supported by most of the party in the 1920s. with greater tolerance for the rights of Soviet Ukrainians. This campaign of "colonizing" the peasantry had its roots both in old
Russian Imperialism and modern
social engineering of the
nation state yet with key differences to the latter such as Soviet repression reflecting more the weakness of said state rather than its strength.
Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians It has been proposed that the Soviet leadership used the human-made famine to attack
Ukrainian nationalism, and thus it could fall under the legal definition of genocide. For example, special and particularly lethal policies were adopted in and largely limited to Soviet Ukraine at the end of 1932 and 1933. According to
Timothy Snyder, "each of them may seem like an
anodyne administrative measure, and each of them was certainly presented as such at the time, and yet each had to kill." Other sources discuss the famine in relation to a project of imperialism or colonialism of Ukraine by the Soviet state. with the areas of most disastrous famine shaded black According to a
Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine such as increased procurement rate, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower numbers of tractors which the paper argues demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians. The paper found from its analysis that "the regime intended to take more grain from Ukrainian areas after conditioning for factors such as production capacity" and noting that "in areas that the Bolshevik regime marked as important for grain production, ethnic Russians replaced ethnic Ukrainians as the largest ethnic group". Mark Tauger criticized Natalya Naumenko's work as being based on: "major historical inaccuracies and falsehoods, omissions of essential evidence contained in her sources or easily available, and substantial misunderstandings of certain key topics". For example, Naumenko ignored Tauger's findings of 8.94 million tons of the harvest that had been lost to crop "rust and smut", Naumenko criticizes Tauger's view of the efficacy of collective farms arguing Tauger's view goes against the consensus, Tauger argues in his counter reply that Naumenko's attempt to correspond collectivization rates to famine mortality fails because "there was no single level of collectivization anywhere in the USSR in 1930, especially in the Ukrainian Republic" and that "since collectivization changed significantly by 1932–1933, any connection between 1930 and 1933 omits those changes and is therefore invalid". Oleh Wolowyna comments that peasant resistance and the ensuing repression of said resistance was a critical factor for the famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia populated by national minorities like Germans and Ukrainians allegedly tainted by "fascism and bourgeois nationalism" according to Soviet authorities.
Regional variation The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses were
Kyiv and
Kharkiv, which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country. A potential explanation for this was that Kharkiv and Kyiv fulfilled and over fulfilled their grain procurements in 1930 which led to
raions in these oblasts having their procurement quotas doubled in 1931 compared to the national average increase in procurement rate of 9%. While Kharkiv and Kyiv had their quotas increased, the Odesa oblast and some raions of Dnipropetrovsk oblast had their procurement quotas decreased. According to Nataliia Levchuk of the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies, "the distribution of the largely increased 1931 grain quotas in Kharkiv and Kyiv oblasts by raion was very uneven and unjustified because it was done disproportionally to the percentage of wheat sown area and their potential grain capacity."
Repressive policies es and their punishment in the
Bashtanka Raion,
Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine. Several repressive policies were implemented in Ukraine immediately preceding, during, and proceeding the famine, including but not limited to cultural-religious persecution the
Law of Spikelets,
Blacklisting,
the internal passport system, and harsh grain requisitions.
Preceding the famine Coiner of the term genocide,
Raphael Lemkin considered the repression of the Orthodox Church to be a prong of genocide against Ukrainians when seen in correlation to the Holodomor famine. Collectivization did not just entail the acquisition of land from farmers but also the closing of churches, burning of icons, and the arrests of priests. Associating the church with the tsarist regime, the Soviet state continued to undermine the church through expropriations and repression. They cut off state financial support to the church and secularized church schools. By early 1930 75% of the Autocephalist
parishes in Ukraine were persecuted by Soviet authorities. The GPU instigated a show trial which denounced the Orthodox Church in Ukraine as a "nationalist, political, counter-revolutionary organization" and instigated a staged "self-dissolution." However the Church was later allowed to reorganize in December 1930 under a pro-Soviet cosmopolitan leader of
Ivan Pavlovsky yet purges of the Church reignited during the
Great Purge. Changes in cultural politics also occurred. First soviet
show trial in Ukraine in connection to the member of the
Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party has taken place as early as 1921. Yet, the first show trial related to Ukraine in the period of the
First five-year plan was a trial in 1928 in
North Caucasus Krai, known as
Shakhty Trial. Prior to this in October 1925 Shakhty
Okrug (previously part of
Donets Governorate) was transferred from
Ukrainian SSR to
RSFSR and thus the trial was held in Moscow.Yet, one of the central ones, was the
"Union for the Freedom of Ukraine" Trial in which 45 intellectuals, higher education professors, writers, a theologian and a priest were publicly prosecuted in
Kharkiv, then capital of Soviet Ukraine. Fifteen of the accused were executed, and 248 with links to the defendants were sent to the camps.
Ukrainian Youth Association was also considered a "sub-division" of the "Union for Freedom of Ukraine" and thus its members were also trialed. Other notable Ukrainian processes included "People's Revolutionary Socialist Party" trial in 1930 (it was claimed that this was an illegal armed insurgent organisation created in December 1929, which existed in
Ukraine and
Chechnya) and "Ukrainian National Center" trial in 1931 (another non-existent counter-revolutionary organisation). In
RSFSR at that time some other
show trials such as Industrial Party Trial (1930) and the
1931 Menshevik Trial were held. The total number is not known, but tens of thousands of people are estimated to have been arrested, exiled, and/or executed during and after the trial including 30,000 intellectuals, writers, teachers, and scientists.
During the famine The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property", nicknamed by the farmers the
Law of Spikelets, was enacted on 7 August 1932. The purpose of the law was to protect the property of the
kolkhoz collective farms. It was nicknamed the Law of Spikelets because it allowed people to be prosecuted for
gleaning leftover grain from the fields. There were more than 200,000 people sentenced under this law.
Stalin wrote a letter to
Lazar Kaganovich on 11 September 1932, shortly before Kaganovich and
Vyacheslav Molotov were appointed heads of special commissions to oversee the grain procurements in Ukraine and Kuban (a region populated primarily by ethnic Ukrainians at the time), in which Stalin urged Kaganovich to force Ukraine into absolute compliance: The blacklist system was formalized in 1932 by the 20 November decree "The Struggle against Kurkul Influence in Collective Farms"; blacklisting, synonymous with a board of infamy, was one of the elements of agitation-propaganda in the
Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian
Kuban region in the 1930s. A blacklisted collective farm, village, or
raion (district) had its monetary loans and grain advances called in, stores closed, grain supplies, livestock, and food confiscated as a penalty, and was cut off from trade. Its Communist Party and collective farm committees were purged and subject to arrest, and their territory was forcibly cordoned off by the
OGPU secret police. Although nominally targeting collective farms failing to meet grain quotas and independent farmers with outstanding tax-in-kind, in practice the punishment was applied to all residents of affected villages and raions, including teachers, tradespeople, and children. In the end 37 out of 392 districts along with at least 400 collective farms where put on the "black board" in Ukraine, more than half of the blacklisted farms being in
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast alone. Every single raion in Dnipropetrovsk had at least one blacklisted village, and in Vinnytsia oblast five entire raions were blacklisted. This oblast is situated right in the middle of traditional lands of the
Zaporizhian Cossacks. Cossack villages were also blacklisted in the Volga and Kuban regions of Russia. Some blacklisted areas in
Kharkiv could have death rates exceeding 40% while in other areas such as
Vinnytsia blacklisting had no particular effect on mortality. The
passport system in the Soviet Union (identity cards) was introduced on 27 December 1932 to deal with the exodus of peasants from the countryside. Individuals not having such a document could not leave their homes on pain of administrative penalties, such as internment in
labour camps (
Gulag). On 22 January 1933,
Joseph Stalin signed a secret decree restricting travel by peasants after requests for bread began in the Kuban and Ukraine. Soviet authorities blamed the exodus of peasants during the famine on anti-Soviet elements, saying that "like the outflow from Ukraine last year, was organized by the enemies of Soviet power." There was a wave of migration due to starvation and authorities responded by introducing a requirement that passports be used to go between republics and banning travel by rail. During March 1933
GPU reported that 219,460 people were either intercepted and escorted back or arrested at its checkpoints meant to prevent movement of peasants between districts. It has been estimated that there were some 150,000 excess deaths as a result of this policy, and one historian asserts that these deaths constitute a
crime against humanity. In contrast, historian
Stephen Kotkin argues that the sealing of the Ukrainian borders caused by the internal passport system was in order to prevent the spread of famine-related diseases. Between January and mid-April 1933, a factor contributing to a surge of deaths within certain regions of Ukraine during the period was the relentless search for alleged hidden grain by the confiscation of all food stuffs from certain households, which Stalin implicitly approved of through a telegram he sent on 1 January 1933 to the Ukrainian government reminding Ukrainian farmers of the severe penalties for not surrendering grain they may be hiding. On the other hand, considerable grain reserves were held back by the Soviet government. By 1 July 1933, around 1,141,000 tons of grain were kept in partially secret reserves which the government did not want to touch. Stephen Wheatcroft, Mark Tauger, and R.W. Davies conclude: "it seems certain that, if Stalin had risked lower levels of these reserves in spring and summer 1933, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of lives could have been saved". In order to make up for unfulfilled grain procurement quotas in Ukraine, reserves of grain were confiscated from three sources including, according to Oleh Wolowyna, "(a) grain set side for seed for the next harvest; (b) a grain fund for emergencies; (c) grain issued to collective farmers for previously completed work, which had to be returned if the collective farm did not fulfill its quota."
Near the end of and after the famine In Ukraine, there was a widespread purge of Communist party officials at all levels. According to Oleh Wolowyna, 390 "anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary insurgent and chauvinist" groups were eliminated resulting in 37,797 arrests, that led to 719 executions, 8,003 people being sent to
Gulag camps, and 2,728 being put into internal exile. 120,000 individuals in Ukraine were reviewed in the first 10 months of 1933 in a top-to-bottom purge of the Communist party resulting in 23% being eliminated as perceived class hostile elements.
Pavel Postyshev was set in charge of placing people at the head of Machine-Tractor Stations in Ukraine which were responsible for purging elements deemed to be class hostile. The secretary of the Kharkiv Oblast referred to "bourgeois-nationalistic rabble" as "class enemies" even near the end of the famine. By the end of 1933, 60% of the heads of village councils and raion committees in Ukraine were replaced with an additional 40,000 lower-tier workers being purged.
Bandura is a traditional Ukrainian musical instrument, whereas
bandurists were the carriers of traditional songs and folklore. One of the communist newspapers in 1930 already stated that "being in love with nationalist romance is not a communist thing" and in December 1933 during the All-Ukrainian Union of Art Workers, the
bandura and
kobza were declared class-enemy instruments, which lead to the beginning of the repressions against the musicians playing them. Despite the crisis, the Soviet government refused to ask for foreign aid for the famine and persistently denied the famine's existence. What aid was given was selectively distributed to preserve the collective farm system. Grain producing oblasts in Ukraine such as
Dnipropetrovsk were given more aid at an earlier time than more severely affected regions like
Kharkiv which produced less grain.
Joseph Stalin had quoted
Vladimir Lenin during the famine declaring: "
He who does not work, neither shall he eat." This perspective is argued by
Michael Ellman to have influenced official policy during the famine, with those deemed to be idlers being disfavored in aid distribution as compared to those deemed "conscientiously working collective farmers". In this vein, Olga Andriewsky states that Soviet archives indicate that the most productive workers were prioritized for receiving food aid. Food rationing in Ukraine was determined by city categories (where one lived, with capitals and industrial centers being given preferential distribution), occupational categories (with industrial and railroad workers being prioritized over blue collar workers and intelligentsia), status in the family unit (with employed persons being entitled to higher rations than dependents and the elderly), and type of workplace in relation to industrialization (with those who worked in industrial endeavors near steel mills being preferred in distribution over those who worked in rural areas or in food). According to
James Abbe, who visited Ukraine at that time, while the Soviet government insisted on him as well as other foreigners to sign an affidavit stating that "they had seen no forced labor in the Ukraine", "only the actual industrial workers had received enough to eat and even their families had suffered". Describing the coal mines he visited in Donetsk region,
James Abbe mentions: "The next day we went into the question of forced labor. Of course, the armed soldiers situated in the mine shafts, power houses and tipples had bayonets fastened to their rifles and revolvers strapped to their belts; but they were doubtless guarding the property — though the superintendent failed to tell us what they were guarding the mines against. Anyhow, the system of issuing and revoking food cards is far more sinister and effective than bayonets". There was also migration in to Ukraine as a response to the famine: in response to the demographic collapse, the Soviet authorities ordered large-scale resettlements, with over 117,000 peasants from remote regions of the Soviet Union taking over the deserted farms. Areas depopulated by the famine were resettled by Russians in the
Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and
Luhansk oblasts, but not as much so in central Ukraine. In some areas where depopulation was due to migration rather than mortality, Ukrainians returned to their places of residence to find their homes occupied by Russians, leading to widespread fights between Ukrainian farmers and Russian settlers. Such clashes caused around one million Russian settlers to be returned home.
Torgsin system Torgsin networks appeared in 1931.They were selling goods for foreign currency or exchanging them for precious metals. Originally only exclusively for foreigners, but later soviet citizens were also allowed to exchange the goods. During Holodomor people brought family heritage - crosses, earrings, wedding rings to Torgsins and exchanged it for special stamps, for which they could obtain basic goods - mostly flour, cereals or sugar. Torgsins operated at highly speculative prices and were known for long queues. With that mechanism authorities were able to extort from the population whatever could have been hidden during the confiscations. Many families survived, in particular thanks to Torgsin. Yet the network was also a cause of a psychological trauma, since people had to give up on family valuables and relics that had not only material, but also spiritual value. During the Holodomor, the network of torgsins expanded considerably—by the end of 1933, there were already about 300 such shops in Soviet Ukraine. In March 1933, the
secret police in
Kyiv province collected "ten or more reports of cannibalism every day" but concluded that "in reality there are many more such incidents", most of which went unreported. Those found guilty of cannibalism were often "imprisoned, executed, or lynched". But while the authorities were well informed about the extent of cannibalism, they also tried to suppress this information from becoming widely known, the chief of the secret police warning "that written notes on the subject do not circulate among the officials where they might cause rumours". And the information secretly collected failed to spur the Soviet government into action. Various reports of the horrors of the famine, including the cannibalism, were sent to Moscow, where they were apparently shelved and ignored.
Ukrainians in other republics Ukrainians in other parts of the Soviet Union also experienced famine and repressive policies. Rural districts with Ukrainian populations in parts of the Soviet Union outside of Ukraine had higher mortality rates in Russia and Belarus than other districts, this discrepancy did not however apply to urban Ukrainians in these areas. This is sometimes viewed as being connected to the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Kuban and the North Caucasus of Russia In 1932–1933, the policies of forced collectivization of the Ukrainian population of the Soviet Union, which caused a devastating famine that greatly affected the Ukrainian population of the Kuban. The number of documented victims of famine in Kuban was at least 62,000. According to other historians, the real death toll is many times higher. Brain Boeck thinks the figure more in the "hundreds of thousands". According to the Holodomor Museum, 300,000 people were deported from the North Caucasus between 1930 and 1933, two thirds of them from the Kuban region. Likely in connection to the affairs in Poltavskaia, Ukrainization was officially reversed in a decree on 26 December 1932; as stated in this decree, there was a two-week deadline to transfer all publishing and paperwork in the region to Russian, and the Ukrainian language was effectively banned in Kuban until 1991. Former
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a public statement giving the death toll at about 10 million. Some Ukrainian and Western historians use similar figures.
David R. Marples gave a figure of 7.5 million in 2007. During an international conference held in Ukraine in 2016,
Holodomor 1932–1933 loss of the Ukrainian nation, at the National
University of Kyiv Taras Shevchenko, it was claimed that during the Holodomor 7 million Ukrainians were killed, and in total, 10 million people died of starvation across the USSR. However, the use of the 7 to 20 million figures has been criticized by historians
Timothy D. Snyder and
Stephen G. Wheatcroft. Snyder wrote: "President Viktor Yushchenko does his country a grave disservice by claiming ten million deaths, thus exaggerating the number of Ukrainians killed by a factor of three; but it is true that the famine in Ukraine of 1932–1933 was a result of purposeful political decisions, and killed about three million people." In an email to
Postmedia News, Wheatcroft wrote: "I find it regrettable that Stephen Harper and other leading Western politicians are continuing to use such exaggerated figures for Ukrainian famine mortality" and "[t]here is absolutely no basis for accepting a figure of 10 million Ukrainians dying as a result of the famine of 1932–1933." In 2001, Wheatcroft had calculated total population loss (including
stillbirth) across the Union at 10 million and possibly up to 15 million between 1931 and 1934, including 2.8 million (and possibly up to 4.8 million excess deaths) and 3.7 million (up to 6.7 million) population losses including birth losses in Ukraine. In 2002, Ukrainian historian , using demographic data including those recently unclassified, narrowed the losses to about 3.2 million or, allowing for the lack of precise data, 3 million to 3.5 million. The number of recorded excess deaths extracted from the birth/death statistics from Soviet archives is contradictory. The data fail to add up to the differences between the results of the 1926 Census and the
1937 Census. Kulchytsky summarized the declassified Soviet statistics as showing a decrease of 538,000 people in the population of Soviet Ukraine between 1926 census (28,926,000) and 1937 census (28,388,000). Historians estimate a quarter of the death toll was from children and extrapolate a further 600,000 lost births. Similarly, Wheatcroft's work from Soviet archives showed that excess deaths in Ukraine in 1932–1933 numbered a minimum of 1.8 million (2.7 including birth losses): "Depending upon the estimations made concerning unregistered mortality and natality, these figures could be increased to a level of 2.8 million to a maximum of 4.8 million excess deaths and to 3.7 million to a maximum of 6.7 million population losses (including birth losses)". , 1933. Photo by
Alexander Wienerberger , 1932 A 2002 study by French demographer Jacques Vallin and colleagues utilising some similar primary sources to Kulchytsky, and performing an analysis with more sophisticated demographic tools with forward projection of expected growth from the 1926 census and backward projection from the 1939 census estimates the number of direct deaths for 1933 as 2.582 million. This number of deaths does not reflect the total demographic loss for Ukraine from these events as the fall of the birth rate during the crisis and the out-migration contribute to the latter as well. The total population shortfall from the expected value between 1926 and 1939 estimated by Vallin amounted to 4.566 million. Of this number, 1.057 million is attributed to the birth deficit, 930,000 to forced out-migration, and 2.582 million to the combination of excess mortality and voluntary out-migration. With the latter assumed to be negligible, this estimate gives the number of deaths as the result of the 1933 famine about 2.2 million. According to demographic studies,
life expectancy, which had been in the high forties to low fifties, fell sharply for those born in 1932 to 28 years, and for 1933 fell further to the extremely low 10.8 years for females and 7.3 years for males. It remained abnormally low for 1934 but, as commonly expected for the post-crisis period peaked in 1935–36. According to Snyder in 2010, the recorded figure of excess deaths was 2.4 million. However, Snyder claims that this figure is "substantially low" due to many deaths going unrecorded. Snyder states that demographic calculations carried out by the Ukrainian government provide a figure of 3.89 million dead, and opined that the actual figure is likely between these two figures, approximately 3.3 million deaths to starvation and disease related to the starvation in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. Snyder also estimates that of the million people who died in the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from famine at the same time, approximately 200,000 were ethnic Ukrainians due to Ukrainian-inhabited regions being particularly hard hit in Russia. Russian historian
Aleksandr Shubin and Kulchytsky believe that figures recorded by Soviet censuses are reliable, and that the figure of unrecorded deaths is not substantial. Shubin writes that for 10 years only around 300 000 deaths could go unrecorded in the whole Soviet Union, and estimates the number of direct deaths as between 1 and 2 millions. As a child,
Mikhail Gorbachev, born into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family, experienced the famine in
Stavropol Krai, Russia. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village,
Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father." Wheatcroft and
R. W. Davies concluded that disease was the cause of a large number of deaths: in 1932–1933, there were 1.2 million cases of typhus and 500,000 cases of
typhoid fever. Malnourishment increases fatality rates from many diseases, and are not counted by some historians. From 1932 to 1934, the largest rate of increase was recorded for typhus, commonly spread by
lice. In conditions of harvest failure and increased poverty, lice are likely to increase. Gathering numerous refugees at railway stations, on trains and elsewhere facilitates the spread. In 1933, the number of recorded cases was 20 times the 1929 level. The number of cases per head of population recorded in Ukraine in 1933 was already considerably higher than in the USSR as a whole. By June 1933, the incidence in Ukraine had increased to nearly 10 times the January level, and it was much higher than in the rest of the USSR. Estimates of the human losses due to famine must account for the numbers involved in migration (including
forced resettlement). According to Soviet statistics, the migration balance for the population in Ukraine for 1927–1936 period was a loss of 1.343 million people. Even when the data were collected, the Soviet statistical institutions acknowledged that the precision was less than for the data of the natural population change. The total number of deaths in Ukraine due to unnatural causes for the given ten years was 3.238 million. Accounting for the lack of precision, estimates of the human toll range from 2.2 million to 3.5 million deaths. According to Babyonyshev's 1981 estimate, about 81.3% of the famine victims in the Ukrainian SSR were ethnic Ukrainians, 4.5%
Russians, 1.4%
Jews and 1.1% were
Poles. Many
Belarusians,
Volga Germans and other nationalities were victims as well. The Ukrainian rural population was the hardest hit by the Holodomor. Since the peasantry constituted a demographic backbone of the Ukrainian nation, the tragedy deeply affected the Ukrainians for many years. In an October 2013 opinion poll (in Ukraine) 38.7% of those polled stated "my families had people affected by the famine", 39.2% stated they did not have such relatives, and 22.1% did not know. == Genocide question ==