The Great Famine of 1932-1933

This year marks the 65th anniversary of one of the world’s worst genocides: the Great Famine of 1932-1933 that ravaged Soviet-occupied Ukraine. The famine was not a natural disaster, but a man-made atrocity that killed 7 million men, women and children. It was a heinous use of food as a weapon – in this case used by Stalin and his henchmen to destroy a nation. The regime ordered the expropriation of foodstuffs in the possession of the rural population to destroy the nationally conscious segments of Ukrainian society, secure collectivization and support industrialization. It was, as the dissident samvydav of the 1970s put it, “a political famine,” “planned at the top by the Kremlin.”