Other foodstuffs were also confiscated by search squads. Unsurprisingly, the situation in the Ukrainian countryside became desperate by winter. But the regime did not relent from its policies of confiscation, punishment and repression. On January 22, , in response to large numbers of hungry Ukrainian farmers leaving their villages in search of food, primarily to Russia, the Soviet leadership issued an order prohibiting their departure from the republic.
A campaign of persecution and destruction of many Ukrainian intellectuals and officials who were accused of being Ukrainian nationalists also began. By that time, resistance in the countryside had been broken.
Demographers estimate that close to four million residents of Ukraine, mostly Ukrainian peasants, perished as a direct result of starvation. In assessing the charge of genocide, one should recognize that it carries legal and political implications, and thus could be controversial.
Political figures and entities have sometimes made statements or offered opinions on specific cases where the question of genocide has been raised.
This is true of the famine in Ukraine. Some countries, like Canada, have adopted resolutions or statements recognizing the Holodomor as genocide. Controversy can also occur because of a lack of consensus among scholars.
There is general agreement among scholars that the Holodomor resulted from the actions of Soviet authorities and was thus man-made and avoidable. However, some scholars as well as political figures have argued that the charge of genocide in Ukraine cannot be substantiated because famine occurred at the same time in other republics of the Soviet Union, including Russia.
It has also been argued that the famine was used as a weapon aimed against peasants as a social group, and not against Ukrainians as an ethnic group.
Soviet officials used this perception of disloyalty to justify the "special measures" used in Ukraine. Failure to meet a grain quota was met with "in-kind fines" the confiscation of all food from a farm or village.
James Mace of University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy maintained that the state-organized mass killing of the rural population combined with the attempted destruction of Ukrainian culture amounted to genocide against the Ukrainian nation.
He noted that blockades were imposed to keep food from going in to Ukraine, and to keep starving Ukrainians inside. At the same time, leading elements of Ukrainian society, from teachers to artists, were imprisoned or killed. Abbott Gleason of Brown University agreed that new evidence demonstrated that Ukraine was singled out as a target of Stalin's ire. He cautioned that the strictest interpretation of genocide—the intention to exterminate the entire population—does not seem to fit with Stalin's desire to mold Ukraine into a "model Soviet Republic.
Stalin's plan for Ukraine as a "model Soviet Republic" envisioned the destruction of Ukrainian culture and the deaths of all who would cling to that culture, concluded Mace. The second panel wrestled with the issue of international reaction to the famine in Ukraine at the time.
Panelists Eugene Fishel of the Department of State and independent scholar Leonard Leshuk both agreed that there were accurate news accounts of the famine provided by Britsh journalists such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Garrett Jones. They were largely drowned out by positive media coverage of the Soviet Union by journalists seeking to curry favor with the Soviet government. The U. Moreover, the U. The final panel attempted to put the Ukrainian famine in the broader context of genocides throughout history.
Frank Chalk of Concordia University, Montreal noted that hunger had been used throughout history as a weapon against populations—from the Romans salting the fields of Carthage to colonial powers burning local crops to weaken and suppress revolts. Senate, in a resolution , affirmed the findings of the commission that Stalin had committed genocide. As in the case of Ukraine it generated so much hatred and resentment that it solidified Ukrainian nationalism.
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