Holodomor Truth

I have been an advocate of peace and from my studies, peace does not only mean absence of warm but freedom as well from mental, social, physical and psychological harm. Philippines has her fair share of problems brought up by wrong economic policies and/or wrong implementation. I could dig a number of social problems to specifically address these.

But in the other side of the earth, these problems had occured too, specifically in Ukrainian between 1932-1933 where 1/4 of the population of Soviet Union died of golodomor. Golodomor comes "golod" means hunger and with the label, golodomor, it means killed by hunger or mass famine.

In that year, scholars estimated a death of 6-8 million peasants where the aggregated number came from these areas of Soviet Union, Central Russia - 2 million deaths, Kazhastan - 1.7 million deaths, Ukraine - 1.3 million deaths, and North Caucasus - 1 million deaths.

In that period, Ukraine was in the regime of a communist Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin who sought massive transformation in his bureaucracy with extremely harsh collectivization of agriculture.

I began my research with the real causes of this tragedy but even historians and experts are divided by the real causes. Some say that the famine was deliberately engineered that they changed the golodomor to holodomor which sounds like "holocaust", and must then be meant as genocide. This was done to undermine or attack Ukraine but this was disputed by European Parliament in its resolution on 23 October 2008 rejected to call the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine as "an act of genocide" but a crime that was "cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin's regime in order to force through the Soviet Union's policy of collectivization of agriculture".

My research also revealed that there were other reasons for this famine. These included poor general and agricultural management and planning, despite the significant amount of modern agricultural mechanisms like agricultural tractors, harvesters employed. But the main reason was that they continually sowed wheat from 1929 on the same areas and even without fertilizers. Sovkhozes also suffered from a lack of manpower and infrastructure. Losses during harvesting were extremely high.

Further, under the strict rule of Stalin he pursued export of food when there was nothing to be be harvested, thus contributing to the famine.

I could only know that the failure of Stalin's management had contributed to this mass famine and should not be connoted as holodomor.