174-570: The Holodomor , also known as the Ukrainian Famine , was a human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians . The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union . While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, it remains in dispute whether
348-596: A ( first Yanukovych Government ) resolution to celebrate Shcherbytsky’s 85th anniversary with the erection of a monument in Kyiv . A street named after Shcherbytsky in Kamianske was renamed to Viacheslav Chornovil Street in 2016 due to Ukrainian decommunization laws . In the same year, a street named after him in Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) was renamed to Olena Blavatsky Street. In Shcherbytsky's birthplace Verkhnodniprovsk
522-452: A 100 percent collectivization rate, the more collectivized region's 1933 mortality rate increases by 58 per thousand relative to its 1927–1928 mortality rate". Naumenko believes the disagreement between her and Tauger is due to a "gulf in training and methods between quantitative fields like political science and economics and qualitative fields like history" noting that Tauger makes no comments on one of her paper's results section. Tauger made
696-593: A backdrop of conventional interventions through the state or markets, alternative initiatives have been pioneered to address the problem of food security. One pan-African example is the Great Green Wall . Another example is the "Community Area-Based Development Approach" to agricultural development ("CABDA"), an NGO programme with the objective of providing an alternative approach to increasing food security in Africa. CABDA proceeds through specific areas of intervention such as
870-569: A beginning of widespread expressions of discontent at the status of the Ukrainian economy beginning in 1986. Political groups in opposition to Shcherbytsky's rule began to form in 1987, and the next year, protests against his government began in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv . In July 1989, a series of strikes by coal miners in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, spurred by strikes in Siberia, began. Shcherbytsky's government replied by discrediting
1044-515: A bust depicting him was dismantled on 18 January 2024. Shcherbytsky was married to Ariadna Gavrilovna Shcherbitskaya, née Zheromskaya (1923–2015) on 13 November 1945. The couple had two children; son Valery (1946–1991), who died due to alcohol and drug addiction just one year after Shcherbytsky's death, and a daughter Olga (1953–2014), who died at a hospital in Kyiv after a serious and prolonged illness. He also had numerous grand and great-grandchildren. Olga
1218-525: A counter-reply to this reply by Naumenko. 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
1392-577: A crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Shcherbytsky ruled as a neo-Stalinist , overseeing Russification of Ukrainian society as well as a rapid shift to nuclear power, ultimately resulting in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster . Shcherbytsky was removed in 1989 amidst widespread protests against his rule, and died months later. Shcherbytsky was born in Verkhnodniprovsk on 17 February 1918 to Vasily Grigorievich Shcherbytsky (1890–1949) and Tatyana Ivanovna Shcherbitskaya (1898–1990), just two weeks after
1566-809: A draftsman, designer and compressor driver at the factories in Dnipropetrovsk. Shcherbytsky graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Chemical Technology Institute in 1941 and in the same year became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shcherbytsky was mobilized into the ranks of the Red Army . Because he was a graduate with
1740-474: A famine created by human rights abuses is the 1998 Sudan famine . AIDS is also having long-term economic effects on agriculture by reducing the available workforce, and is creating new vulnerabilities to famine by overburdening poor households. On the other hand, in the modern history of Africa on quite a few occasions famines acted as a major source of acute political instability. In Africa, if current trends of population growth and soil degradation continue,
1914-612: A famine of the proportions of the Great Leap Forward since 1961. Japan experienced more than 130 famines between 1603 and 1868. Volodymyr Shcherbytsky Volodymyr Vasyliovych Shcherbytsky (17 February 1918 – 16 February 1990) was a Ukrainian Soviet politician who served as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1972 to 1989. A close ally of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev , Shcherbytsky replaced reformist leader Petro Shelest in 1972 as part of
SECTION 10
#17328445658382088-587: A group of party cadres from both the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia and emerging Donetsk Clan , both of whom were more supportive of Russification than other political clans in Ukraine. The Kharkiv Clan was pushed out of government and marginalised. Ideologically, Shcherbytsky was a neo-Stalinist and hardline conservative. The first year of his rule was marked by a wide-reaching purge of the KPU and Ukrainian civil society. As
2262-579: A major in chemical equipment and machinery, he was sent to attend short term courses at the Military Academy of Chemical Protection named after Voroshilov , which was evacuated from Moscow to Samarkand in Uzbek SSR . After graduation, Shcherbytsky was appointed head of the chemical unit within the 34th Infantry Regiment of the 473rd Infantry Division in the Transcaucasian Front . In November 1941,
2436-404: A network of granaries . Its famines generally occurred immediately after El Niño-Southern Oscillation -linked droughts and floods. These events are comparable, though somewhat smaller in scale, to the ecological trigger events of China's vast 19th-century famines. Qing China carried out its relief efforts, which included vast shipments of food, a requirement that the rich open their storehouses to
2610-553: A new method of political repression. Ukrainian language press, scholarly and cultural organisations which had flourished under Shcherbytsky's predecessor Shelest were repressed by Shcherbytsky. Shcherbytsky also made a point of speaking Russian at official functions while Shelest spoke Ukrainian in public events. In an October 1973 speech to fellow party members Shcherbytsky stated that as an " internationalist " Ukrainians were meant to "express feelings of friendship and brotherhood to all people of our country but first of all against
2784-474: 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
2958-630: 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
3132-606: A purge of conservative members pushed through by Gorbachev. Eight days later, upon the personal intervention of Gorbachev, he was removed as First Secretary of the KPU and replaced by Vladimir Ivashko , who took a more conciliatory line towards the growing protests. His removal, however, was not enough to stem the rapidly-growing discontent with the Soviet system in Ukraine, which continued to grow until Ukraine achieved independence two years later. Shcherbytsky died on 16 February 1990 - one day before his 72nd birthday, which also when he
3306-554: A result of the purge, which was co-orchestrated by Valentyn Malanchuk [ uk ] , 5% of the KPU's members were removed, and several leading Ukrainian intellectuals, among them anti-communist leaders Viacheslav Chornovil , Ivan Svitlychnyi , and Yevhen Sverstiuk , were arrested. Described by Peter Reddaway as the "heaviest single KGB assault", the intelligentsia interpreted the purge as an effort to undo Shelest's rule and reestablish Russian control over Ukraine. Ivan Dziuba 's book Internationalism or Russification? , which
3480-420: 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
3654-502: A series of government guidelines and regulations on how to respond to famines and food shortages called the Famine Code. The famine code was also one of the first attempts to scientifically predict famine in order to mitigate its effects. These were finally passed into law in 1883 under Lord Ripon . The Code introduced the first famine scale : three levels of food insecurity were defined: near-scarcity, scarcity, and famine. "Scarcity"
SECTION 20
#17328445658383828-503: A strategy of generating employment for these sections of the population and relied on open-ended public works to do so. During the 20th century, an estimated 70 to 120 million people died from famines across the world , of whom over half died in China, with an estimated 30 million dying during the famine of 1958–1961 , up to 10 million in the Chinese famine of 1928–1930 , and over two million in
4002-484: A suicide note explaining to his wife how to deal with cash, medals and small arms that were kept in the family home. He was buried at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. In 1994 the first President of Ukraine of independent Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk in interviews stated his views about Shcherbytsky’s positive legacy. In January 2003 Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine on humanitarian policy Dmytro Tabachnyk signed
4176-484: A supporter of increased Ukrainian cultural identification, Shcherbytsky was unfailingly loyal to Brezhnev, and conducted policy accordingly. Shcherbytsky's appointment was both a victory for the Soviet government and a personal victory for Brezhnev; Shcherbytsky was a member of Brezhnev's political clan, the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia , which was opposed to Shelest's Kharkiv Clan . In government, Shcherbytsky relied on
4350-614: 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
4524-481: A worldwide problem with hundreds of millions of people suffering. These famines cause widespread malnutrition and impoverishment. The famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s had an immense death toll, although Asian famines of the 20th century have also produced extensive death tolls. Modern African famines are characterized by widespread destitution and malnutrition, with heightened mortality confined to young children. Against
4698-412: A yield of 68.9 million tons. (Note that a single ton of grain is enough to feed 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
4872-566: Is zamoryty , 'kill or drive to death'. In English, the Holodomor has also been referred to as the artificial famine , terror-genocide and the great famine . It was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor , and by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada by 1978; in the Soviet Union , of which Ukraine
5046-616: Is 9.5 to 13 million people. The largest famine of the 20th century was the 1958–1961 famine associated with the Great Leap Forward in China. The immediate causes of this famine lay in Mao Zedong's ill-fated attempt to transform China from an agricultural nation to an industrial power in one huge leap. Communist Party cadres across China insisted that peasants abandon their farms for collective farms, and begin to produce steel in small foundries, often melting down their farm instruments in
5220-701: Is believed to have been a major cause of the collapse of the Old Kingdom . An account from the First Intermediate Period states, "All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children." As for recorded examples about more recent centuries: in the 1680s, famine extended across the entire Sahel , and in 1738 half the population of Timbuktu died of famine. In Egypt , between 1687 and 1731, there were six famines. The famine that afflicted Egypt in 1784 cost it roughly one-sixth of its population. The Maghreb experienced famine and plague in
5394-506: Is increasingly problematic: the Sahara reportedly spreads up to 48 kilometres (30 mi) per year. The most serious famines have been caused by a combination of drought, misguided economic policies, and conflict. The 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia, for example, was the outcome of all these three factors, made worse by the Communist government's censorship of the emerging crisis. In Capitalist Sudan at
Holodomor - Misplaced Pages Continue
5568-645: Is no definitive documentation that Stalin directly ordered the mass murder of Ukrainians. Barkan et al. state that the term Holodomor was "introduced and popularized by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America before Ukraine became independent" and that the term 'Holocaust' in reference to the famine "is not explained at all." The famine affected the Ukrainian SSR as well as the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (a part of
5742-449: Is no party, but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament. Instead of directing the districts, Kosior is always waffling between the directives of the CC VKP(b) and the demands of the district Party committees and waffled to the end. Lenin was right, when he said that a person who lacks the courage at the necessary moment to go against the current cannot be a real Bolshevik leader. Bad from
5916-458: Is now Ukraine. Matters in Ukraine are now extremely bad. Bad from the standpoint of the Party line. They say that there are two oblasts of Ukraine (Kyiv and Dnipropetrovs'k, it seems) where almost 50 raikomy [district Party committees] have come out against the plan of grain procurements, considering them unrealistic. In other raikomy , they confirm, the matter is no better. What does this look like? This
6090-450: Is responsible for up to 52% of Holodomor excess deaths . At every [train] station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering icons and linen in exchange for a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows—infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks. — Arthur Koestler , Hungarian-British journalist It has been proposed that
6264-530: Is taken, lives will be lost. The responsibility to address this lies with states", they added. In November 2021, the World Food Programme reported that 45 million people were "teetering on the very edge of famine" in 43 countries and that the slightest shock would push them over the precipice. This number had risen from 42 million earlier in 2021, and from 27 million in 2019. The slightest shock — be it extreme weather linked to climate change, conflict, or
6438-405: 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 . Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in
6612-439: Is therefore invalid". Tauger also criticizes Naumenko's ignoring of statistics Tauger's presented where "in her reply she completely ignored the quantitative data [Tauger] presented in [his] article" in which she against the evidence "denied that any famines took place in the later 1920s". To counter Naumenko's claim that collectivization explains the famine Tauger argues ( in his words) how agro-environmental disasters better explain
6786-428: Is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition , starvation , epidemic , and increased mortality . Every inhabited continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history. During the 19th and 20th century, Southeast and South Asia , as well as Eastern and Central Europe , suffered the greatest number of fatalities due to famine. Deaths caused by famine declined sharply beginning in
6960-618: The 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel caused the Gaza Strip famine . This includes a full ban on all shipments for a short time after the attack, later extremely restrictive security checks on aid attempting to go through the blockade, and Israeli protesters blocking aid . In 2024, famine conditions struck Haiti as a result of the ongoing Haitian crisis , resulting in a reported 6,000 people suffering from starvation and 5.4 million civilians— almost half of Haiti's population— suffering from "crisis levels of hunger or worse". While food insecurity
7134-576: The Chinese famine of 1942–1943 , and millions more lost in famines in North and East China. The USSR lost 8 million claimed by the Soviet famine of 1930–1933 , over a million in both the Soviet famine of 1946–1947 and Siege of Leningrad , the 5 million in the Russian famine of 1921–1922 , and others famines. Java suffered 2.5 million deaths under Japanese occupation during World War Two. The other most notable famine of
Holodomor - Misplaced Pages Continue
7308-611: The Communist Party of Ukraine . In February 1961, he was appointed chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers , the second highest post in the republic, but in June 1963, just after Petro Shelest had been appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine , Shcherbytysky was shifted to the lesser job of First Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee. On 16 October 1965, after Brezhnev had risen to
7482-530: The Netherlands had one of the most commercialized agricultural systems in Europe. They grew many industrial crops such as flax , hemp and hops . Agriculture became increasingly specialized and efficient. The efficiency of Dutch agriculture allowed for much more rapid urbanization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than anywhere else in Europe. As a result, productivity and wealth increased, allowing
7656-476: 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
7830-575: The Poor Law , the latter through soup kitchens . A systematic attempt at creating the necessary regulatory framework for dealing with famine was developed by the British Raj in the 1880s. In order to comprehensively address the issue of famine, the British created an Indian Famine commission to recommend steps that the government would be required to take in the event of a famine. The Famine Commission issued
8004-632: 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
8178-472: The Ukrainian nationalist movement subdued. Shcherbytsky was likewise a strong opponent of Gorbachev, saying in one instance: What fool (durak) invented this word perestroika ? Why rebuild the house? Is there anything wrong in the Soviet Union? We are fine! What is there to rebuild? It is necessary to improve, reorganize, but why, if the house is not falling apart, why does it need to be rebuilt? An advocate of increased nuclear power, Shcherbytsky's position
8352-525: The Union of Soviet Writers in Ukraine. The term holodomor may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, when Musiyenko's article on the topic was published. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, published in 2004, described as "artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country's population." According to Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve,
8526-547: The rinderpest epizootic , introduced into Eritrea by infected cattle, spread southwards reaching ultimately as far as South Africa . In Ethiopia it was estimated that as much as 90 percent of the national herd died, rendering rich farmers and herders destitute overnight. This coincided with drought associated with an El Niño oscillation, human epidemics of smallpox , and in several countries, intense war. The Ethiopian Great famine that afflicted Ethiopia from 1888 to 1892 cost it roughly one-third of its population. In Sudan
8700-462: The 16th and 17th century, the feudal system began to break down, and more prosperous farmers began to enclose their own land and improve their yields to sell the surplus crops for a profit. These capitalist landowners paid their labourers with money , thereby increasing the commercialization of rural society. In the emerging competitive labour market, better techniques for the improvement of labour productivity were increasingly valued and rewarded. It
8874-482: The 1870s to the 1970s, great famines killed an average of 928,000 people a year. Since 1980, annual deaths had dropped to an average of 75,000, less than 10% of what they had been until the 1970s. That reduction was achieved despite the approximately 150,000 lives lost in the 2011 Somalia famine . Yet in 2017, the UN officially declared famine had returned to Africa, with about 20 million people at risk of death from starvation in
SECTION 50
#17328445658389048-417: 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
9222-527: The 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year. The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat 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. Historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft lists four problems Soviet authorities ignored during collectivization that would hinder
9396-572: The 1970s, with numbers falling further since 2000. Since 2010, Africa has been the most affected continent in the world by famine. According to the United Nations World Food Programme , famine is declared when malnutrition is widespread, and when people have started dying of starvation through lack of access to sufficient, nutritious food. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification criteria define Phase 5 famine of acute food insecurity as occurring when all three of
9570-508: The African crisis has been interested in the political aspects of the continent, especially the liberation of the occupied parts of it and the elimination of racism. The organization has succeeded in this area but the economic field and development has not succeeded in these fields. African leaders have agreed to waive the role of their organization in the development to the United Nations through
9744-573: 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
9918-514: The Economic Commission for Africa "ECA". Chinese scholars had kept count of 1,828 instances of famine from 108 BC to 1911 in one province or another—an average of more than one famine per year. A major famine from 1333 to 1337 killed 6 million. The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed no fewer than 45 million people. China's Qing dynasty bureaucracy devoted extensive attention to minimizing famines with
10092-485: The Holodomor has been described as a "Ukrainian Holocaust". They assert that since the 1990s the term Holodomor has been widely adopted by anti-communists in order to draw parallels to the Holocaust . However this term has been criticized by some academics, as the Holocaust was a heavily documented, coordinated effort by Nazi Germany and its collaborators to eliminate certain ethnic groups such as Jews. By contrast, there
10266-466: 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
10440-505: 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
10614-577: The International Council of Voluntary Agencies and the World Food Programme said: "Girls and boys, men and women, are being starved by conflict and violence; by inequality; by the impacts of climate change; by the loss of land, jobs of prospects; by a fight against Covid-19 that has left them even further behind". The groups warned that funding had dwindled, while money alone would not be enough by itself. Governments should step in to end conflicts and ensure humanitarian access, they said. "If no action
SECTION 60
#173284456583810788-694: 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
10962-567: The Lithuanian Sąjūdis , was also founded in September 1989 by dissident leader Chornovil, and gathered far-reaching support from its early days. In the face of the strikes and continued pressure to step down from Moscow, Shcherbytsky was quickly removed from all of his offices. On 20 September 1989, Shcherbytsky lost his membership of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in
11136-533: The Netherlands to maintain a steady food supply. By 1650, English agriculture had also become commercialized on a much wider scale. The last peacetime famine in England was in 1623–24. There were still periods of hunger, as in the Netherlands, but no more famines ever occurred. Common areas for pasture were enclosed for private use and large scale, efficient farms were consolidated. Other technical developments included
11310-554: The North Caucasus, and only 43 in the Central Black Earth Oblast (out of 1,630 total). Reports two years prior recorded over 4,000 unrests in Ukraine, while in other agricultural regions - Central Black Earth, Middle Volga, Lower Volga, and North Caucasus - the numbers were sightly above 1,000. OGPU's summaries also cited public proclamations of Ukrainian insurgents to restore the independence of Ukraine , while reports by
11484-647: The Portuguese wrote of African raids on Portuguese merchants solely for food, giving clear signs of famine. Additionally, instances of cannibalism by the African Jaga were also more prevalent during this time frame, indicating an extreme deprivation of a primary food source. A notable period of famine occurred around the turn of the 20th century in the Congo Free State . In forming this state, Leopold used mass labor camps to finance his empire. This period resulted in
11658-570: The Prime Minister. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The maize corn was then re-sold for a penny a pound. In 1846, Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws , tariffs on grain which kept
11832-403: 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
12006-420: The Soviet elite. Leon Trotsky , however, opposed the policy of forced collectivisation under Stalin and would have favoured a voluntary , gradual approach towards collective farming 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
12180-591: 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
12354-431: 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
12528-588: The Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals". Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger", "killing by hunger, killing by starvation", or sometimes "murder by hunger or starvation." It is a compound of the Ukrainian holod , ' hunger ', and mor , ' plague '. The expression holodom moryty means "to inflict death by hunger." The Ukrainian verb moryty ( морити ) means "to poison, to drive to exhaustion, or to torment." The perfective form of moryty
12702-704: The Soviet takeover of the city during the Ukrainian–Soviet War . During his school years, he worked as an activist and a member of the Komsomol from 1931. In 1934, while still in school, he became an instructor and agitator for the district committee of the Komsomol. In 1936, he entered the Faculty of Mechanics at the Dnipropetrovsk Chemical Technology Institute. During his training, he worked as
12876-667: The Sudan and Sahelian regions of Africa. This caused famine because even though the Sudanese Government believed there was a surplus of grain, there were local deficits across the region. In October 1984, television reports describing the Ethiopian famine as "biblical", prompted the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia, which raised large sums to alleviate the suffering. A primary cause of
13050-683: The Transcaucasian Front, where he served until the end of the war. In August 1945, the Transcaucasian Front was reorganized into the Tbilisi Military District and Shcherbytsky's last military assignment was as an assistant chief of the chemistry department of the district headquarters for combat training. In December 1945, he left the military service at the rank of captain. After World War II , he worked as an engineer in Dniprodzerzhynsk (now Kamianske ). From 1948 Shcherbytsky
13224-590: The USSR and was subject to unreasonably high grain quotas compared to the rest of the USSR. This caused Ukraine to be hit particularly hard by the famine. Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials vary greatly. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million died. However, current scholarship estimates a range significantly lower with 3.5 to 5 million victims. The famine's widespread impact on Ukraine persists to this day. Public discussion of
13398-517: The USSR in 1932". Other scholars argue that in other years preceding the famine this was not the case. For example, Stanislav Kulchytsky claims Ukraine produced more grain in 1930 than the Central Black Earth Oblast , Middle and Lower Volga and North Caucasus regions all together, which had never been done before, and on average gave 4.7 quintals of grain from every sown hectare to the state—a record-breaking index of marketability—but
13572-423: The Ukrainian Communist Party (500,000 members, ha, ha) there are not a few (yes, not a few!) rotten elements that are conscious or unconscious Petliura adherents and in the final analysis agents of Pilsudski. If the situation gets any worse, these elements won't hesitate to open a front within (and outside) the Party, against the Party. Worst of all, the Ukrainian leadership doesn't see these dangers.... Set yourself
13746-427: The Ukrainian SSR. Many regional reports and most of the central summary reports are available from present-day central and regional Ukrainian archives. While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, it remains in dispute 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
13920-496: The Ukrainian officials included information about the declining popularity and authority of the party among peasants. 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. The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for
14094-440: The advancement of agricultural technology and ultimately contributed to the famine: Mark Tauger notes that Soviet and Western specialist at the time noted draught power shortages and lack of crop rotation contributed to intense weed infestations, with these both being also factors Stephen Wheatcroft lists as contributing to the famine. Natalya Naumenko calculated that reduced agriculture production in "collectivized" collective farms
14268-411: The ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev . Gorbachev's liberal rule contrasted heavily with Shcherbytsky's hardline principles, and remaining Brezhnev loyalists either retired from their positions or were removed by Gorbachev. Shcherbytsky's removal was originally planned by Gorbachev, owing to the former's hardline rule. However, he decided to allow him to remain in office for several more years in order to keep
14442-791: 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
14616-417: The celebrations. But he arrived late, and complained to aides: "He told me: 'You will put your party card on the table if you bungle the parade'." The continually-worsening state of the Ukrainian economy, particularly in the industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, also undermined his popularity. Gorbachev's campaign of Glasnost , which called for increased openness regarding political matters, led to
14790-564: The century was the Bengal famine of 1943 , resulting both from the Japanese occupation of Burma , resulting in an influx of refugees, and blocking Burmese grain imports and a failure of the Bengali provincial Government to declare a famine , and fund relief, the imposition of grain and transport embargoes by the neighbouring provincial administrations, to prevent their own stocks being transferred to Bengal,
14964-572: 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
15138-566: The continent might be able to feed just 25% of its population by 2025, according to United Nations University (UNU)'s Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa. Famines in the early 21st century in Africa include the 2005–06 Niger food crisis , the 2010 Sahel famine and the 2011 East Africa drought , where two consecutive missed rainy seasons precipitated the one of the worst droughts in East Africa in 60 years. An estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people are reported to have died during
15312-428: The crisis deepened. Russell's ministry introduced public works projects, which by December 1846 employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer. The government was influenced by a laissez-faire belief that the market would provide the food needed. It halted government food and relief works, and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through
15486-465: The deadly interplay of both hunger drivers — could push tens of millions of people into irreversible peril, a prospect the agency had been warning of for more than a year. Afghanistan was becoming the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with the country's needs surpassing those of the other worst-hit countries — Ethiopia , South Sudan , Syria and even Yemen . In 2023 and 2024, the Israeli response to
15660-672: The death of up to 10 million Congolese from brutality, disease and famine. Some colonial "pacification" efforts often caused severe famine, notably with the repression of the Maji Maji revolt in Tanganyika in 1906. The introduction of cash crops such as cotton, and forcible measures to impel farmers to grow these crops, sometimes impoverished the peasantry in many areas, such as northern Nigeria, contributing to greater vulnerability to famine when severe drought struck in 1913. A large-scale famine occurred in Ethiopia in 1888 and in succeeding years, as
15834-478: The dissident movement to consider the outright separation of Ukraine from the Soviet Union rather than simply increased autonomy. Further purges continued throughout the 1970s, including against the Ukrainian academia and the filmmaking community. Through the Helsinki Accords the dissident movement reemerged and strengthened its position despite continuous attacks by Shcherbytsky's government. Shcherbytsky
16008-565: The division was formed in the cities of Baku and Sumgayit in Azerbaijan SSR . On 8 January 1942, the division was renamed as 75th Rifle Division, and in April of the same year, Shcherbytsky and the division took part in the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran . On the same year, he served in a tank brigade. In March 1943, Shcherbytsky was transferred to the chemical department at the headquarters of
16182-408: The draining of marshes, more efficient field use patterns, and the wider introduction of industrial crops. These agricultural developments led to wider prosperity in England and increasing urbanization. By the end of the 17th century, English agriculture was the most productive in Europe. In both England and the Netherlands, the population stabilized between 1650 and 1750, the same time period in which
16356-664: The drought was brief the main cause of death in Rwanda was due to Belgian prerogatives to acquisition grain from their colony (Rwanda). The increased grain acquisition was related to WW2. This and the drought caused 300,000 Rwandans to perish. From 1967 to 1969 large scale famine occurred in Biafra and Nigeria due to a government blockade of the Breakaway territory . It is estimated that 1.5 million people died of starvation due to this famine. Additionally, drought and other government interference with
16530-634: The efficacy of collective farms arguing Tauger's view goes against the consensus, she also states that the tenfold difference in death toll between the 1932-1933 Soviet famine and the Russian famine of 1891–1892 can only be explained by government policies, and that the infestations of pests and plant disease suggested by Tauger as a cause of the famine must also correspond such infestations to rates of collectivization due to deaths by area corresponding to this due Naumenko's findings that: "on average, if you compare two regions with similar pre-famine characteristics, one with zero collectivization rate and another with
16704-434: The escalating disaster was effectively suppressed. When the leadership did become aware of the scale of the famine, it did little to respond, and continued to ban any discussion of the cataclysm. This blanket suppression of news was so effective that very few Chinese citizens were aware of the scale of the famine, and the greatest peacetime demographic disaster of the 20th century only became widely known twenty years later, when
16878-408: 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
17052-530: The expanded policies of re-centralisation and suppression of Soviet dissidents , accompanied by a broad assault on Ukrainian culture and intensification of Russification . During Shcherbytsky's rule mass arrests were carried out that incarcerated any member of the intelligentsia that dared to dissent from official state policies. The expirations of political prisoners' sentences were increasingly followed by re-arrest and new sentences on charges of criminal activity. Incarceration in psychiatric institutions became
17226-545: The failure to implement India wide rationing by the central Delhi authority, hoarding and profiteering by merchants, medieval land management practices, an Axis powers denial program that confiscated boats once used to transport grain, a Delhi administration that prioritised supplying, and offering medical treatment to the British Indian Army, War workers, and Civil servants, over the populace at large, incompetence and ignorance, and an Imperial War Cabinet initially leaving
17400-446: The famine (one of the largest seen in the country) is that Ethiopia (and the surrounding Horn) was still recovering from the droughts which occurred in the mid-late 1970s. Compounding this problem was the intermittent fighting due to civil war , the government 's lack of organization in providing relief, and hoarding of supplies to control the population. Ultimately, over 1 million Ethiopians died and over 22 million people suffered due to
17574-419: The famine could have been greatly reduced or even eliminated" however (in his words) "if the regime had left that grain in Ukraine, then other parts of the USSR would have been even more deprived of food than they were, including Ukrainian cities and industrial sites, and the overall effect would still have been a major famine, even worse in "non-Ukrainian" regions." In fact in contrast to Naumenko's paper's claims
17748-423: 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
17922-588: The famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 33 other UN member states, the European Parliament , and 35 of the 50 states of the United States as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned
18096-444: 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
18270-536: The famines of the 20th century served the geopolitical purposes of governments, including traumatizing and replacing distrusted ethnic populations in strategically important regions, rendering regions vulnerable to invasion difficult to govern by an enemy power and shifting the burden of food shortage onto regions where the distress of the population posed a lesser risk of catastrophic regime de-legitimation. Until 2017, worldwide deaths from famine had been falling dramatically. The World Peace Foundation reported that from
18444-451: 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 main thing
18618-472: The first official use of famine was in a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi , First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine , on the occasion of the republic's 70th anniversary. Another early public usage in the Soviet Union was in a February 1988 speech by Oleksiy Musiyenko, Deputy Secretary for ideological matters of the party organisation of the Kyiv branch of
18792-764: The following situations exist at the same time: The declaration of a famine carries no binding obligations on the UN or member states, but serves to focus global attention on the problem. The scarcity of food refers to a situation where the availability of food is insufficient to meet the demands of a population, often resulting from factors like poor agricultural productivity, climate change, political instability, or economic crises. This shortage can lead to widespread hunger, malnutrition, and social unrest, especially in vulnerable regions. Food scarcity affects not only individual health and well-being but also contributes to greater inequality and economic decline as prices for essential items rise dramatically, further limiting access for
18966-533: The food supply caused 500 thousand Africans to perish in Central and West Africa. Famine recurred in the early 1970s, when Ethiopia and the west African Sahel suffered drought and famine . The Ethiopian famine of that time was closely linked to the crisis of feudalism in that country, and in due course helped to bring about the downfall of the Emperor Haile Selassie . The Sahelian famine was associated with
19140-477: The great Russian people , their culture , their language - the language of the Revolution , of Lenin , the language of international intercourse and unity". Shcherbytsky also claimed that "the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people" is "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and also international Zionism ". During Shcherbytsky's rule, Ukrainian-language education was greatly scaled back. Shcherbytsky also took aim at
19314-446: 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. Due to factional struggles with Bukharin wing of the party, peasant resistance to the NEP under Lenin , and
19488-432: The harvest that had been lost to crop "rust and smut", four reductions in grain procurement to Ukraine including a 39.5 million puds reduction in grain procurements ordered by Stalin, and that from Tauger's findings which are contrary to Naumenko's paper's claims the "per-capita grain procurements in Ukraine were less, often significantly less, than the per-capita procurements from the five other main grain-producing regions in
19662-605: The higher Ukrainian collectivization rates in Tauger's opinion actually indicate a pro-Ukrainian bias in Soviet policies rather than an anti-Ukrainian one: "[Soviet authorities] did not see collectivization as "discrimination" against Ukrainians; they saw it as a reflection of—in the leaders' view—Ukraine's relatively more advanced farming skills that made Ukraine better prepared for collectivization (Davies 1980a, 166, 187–188; Tauger 2006a)." Naumenko responded to some of Tauger's criticisms in another paper. Naumenko criticizes Tauger's view of
19836-616: The introduction of drought-resistant crops and new methods of food production such as agro-forestry. Piloted in Ethiopia in the 1990s it has spread to Malawi, Uganda, Eritrea and Kenya. In an analysis of the programme by the Overseas Development Institute , CABDA's focus on individual and community capacity-building is highlighted. This enables farmers to influence and drive their own development through community-run institutions, bringing food security to their household and region. The organization of African unity and its role in
20010-755: The issue to the Colonial administration to resolve, than to the original local crop failures, and blights. A few of the great famines of the late 20th century were: the Biafran famine in the 1960s, the Khmer Rouge -caused famine in Cambodia in the 1970s, the North Korean famine of the 1990s , and the Ethiopian famine of 1983–1985 . Approximately 3 million died as a consequence of the Second Congo War . The Ethiopian famine
20184-525: The late 18th century and early 19th century. There was famine in Tripoli in 1784, and in Tunis in 1785. According to John Iliffe, "Portuguese records of Angola from the 16th century show that a great famine occurred on average every seventy years; accompanied by epidemic disease, it might kill one-third or one-half of the population, destroying the demographic growth of a generation and forcing colonists back into
20358-442: The latter such as Soviet repression reflecting more the weakness of said state rather than its strength. In this vein by the summer of 1930, the government instituted a program of food requisitioning, ostensibly to increase grain exports. According to Natalya Naumenko, collectivization in the Soviet Union and lack of favored industries were primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows there
20532-484: The mid-19th century and the onset of the Industrial Revolution , it became possible for governments to alleviate the effects of famine through price controls , large scale importation of food products from foreign markets, stockpiling, rationing , regulation of production and charity . The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland was one of the first famines to feature such intervention, although the government response
20706-544: The mid-19th century, the system broke down. Thus the 1867–68 famine under the Tongzhi Restoration was successfully relieved but the Great North China Famine of 1877–78, caused by drought across northern China, was a catastrophe. The province of Shanxi was substantially depopulated as grains ran out, and desperately starving people stripped forests, fields, and their very houses for food. Estimated mortality
20880-576: The middle part of the 20th century, agriculturalists, economists and geographers did not consider Africa to be especially famine prone. From 1870 to 2010, 87% of deaths from famine occurred in Asia and Eastern Europe, with only 9.2% in Africa. There were notable counter-examples, such as the famine in Rwanda during World War II and the Malawi famine of 1949, but most famines were localized and brief food shortages. Although
21054-595: 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
21228-411: The need for industrialization, Joseph Stalin declared a need to extract a "tribute" or "tax" from the peasantry. This idea was supported by most of the party in the 1920s. The tribute collected by the party took on the form of a virtual war against the peasantry that would lead to its cultural destruction and the relegating of the countryside to essentially a colony homogenized to the urban culture of
21402-500: The new money to purchase manufactured goods. The agricultural and social developments encouraging increased food production were gradually taking place throughout the 16th century, but took off in the early 17th century. By the 1590s, these trends were sufficiently developed in the rich and commercialized province of Holland to allow its population to withstand a general outbreak of famine in Western Europe at that time. By that time,
21576-464: 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." Famine A famine is a widespread scarcity of food caused by several possible factors, including, but not limited to war , natural disasters , crop failure , widespread poverty , an economic catastrophe or government policies . This phenomenon
21750-683: The northern part of Nigeria, in South Sudan , in Yemen , and in Somalia . On 20 April 2021, hundreds of aid organizations from around the world wrote an open letter to The Guardian newspaper, warning that millions of people in Yemen , Afghanistan , Ethiopia , South Sudan , Burkina Faso , Democratic Republic of the Congo , Honduras , Venezuela , Nigeria , Haiti , Central African Republic , Uganda , Zimbabwe and Sudan faced starvation. Organizations including
21924-503: The number of deaths by famine markedly. That said, many African countries are not self-sufficient in food production, relying on income from cash crops to import food. Agriculture in Africa is susceptible to climatic fluctuations, especially droughts which can reduce the amount of food produced locally. Other agricultural problems include soil infertility , land degradation and erosion , swarms of desert locusts , which can destroy whole crops, and livestock diseases. Desertification
22098-613: 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. 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
22272-400: 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
22446-532: The period. In 2012, the Sahel drought put more than 10 million people in the western Sahel at risk of famine (according to a Methodist Relief & Development Fund (MRDF) aid expert), due to a month-long heat wave. Today, famine is most widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa , but with exhaustion of food resources, overdrafting of groundwater , wars, internal struggles, and economic failure, famine continues to be
22620-488: The poor, and price regulation, as part of a state guarantee of subsistence to the peasantry (known as ming-sheng ). However the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s disrupted the granary relief system such that 1850 to 1873 saw the population of China drop by over 30 million people from early deaths and missing births. When a stressed monarchy shifted from state management and direct shipments of grain to monetary charity in
22794-536: The poor. Addressing food scarcity requires sustainable agricultural practices, improved food distribution systems, and coordinated global efforts to alleviate poverty and inequality. The cyclical occurrence of famine has been a mainstay of societies engaged in subsistence agriculture since the dawn of agriculture itself. The frequency and intensity of famine has fluctuated throughout history, depending on changes in food demand, such as population growth , and supply-side shifts caused by changing climatic conditions. In
22968-558: The price of bread artificially high. The famine situation worsened during 1846 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland. Despite this promising start, the measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Lord John Russell , proved comparatively "inadequate" as
23142-471: The process. Collectivisation undermined incentives for the investment of labor and resources in agriculture; unrealistic plans for decentralized metal production sapped needed labor; unfavorable weather conditions; and communal dining halls encouraged overconsumption of available food. Such was the centralized control of information and the intense pressure on party cadres to report only good news—such as production quotas met or exceeded—that information about
23316-440: The prolonged drought, which lasted roughly 2 years. In 1992 Somalia became a war zone with no effective government, police, or basic services after the collapse of the dictatorship led by Siad Barre and the split of power between warlords. This coincided with a massive drought, causing over 300,000 Somalis to perish. Since the start of the 21st century, more effective early warning and humanitarian response actions have reduced
23490-497: 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
23664-436: The regional discrepancies: "[Naumenko's] calculations again omit any consideration of the agro-environmental disasters that harmed farm production in 1932. In her appendices, Table C3, she does the same calculation with collectivization data from 1932, which she argues shows a closer correlation between collectivization and famine mortality (Naumenko 2021b, 33). Yet, as I showed, those agroenvironmental disasters were much worse in
23838-643: The regions with higher collectivization—especially Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Volga River basin (and also in Kazakhstan)—than elsewhere in the USSR. As I documented in my article and other publications, these were regions that had a history of environmental disasters that caused crop failures and famines repeatedly in Russian history." Tauger notes: "[Naumenko's] assumption that collectivization subjected peasants to higher procurements, but in 1932 in Ukraine this
24012-517: 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
24186-466: 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
24360-509: The river valleys." The first documentation of weather in West-Central Africa occurred around the mid-16th to 17th centuries in areas such as Luanda Kongo, however, not much data was recorded on the issues of weather and disease except for a few notable documents. The only records obtained are of violence between Portuguese and Africans during the Battle of Mbwila in 1665. In these documents
24534-519: The same date, drought and economic crisis combined with denials of any food shortage by the then-government of President Gaafar Nimeiry , to create a crisis that killed perhaps 250,000 people—and helped bring about a popular uprising that overthrew Nimeiry. Numerous factors make the food security situation in Africa tenuous, including political instability, armed conflict and civil war , corruption and mismanagement in handling food supplies, and trade policies that harm African agriculture. An example of
24708-406: The same period versus 1932 where three Russian regions delivered almost all of their procurements and Ukraine and North Caucasus did not. This can partially be explained by Ukrainian regions losing a third of their harvests and Russian regions losing by comparison only 15% of their harvest. Ultimately, Tauger states: "if the regime had not taken even that smaller amount grain from Ukrainian villages,
24882-488: The slowly growing crisis of pastoralism in Africa, which has seen livestock herding decline as a viable way of life over the last two generations. Famines occurred in Sudan in the late-1970s and again in 1990 and 1998. The 1980 famine in Karamoja , Uganda was, in terms of mortality rates, one of the worst in history. 21% of the population died, including 60% of the infants. In the 1980s, large scale multilayer drought occurred in
25056-491: The standpoint of the Soviet [state] line. Chubar is no leader. Bad from the standpoint of the GPU . Redens lacks the energy to direct the struggle with the counterrevolution in such a big and unique republic as Ukraine. If we do not now correct the situation in Ukraine, we could lose Ukraine. Consider that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are much stronger than Redens or Kosior imagine. Also consider that within
25230-417: 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
25404-491: The strikes in state media and downplaying their significance. As the strikes increased in intensity, so, too, did their demands, as increasing amounts of miners demanded Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union and the resignation of Shcherbytsky, as well as Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Valentyna Shevchenko . The People's Movement of Ukraine , a Ukrainian nationalist political movement inspired by
25578-407: The supreme position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , Shcherbytsky was restored to his former position at the head of the Ukrainian government. In May 1972, Shelest was recalled from his post as head of the Ukrainian government, as part of a broader attack on the nationally-minded Ukrainian intelligentsia by the central Soviet government that had begun in January. He
25752-698: The sweeping changes to agriculture occurred. Famine still occurred in other parts of Europe, however. In Eastern Europe , famines occurred as late as the twentieth century. Because of the severity of famine, it was a chief concern for governments and other authorities. In pre-industrial Europe, preventing famine, and ensuring timely food supplies, was one of the chief concerns of many governments, although they were severely limited in their options due to limited levels of external trade, infrastructure, and bureaucracy generally too rudimentary to effect real relief. Most governments were concerned by famine because it could lead to revolt and other forms of social disruption. By
25926-502: The task of turning Ukraine in the shortest possible time into a fortress of the USSR, into the most inalienable republic. Don't worry about money for this purpose. 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
26100-522: 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. 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
26274-560: The trial including 30,000 intellectuals, writers, teachers, and scientists. 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
26448-494: The usage of Ukrainian. Under his leadership, all meetings of the KPU were conducted in Russian, and Ukrainian education was further Russified. By the time of Brezhnev's death, fewer books had been published in Ukrainian throughout his rule than during the rule of Stalin, a process owed in part to Shcherbytsky. Following Brezhnev's death, he was replaced as General Secretary at first by Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko before
26622-419: The veil of censorship began to lift. The exact number of famine deaths during 1958–1961 is difficult to determine, and estimates range from 18 million to at least 42 million people, with a further 30 million cancelled or delayed births. It was only when the famine had wrought its worst that Mao reversed agricultural collectivisation policies, which were effectively dismantled in 1978. China has not experienced
26796-663: The year 1888 is remembered as the worst famine in history, on account of these factors and also the exactions imposed by the Mahdist state . The oral traditions of the Himba people recall two droughts from 1910 to 1917. From 1910 to 1911 the Himba described the drought as "drought of the omutati seed", also called omangowi , the fruit of an unidentified vine that people ate during the time period. From 1914 to 1916, droughts brought katur' ombanda or kari' ombanda 'the time of eating clothing'. For
26970-409: Was a constituent republic , any references to the famine were dismissed as anti-Soviet propaganda , even after de-Stalinization in 1956, until the declassification and publication of historical documents in the late 1980s made continued denial of the catastrophe unsustainable. Discussion of the Holodomor became possible as part of the Soviet glasnost ("openness") policy in the 1980s. In Ukraine,
27144-508: Was a party functionary in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . In 1948, he was appointed Second Secretary of Dniprodzerhynsk city communist party committee, soon after Leonid Brezhnev had taken over the First Secretary of the regional party committee. He succeeded Brezhnev as regional party boss in November 1955. In December 1957, he was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee of
27318-482: Was also an influential figure in the Soviet Union 's larger government. In April 1971, he was promoted to membership of the Politburo , on which he remained a close ally of Brezhnev. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott have argued that Shcherbytsky's rule was among the most corrupt and conservative among the Soviet republics. His rule of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was characterized by
27492-637: 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. 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
27666-559: 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
27840-412: Was clearly not the case" as "grain procurements both total and per-capita were much lower in Ukraine than anywhere else in the USSR in 1932". Soviet institutions Policies Collectivization in the Soviet Union , including the Ukrainian SSR, was not popular among the peasantry, and forced collectivisation led to numerous peasant revolts . The OGPU recorded 932 disturbances in Ukraine, 173 in
28014-463: Was critical of the role the Russian language played in the Soviet Union, was harshly criticised and suppressed by the Ukrainian government. Dziuba himself was later arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labour. Arrested dissidents were linked to the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists , then operating abroad. The purge led to increased radicalism among the dissident movement, bringing many in
28188-442: Was defined as three successive years of crop failure , crop yields of one-third or one-half normal, and large populations in distress. "Famine" further included a rise in food prices above 140% of "normal", the movement of people in search of food, and widespread mortality. The Commission identified that the loss of wages from lack of employment of agricultural labourers and artisans were the cause of famines. The Famine Code applied
28362-438: Was discrimination against ethnic Ukrainians and Germans. In Ukraine collectivisation policy was enforced, entailing extreme crisis and contributing to the famine. In 1929–1930, peasants were induced to transfer land and livestock to state-owned farms, on which they would work as day-labourers for payment in kind. Food exports continued during the famine, albeit at a reduced rate. In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that
28536-439: Was done disproportionally to the percentage of wheat sown area and their potential grain capacity." 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. Coiner of the term genocide , Raphael Lemkin considered
28710-759: Was first noted in March 2024, a 30 September report released for the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IFSPC) officially declared the presence of famine in Haiti as a consequence of gang conflict preventing transport of food while also preventing civilians from being able to find food outside of their homes. In the mid-22nd century BC, a sudden and short-lived climatic change that caused reduced rainfall resulted in several decades of drought in Upper Egypt . The resulting famine and civil strife
28884-633: Was in the farmer's interest to produce as much as possible on their land in order to sell it to areas that demanded that product. They produced guaranteed surpluses of their crop every year if they could. Subsistence peasants were also increasingly forced to commercialize their activities because of increasing taxes . Taxes that had to be paid to central governments in money forced the peasants to produce crops to sell. Sometimes they produced industrial crops , but they would find ways to increase their production in order to meet both their subsistence requirements as well as their tax obligations. Peasants also used
29058-405: Was instead transferred to Moscow and elected to be the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. As a result of this development, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party elected Shcherbytysky as their new First Secretary; this was the highest political office in the Ukrainian SSR. While Shelest had pushed for increased Ukrainian autonomy from Moscow, and had been
29232-427: Was married to Bulgarian businessman Borislav Dionisiev, who then was a soldier in the Bulgarian People's Army and a Consul General of Bulgaria in Odesa . The couple had a daughter before divorcing in an unknown date. Volodymyr Shcherbytsky was twice awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour — in 1974 and 1977. During his public service he also received numerous other civil and state awards and recognitions, including
29406-407: Was often lackluster. The initial response of the British government to the early phase of the famine was "prompt and relatively successful", according to F. S. L. Lyons . Confronted by widespread crop failure in the autumn of 1845, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America. Baring Brothers & Co initially acted as purchasing agents for
29580-399: Was organized by Bob Geldof and featured more than 20 pop stars. The Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia raised even more funds for the cause. Hundreds of thousands of people died within one year as a result of the famine, but the publicity Live Aid generated encouraged Western nations to make available enough surplus grain to end the immediate hunger crisis in Africa. Some of
29754-421: Was reported on television reports around the world, carrying footage of starving Ethiopians whose plight was centered around a feeding station near the town of Korem . This stimulated the first mass movements to end famine across the world. BBC newsreader Michael Buerk gave moving commentary of the tragedy on 23 October 1984, which he described as a "biblical famine". This prompted the Band Aid single, which
29928-416: Was significantly impacted by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster . After the disaster, Shcherbytsky was ordered by Gorbachev to go ahead with the annual International Workers' Day parade on the Khreshchatyk in Kyiv , in an effort to show people that there was no reason for panic. He went ahead with this plan, knowing that there was danger of spreading radiation sickness and even taking his own grandson Volodya to
30102-434: Was supposed to testify in the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR about the events related to the Chernobyl disaster. Although the official version claims that the cause of death was pneumonia, it was alleged that he had committed suicide by shooting himself with his carbine , "unable to deal not only with the end of his own career but also with the end of the political and social order he had served all his life" and had left
30276-421: Was unable to fulfill the grain quota for 1930 until May 1931. Ukraine produced a similar amount of grain in 1931; however, by the late spring of 1932 "many districts were left with no reserves of produce or fodder at all". Despite this, according to statistics gathered by Nataliia Levchuk, Ukraine and North Caucasus Krai delivered almost 100% of their grain procurement in 1931 versus 67% in two Russian Oblasts during
#837162