At the initiative of the German government and opposition parties, the Bundestag plans to pass a resolution this week describing the Holodomor, the great Stalinist famine of the 1930s, as “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.
According to the draft resolution leaked to the press, this famine, deliberately carried out by Soviet dictator Iósif Stalin, is part of “the list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by totalitarian systems in the first half of the 20th century”.
While no one denies the horrific reality of the Holodomor, historians are conflicted as to whether this operation only targeted the Ukrainian population, which is estimated to have suffered more than three and a half million deaths. genocide.
Comparatively, that is, taking into account the number of residents involved, Kazakhstan, one of the then USSR republics, suffered a higher percentage of victims: one and a half million, which is almost a third of its population.
The famine also affected the inhabitants of other parts of the USSR, albeit to a lesser extent: southern Belarus, northern Caucasus, southern Urals. Among Stalin’s victims were Tatars, Bashkirs, Volga Germans and other ethnic groups.
But so far only Ukraine insisted on the recognition of the specificity of the Holodomor: the then president of the country, Petro Poroshenko, tried it already in 2019, and also in 2019, as soon as the current head of state Volodymyr Zelensky won the elections.
Zelensky revived the issue in a video speech addressed to the Israeli Parliament in March of this year, when he compared Stalin’s deliberate extermination of the Ukrainian people to what Hitler’s Germany had done against the Jews, sparking angry protests in that country. was immediately accused of “trivializing” the Holocaust.
Moscow denies that it was a genocide, as the American journalist Anne Applebaum argues in her book “The Red Famine” and claims that as a result of the collectivization of the land and the intense industrialization of Stalin in those years, as many as seven million citizens lived in Russia. The Soviets died, including 2.5 million in Russia itself.
Although the number of Ukrainian victims outnumbered that of other USSR nationals, some historians deny that it was a mass racist crime and argue that the main Soviet leaders at the time were of different nationalities.
Thus, Stalin himself was a Georgian; Stanislav Kosior, Secretary General of the KP of Ukraine, Poland; Head of Government Viacheslav Molotov is Russian and Deputy Prime Minister Lazar Kagánovich is Jewish.
But the Stalinists were not the only executioners on the territory of Ukraine in those years, in any case, this tends to be forgotten today.
There, one and a half million Jews fell victim to both the German Army and the SS and their collaborators, including members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera.
And while throughout Ukraine there are many official monuments commemorating the Great Famine and honoring Bandera, who is today a national hero, in cities such as Kharkiv, Odessa or Dnipro, those dedicated to the Holocaust are entirely private initiatives.
In any case, the German Parliament will join the parliaments of many countries such as Australia, Canada, the Baltic Republics, Poland, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Moldova and of course the United States. Irritation of Russia, which was accepted before the Holodomor was described as genocide.