Holodomor Remembrance Day is celebratedmainly in modern Ukraine, however, other states have the right to hold such events. In particular, the famine in the USSR, which took place in 1932-1933, actually covered the territories of Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, Western Siberia, Belarus and Ukraine. To a lesser extent, this disaster affected Armenia and Azerbaijan, the eastern regions of the USSR of that time, as well as the Moscow region and the territories further north, even though they were consuming rather than producing agricultural products.
Hunger in Russia was several times a century
In Russia, the pre-revolutionary period, the hungry yearsWere not at all a great rarity. So, it is believed that the lack of food was noted in 1880, 1892 (especially the hungry year), 1891, 1897-1898, the same situation was in 1901, 1905-1908, 1911 and 1913. But the memory of the victims of the famine was not honored at all, because, despite the poor harvests, there were no mass casualties among the population. But it was a sufficient reduction in terms of life due to the use of surrogates instead of full-fledged products. It is worth noting that the state made attempts to stop the consequences of crop failures by creating grain stocks and providing them to those in need during the famine years. In particular, this system worked particularly well in 1911.
The victims of the first famine under the Soviet regime
The situation was somewhat different afterThe Great October Socialist Revolution, followed by the Civil War. Moreover, the overthrow of the tsarist regime was preceded by the First World War. In connection with the crisis of power and chaos reigning in the country, the first famine in Soviet times was registered in 1921-1922, when a severe drought broke out, which exacerbated the existing organizational and military problems. The main affected areas were then the Volga and South Urals. The Day of Remembrance of the Famine Victims on this occasion in Russia is not established, although the number of victims is impressive - 5 million people. The situation was so difficult that the Bolshevik government accepted the help of Western countries and seized a lot of church valuables under the guise of help to the starving.
Is the system to blame for the death of people?
The memory of victims of the famine of 1932-1933it is esteemed especially because during this period there were no natural prerequisites for such a situation — these years, in contrast to 1921, 1946, were not barren. Therefore, the communist regime is guilty of the death of millions of people (in accordance with the officially adopted version). It is based on the fact that the government of the USSR from 1927 developed plans for complete collectivization in agriculture by compulsory methods, since at 95% of the area under crops, the yields were about half of the pre-war norm. Planned pressure on the prosperous part of farmers, which, after its implementation, led to the fact that able-bodied young people fled to the cities, and about 2 million of the most intelligent workers were sent to the eastern regions of the country (where hunger manifested itself to a minimum).
The ruin of the "fists" led to a drop in the qualification of the labor force
День памяти жертв голодомора, к несчастью, may indeed be noted in connection with the long-term mistakes of the Soviet leadership, since such a policy led to a substantial shortage of force and a great deterioration in the skills of agricultural workers in the most promising regions of the country by 1931. Lack of skills in high-quality farming for peasant farmers remaining in the field led to the fact that the fields were not sufficiently well treated (even the Red Army was sent for weeding), and up to one-fifth of the total harvest was lost during harvesting.
Losses of a half of a crop and two million victims in Kazakhstan
День памяти жертв голодомора в Украине мог бы never to be established if in 1932 in this, at that time, the Soviet republic, about 40 percent of the total grain harvest remained at the root. At the same time, almost the same figure (about 36%) was recorded in sources for the grain-growing areas of the Lower and Upper Volga. Therefore, Ukraine in its trouble of that time has “fellows in misfortune” - Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan. The peculiarity of Ukraine is that the famine of those years covered almost all of its territory, so some local historians mistakenly believe that this was a directed genocide against the Ukrainian nation. In Kazakhstan, where the day of memory of victims of famines is not celebrated, in the same period about 2 million people died from food shortages, while almost half of the indigenous people left their place of residence and went to other regions.
The withdrawal of agricultural products was accompanied by repression
When Ukraine commemorates victimsfamine? The date of this event was set by Ukrainian President L. Kuchma and falls on the last Saturday of November (since 1998). Since 2000, this day honored not only the memory of the victims of the famine, but also the memory of the victims of repression, which in the 30s of the 20th century were very much throughout the former USSR. In particular, in 1932-1933, during the famine, the law “On the Five Spikelets” was passed, when for trying to starve people to find several stalks of grain on the field they could be shot (more than two thousand sentences carried out) or convicted (convicted 52,000 people). And all this happened against the background of a massive seizure of agricultural products by the most inhuman methods. People were evicted, beaten, shot, frozen, buried to the waist in pits, tortured, forced to drink water mixed with kerosene, destroyed their houses, etc. So it was received about 593 tons of grain.
Huge variation in the assessment of the dead
The memory of victims of the famine in all regions of manycountries today are honored, as they were relatives of some of the living. And what is happening then should not be forgotten, because the events of those years were more than tragic. In Ukraine in 1933, the death rate in some regions reached one hundred percent, up to 25 thousand per day perished, and the total number of victims was - according to various estimates - from 4.6 million people (French researchers) to ten million (information from the US Congress, perhaps in the USSR as a whole). The exact figures are unlikely to be once known, since Soviet statistics no longer take into account the victims since April 1933, when their number approached 2.42 million people only in Ukraine. In addition, it is estimated that in these years, one million Ukrainian babies were not born due to hunger.
Modern people should honor the memory of the victimsfamine. Photos of those terrible years often show us cannibals from different parts of the former USSR with the remains of their victims. A total of about 2500 episodes of cannibalism (murder for later consumption) and eating the corpses of the dead were officially recorded in Ukraine (again, until April 1933). Such events should not be repeated, especially since in today's reality hundreds of millions of people on the planet suffer and die from malnutrition.
Memorial Day to the victims of famine to the presentTime has become partly a topic for speculations of various kinds. For example, the President of Ukraine V. Yushchenko issued a law in which famine in Ukraine (at that time) is considered genocide, and its public denial is punishable by law as an illegal act aimed at degrading the dignity of the Ukrainian nation, outraging the memory of the millions who died. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation believes that the recognition of the famine as genocide is one-sided, since not only Ukrainians, but also many other nationalities suffered.
Ukrainians simply honor the memory of the victims of famine. 2014 was no exception for this - in many cities, appropriate events were held with laying flowers to the monuments to the victims of this tragedy.
An additional version of the causes of high mortality in the years 1932-1933.
Informal studies of that hard periodSoviet history recorded one rather curious fact - among the dead people there were a certain number of those who did not lose weight to the skeleton-like state from hunger, but, on the contrary, became very swollen. This is a feature of the famine of 1933, which is not found either in 1921, or in 1946 lean years, or even in besieged Leningrad. Cases of swelling were found even in families with hidden food supplies, which, as suggested, indicates the ingestion of toxins in the existing food, or, alternatively, fungal origin. In particular, in those years, on the fields of the whole of Eastern Europe, such a disease of bread as “rust” was officially recorded, which hit up to half of the crop in some regions, including Ukraine. Therefore, it is possible that some people did not die of hunger, but of intoxication caused by the poor quality of the harvested crop, which does not detract from the general scale of this tragedy. The memory of the victims of the famine in Ukraine and other former republics of the USSR should be properly monitored so that such events never repeat.
