75th anniversary of the holodomor in Ukraine

The Weekly Standard reminds us that this year constitutes the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union's intentional starvation of 6-10 million people in 1932-33 during the collectivization of farms in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. During that period, Walter Duranty and the New York Times reported that no famine was occurring in the Soviet Union and accused those who wrote about the famine of being reactionaries and anti-Bolshevik propagandists.

Louis Fischer toured Ukraine in October 1935 and claimed in The Nation that food rotted in the fields because of the peasants' passive resistance. He admitted that times were very harsh, but blamed the peasants themselves for their difficulties. He denied that famine occurred in 1932-33.

Scholars have written little about the holodomor (Ukrainian for "to inflict death by hunger"), so most people in the west know little about it. Today few serious scholars question the reality of the famine; instead, the focus of the debate seems to be whether it was a genocide of Ukrainians or a stratocide based on class status. Whether Stalin sought to murder millions of people because of the ethnic identity as Ukrainians or their class status as peasants who wanted to operate their own land, he intentionally starved 6-10 million people.

It seems to me that the motivation for Stalin's murder of millions neither excuses him nor suggests the presence of a greater evil. He deserves the same opprobrium regardless of the intent motivating him.