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Aftermath of a Soviet Famine
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But historians remain divided over whether the famine meets the United Nations definition of genocide, which defines it, in part, as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
"Registry office statistics for 1933 show death rates in urban localities no higher than average in contrast to the exorbitant death toll in the countryside, not only in Ukraine but all over the Soviet Union," Andrei Marchukov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History, wrote in an article published by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. "People were doomed not on the grounds of ethnicity but merely because they lived in rural areas."
The issue has also divided Ukrainians, with Russian-speakers, who live mainly in the eastern part of the country, dismissing the genocide charge as grandstanding by Yushchenko. The president has also proposed a law that would criminalize denial of Holodomor.
The pro-Russian party led by former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych boycotted a parliamentary vote on a 2006 law recognizing the famine as an act of genocide. His party has suggested using the word "tragedy" to describe the famine.
"It happened on the territory of many countries," Yanukovych said. "Maybe in Ukraine it had a greater effect, as Ukraine is a more agricultural country."
Some Ukrainian historians, such as Stanislav Kulchitsky, an authority on the famine who works at the Institute of History in Kiev, counter that while the famine enveloped many regions of the Soviet Union, the "smashing blow," as he said Stalin called it, fell on Ukraine and Kuban, a region heavily populated with Ukrainians.
"The mechanism was different in Ukraine," Kulchitsky said in a telephone interview. He cited the sealing off of the Ukrainian countryside in particular, saying there were no such efforts elsewhere.
Kulchitsky said the famine should be understood as part of a larger effort to wipe out Ukrainian culture and nationalism that began in the 1920s.
"It was not industrialization or modernization," he said. "It was cold-blooded killing by hunger."
