A WWII refugee from Ukraine links Putin’s war to Stalin’s famine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back memories.

The Soviet army invaded western Ukraine in September 1939, three months after I was born. During its 2½-year occupation, my father was interrogated twice by the Soviet secret police, and he realized he was on their list of “enemies of the people.”

Before being forced to retreat by the German army’s advance, the Communists rounded up people on their list of suspects and, as has been their custom since the inception of the Soviet regime, had them shot. My father saved his life by hiding in a village.

When the Soviet army was about to return in 1944, my father had to decide whether to stay – and probably be shot or sent to a gulag in Siberia – or to flee for his life. My parents and several other families left everything and began a dangerous journey to the West. At age 5, I became part of the large wave of World War II refugees called displaced persons.

My experience was similar to that of current refugees from Ukraine: Running to a bomb shelter. Not knowing where the next meal would come from. Learning new languages and finding one’s way in new environments – in my case, in Slovakia, Austria, and eventually Argentina.

One day in Argentina, my mother sent me to buy rice. I was 8 years old. I did not know how to say rice in Spanish and could not explain what I wanted. The grocery store owner tried to help by showing me different food items, but I returned home without the rice.

The war also recalls a more recent experience. The siege of Mariupol, with the systematic destruction of the city and the blockage of all attempts to assist people trapped there, reminded me of my study of the use of famine as a weapon of terror. The Russians used hunger in Mariupol just as Josef Stalin did in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s.

The New York Times reported on Mariupol residents’ deprivation in late March:

She read fairy tales to distract the children, but once they got hungry, “the fire was gone from their eyes,” said Kristina. ... “They had no interest in anything.” 

“We ate once a day,” she said. “It was mostly in the morning or the evening that the children cried out, saying, ‘I want to eat.’” 

I heard in those words echoes of thousands of testimonials by survivors of the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, called the Holodomor, or death by starvation. Many countries, including the United States, recognize it as genocide. Pavlo Makohon’s description of the famine is one of many posted on the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium’s website:

I had younger brothers – Ivan, Wasyl, Anatoliy, and a younger sister, Maria. All of them, and my grandmother, died in front of my eyes from starvation. I would run around and collect any food I could get – porcupines, meat from dead horses – and bring it home to them. When there wasn’t anything left, and everyone had died of starvation, I saw that I would die as well. So I left and started wandering around the farmsteads. 

Diving into Holodomor data

My encounter with the Holodomor started in 2008 with my first Fulbright grant at the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies in Kyiv, Ukraine. There, I met Omelan Rudnytskyi, a senior demographer who had spent a good part of his professional life collecting, at great personal risk, data and documents on the demographic history of Ukraine and the Holodomor. He also had access to the scholarly legacy of Ukraine’s original Institute of Demography, which operated from 1918 until 1938, when the Soviet government shut it down.

Working with Mr. Rudnytskyi presented a unique opportunity, so I abandoned my original research plan and started to study the Holodomor, working with a group of institute demographers.    

For many years, the Soviet regime denied the existence of the famine. Mentioning the famine was a criminal offense. As a result, people could not process the trauma it caused. When I asked my Ukrainian colleagues if their surviving family members had ever talked about the Holodomor, many said no.    

But that began changing the year I was there.

A monument breaks the silence

November 22, 2008, marked the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. Cold and windy, wet with snow, the weather provided a somber background to this sad day. Events culminated in the evening with the unveiling of the Holodomor monument in Kyiv. Snow had changed to sleet, but thousands of Ukrainians from all over the country gathered by the monument with candles under a sea of umbrellas. The names of hundreds of victims of the Holodomor were read, one village at a time. For some, it was a family member; for others, a neighbor. I could see the event’s impact on people’s faces illuminated by flickering candles.    

The trauma produced by the Holodomor, suppressed for many years, finally came out in the open. Hundreds of Ukrainians searched the stone plates near the monument for the names of family members. People began to speak about the Holodomor, too. When riding the bus by the monument, I heard many passengers point it out. Hundreds of interviews with survivors were recorded, and many memoirs were published. 

According to our estimates of the famine’s impact, about 4 million people, or 13% of Soviet Ukraine’s population in 1933, were starved to death between 1932 and 1934, and 600,000 children were not born.

A unique characteristic of the Holodomor is that 80% of the 4 million deaths happened in six months. There was an explosion of mortality during the first half of 1933, with the number of deaths caused by the famine increasing 10 times between January and June of that year. At the height of the famine in June 1933, there were 28,000 famine-related deaths per day, or 1,167 per hour, or 19 per minute. Mortality levels of this magnitude are not found in other human-made famines. According to French historian Alain Blum, “Rarely, in all of the demographic history of Europe, will a famine have caused losses of such proportions” (Mr. Blum’s emphasis).

Why inflict such torture?

The French historian Nicolas Werth provides the following summary of Stalin’s objectives: “Choosing to instrumentalize the famine, Stalin intentionally amplified it in order to punish the Ukrainian peasants who rejected the ‘new serfdom’ and to break ‘Ukrainian nationalism,’ which he saw as a threat to his goal of constructing a centralized and dictatorial Soviet state.” 

Ninety years later

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an updated version of Stalin’s deliberately manufactured famine. Stalin denied the famine’s existence; Mr. Putin claimed he had no intention of invading Ukraine. Mentioning the famine was punishable by law, as is the case today with describing the invasion as war. Ukrainians starved to death during the Holodomor because Stalin took away most of the grain produced by Ukrainian peasants; Mr. Putin is stealing hundreds of thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain. In terms of Ukrainian identity, though, Mr. Putin has in some ways gone a step further than Stalin by denying the very existence of Ukraine and claiming that all Ukrainians are Russian.

When the war is over, I will probably return to Ukraine and, with my colleagues there, face the task of documenting a second genocide. We will try to determine how many civilians were killed, how many children were not born because of the war, and what proportion of future generations has been lost forever.

In the meantime, Ukrainians are fighting for their existence, driven in part by the collective memory of the Holodomor. The present reminds them of what their parents and grandparents experienced. They fight to honor them and to prevent what they know Russia is capable of doing.

Oleh Wolowyna, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An article he co-wrote on the Holodomor received the 2021 Huttenbach Prize for the best paper in the journal Nationalities Papers.