The last Saturday in November is Holodomor Remembrance Day in Ukraine, a time to mark the anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s engineered starvation that killed millions in 1932-33. In the West, the date should also be remembered as a pivotal event that ensured the viability of the Soviet Union, with its consequent implications for hundreds of millions in the free world.
The Holodomor in Ukraine is too often mistakenly grouped together in the West with the generic Soviet collectivization of agriculture. While collectivization was extant throughout the Soviet Union, it was distinct in purpose and result in Ukraine. There, wrote Proletarska Pravda in 1930, collectivization was intended “to destroy the social basis of Ukrainian nationalism.” Indeed, though collectivization in Ukraine was virtually complete by the spring of 1932, Moscow pressed on. Having eliminated Ukraine’s political, cultural, and religious strata, Stalin turned against the villages. It was there that Ukrainian traditions and self-awareness were rooted, and where the overwhelming majority of the population resided.
The task, wrote historian Norman Davies, was to forever inter any notion of independence. The countryside was stripped not simply of grain but of anything remotely edible. Cooking utensils and farming tools were confiscated. The borders were sealed, and no food was allowed in. No one was allowed out. And not just in Ukraine, but also in the heavily Ukrainian ethnographic regions absorbed…