DISINFO: Holodomor was large-scale sabotage against the Soviet Union
DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

DISINFO: Holodomor was large-scale sabotage against the Soviet Union

SUMMARY

The biggest sabotage is the story of the Holodomor. The famine is called the Holodomor, and some people continue to replicate this name. The Holodomor means that the people were starved deliberately. Not a single document has been found to prove that people were starved deliberately. It was large-scale sabotage against Ukrainians in the Soviet Union invented in Canada, in the USA, and in Western Ukraine.

RESPONSE

This is a recurring Kremlin narrative about the Holodomor in Ukraine. The Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33 is a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated six to eight million people who died in the Soviet Union, about four to five million were Ukrainians. The exact number of victims is hard to establish as a lot of evidence was destroyed. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica," the famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivisation; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivisation campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated." On 23 October 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that recognised the Holodomor as a crime against humanity, caused by the deliberate policies of Stalin's USSR. On 28 April 2010, a Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolution declared the famine was caused by the "cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime" and was responsible for the deaths of "millions of innocent people" in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia. See the similar disinfo statements alleging that the Holodomor of 1932-1933 was not a deliberate action by the Soviet government against Ukrainians.

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Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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