emoirs published in 1959, refers to a conversation with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in August, 1942, about the stresses of the war as compared with carrying through the policy of the collective farms. According to Churchill, when talking about collectivization, Stalin held up two hands and said, “10 million. It was fearful.”
In September 1933, Soviet apologist, Holodomor denier and New York Times reporter Walter Duranty returned from Ukraine and the North Caucasus and concluded that it was quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.
Dr. W. Horsley Gantt, chief of the medical division of the American Relief Administration’s Leningrad unit (192223), a collaborator in Pavlov’s Laboratories (192529, 3336), wrote a letter in March 1964 noting that the Soviet government forbade news correspondents to travel from Moscow or Leningrad to the country’s outlying areas. He wrote:
“However, I as a scientist, was allowed in areas outside of the cities, and I could talk with doctors who gave me firsthand reports of both the famine and the epidemics. These later were a complicating picture of the famine. Your highest estimate of the famine deaths is put at 10 million, while I got the maximum figure of 15 million, received privately from Soviet authorities in Russia. Since starvation was complicated by the epidemics, it is not possible to separate which of these two causes was primary in casualties.”
Noted British historian Robert Conquest, in his book “The Harvest of Sorrow,” estimated the total number of victims from the 193233 famine at 7 million, with 6 million Ukrainians. Additionally he estimated 4 million deaths within the USSR in 1930 to 1937 as a result of dekulakization. Ukrainians were considered the main victums of dekulakization.
Some 80 percent of that 4 million were Ukrainians, which would mean that in 1930 to 1937, more than 9 million Ukrainians lost their lives from famine and dekulakization. The distinction between death from famine and death from dekulakization, in our view, is difficult to define.
In its report to the Congress of the United States adopted and submitted in 1988, the Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine sets the number of Ukrainian victims as widely ranged, but with a high end of more than eight million.
James Mace, the executive director of the Congressional Commission, had written earlier of a 7.5 million number. “Actually, the figure might well be higher. The figure of 10 million total victims of the famine seems to have circulated within the Soviet elite,” he said. “The extraordinary frequency with which the 10 million figure appears obliges us to take seriously the possibility that it did in fact originate in Soviet official circles, even if we cannot claim to know with certainty.”
The International Commission of Inquiry into the 193233 Famine in Ukraine in its 1990 report concluded that the number of victims in Ukraine was at least 4.5 million.
The Summary of the International Commission of Inquiry into the 193233 Famine in Ukraine refers to two censuses in the USSR, one in 1926 and the other in 1939.
It is important to add that there had been a thorough and complete census conducted in 1937 that evidenced such an egregious loss of life attendant to the famine, that Stalin had the results suppressed and the officials responsible promptly arrested and executed.
In any event, the 1926 census, about which there is no dispute, reveals that in 1926, the total population of the USSR was 147 million, with 31 million Ukrainians. The 1939 census, which was sanctioned officially as accurate, shows the USSR’s total population at 170.5 million, with 28 million Ukrainians.
This indicates that the Ukrainian population actually declined by some 3 million during that period, while the population of nonUkrainians grew by 26.5 million, or 23 percent, which if applied to Ukrainians, would have meant that in 1939, there should have been 38 million Ukrainians. Thus it would appear that the Ukrainian population declined by 10 million.
Arguably Stalin’s purges, which began in late 1937, resulted in the deaths of a disproportionate amount of Ukrainians, particularly from labor camps. The 1937 census statistics are very important and since the demise of the USSR are available for study. According to that census, the number of Ukrainians within the USSR in 1937 was 26.4 million, almost five million less that in 1926.
That, in and of itself, is staggering. When combined with what was the normal growth rate of nonUkrainians in the USSR from 1926 to 1937 at 17 percent, Ukrainians should have numbered 36.5 million in 1937.
The conclusion is that between 1926 and 1937, the Ukrainian population within the entire USSR declined by 10.1 million.
However, in assessing the number of actual victims, an allowance should be made for children never born to those victims.
Certitude as to the number of victims in any crime against humanity or genocide is impossible due primarily to a perpetrator’s attempts to cover up the crime. This is particularly true in the case of the former USSR, where purges of records and record keepers were the norm. The passing of 75 years makes this endeavor more problematic.
Nevertheless, an estimate of 7 to 10 million appears to present an accurate picture of the number of deaths suffered by the Ukrainian nation from the Holodomor of 1932 to 1933.
Askold Lozynskyj is president of the Ukrainian World Congress based in New York City.
