Ukrainian Holodomor

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 11th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) for her success in securing this debate and for the way in which she made her case. She did so with a commitment, eloquence and passion that did justice to the gravity of the appalling events that we are debating.

To say that the famine that culminated in 1932 and 1933 was a terrible tragedy is to underestimate the sheer brutality and inhumanity of what took place. I think that my hon. Friend would be the first to agree that the anecdotes and illustrations on which she drew in her speech can give us only the briefest glimpse of an horrific picture that was the daily experience of suffering among people in Ukraine during that time. The numbers of people who were involved and who suffered are staggering. Across vast swathes of what was then the Soviet Union—notably in Ukraine, but also as far west as Moldova and eastwards into Kazakhstan—millions of people starved to death because of the policies of their own Government.

It is a cause for some heart searching in the western world that for decades this tragedy was often overlooked or ignored. Worse, it was in some quarters denied, even among some who had pretentions to serious scholarship. Of course, countless people inside and outside Ukraine have fought to keep alive the memory of those who died in this atrocity and to raise awareness of the holodomor, but probably in the west it was pioneering historians of their time, such as Robert Conquest, who first drew attention to what had happened. I still remember reading as a schoolboy the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and finding there his account of the famine set in its broader context of policies of persecution, policies sometimes of slaughter, that were directed by Lenin and Stalin against the peoples over whom they ruled. What the efforts of those historians and of those many people inside and outside Ukraine have achieved is that people across the world continue to remember those who were lost and reflect today on the warning from history that the famine clearly provides.

There is no question, in the Government’s view, but that the famine took place as a result of Stalin and the actions of his Government. It was a man-made tragedy. It is clear, too, that it was within modern Ukraine where the terrible consequences of those actions were most heavily borne. On the question whether Ukraine was specifically targeted, whether this was a campaign directed by Stalin against any manifestation of Ukrainian nationhood, that is certainly widely believed, although it is not without controversy inside Ukraine, but it is also true that other parts of the then Soviet Union were gravely affected by the famine. In Kazakhstan, for example, the death toll as a proportion of the local population was higher than that in Ukraine. Areas of rural Russia were also affected; innocent people died there, too.

However, it is also clear that the Soviet regime felt deep hostility towards any manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism and it must have known that policies targeting the agricultural regions of the Soviet Union would have a disproportionate effect on Ukraine. The fact that, during the famine, Stalin closed the eastern border of Ukraine to prevent starving peasants from entering Russia in search of food is perhaps one of the strongest indications that his policy was, at least in part, motivated by a hostility towards Ukraine as a nation, with an identity, tradition and culture of its own. I think that no reasonable man or woman today would deny the horror, the atrocity, that was the holodomor.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire asks whether the Government will recognise the holodomor formally as a genocide. Given the history of the holodomor, I can well understand the depth and strength of feeling in favour of doing that and why some Parliaments around the world have already done so. As the House knows, there is still a debate among historians and others on the question of recognition of the holodomor as genocide. Genocide has a defined status in international law, following the 1948 UN genocide convention. The holodomor predates the establishment of the concept of genocide in international law and the convention was not drafted to apply retrospectively.

Government policy is that recognition of genocides should be a matter for judicial decision, bearing in mind the terms of the convention and the consequences for individuals and Governments that can follow from the designation of their actions as genocide. It should be for judges, rather than Governments or non-judicial bodies, to make a designation of genocide. Recognition decisions should be based on a credible judicial process, and the courts are best placed to judge what are essentially criminal matters. The British Government have not proactively designated any atrocities as genocide. Those we have recognised—the holocaust, the 1994 killings in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica—are all cases in which judicial bodies had judged the outrages to be genocide, in line with the definition in international law.

We have made clear, and will continue to make clear, our abiding horror at what happened in Ukraine in the 1930s. Every year, the Ukrainian Government host a formal ceremony of commemoration in Kiev. They invite foreign ambassadors, and our ambassador normally represents the UK at that event. To mark the 75th anniversary of the holodomor in 2008, their Royal Highnesses the Duke of York and Princess Eugenie travelled to Kiev, took part in the ceremony and laid wreathes at the Kiev memorial to the victims of the holodomor.

I give my hon. Friend and the House the undertaking that we will not forget or overlook what happened. It is important for all of us that Governments and peoples throughout Europe continue to learn the lessons from what happened in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe in those years, to ensure that no one is again tempted towards policies that could have such an appalling effect on innocent men, women and children. We will look for other opportunities to demonstrate our solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We will mark with them the opportunity to mourn those who suffered or lost their lives during the holodomor and recall the importance of remembrance of the atrocity for the new generations growing to adulthood today. Nothing should diminish the horror or magnitude of the events in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Man-made policies, a brutal dictatorship and a pitiless ideology led to the deaths of many millions of innocent people. That is something that the world cannot and should never forget.