Ukrainian Holodomor

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the Holodomor was a genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The motion stands in my name and that of the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald), but I am grateful to the many right hon. and hon. Members from five different parties who supported the application for a debate. I am also grateful to the Government for allowing time today to debate this important issue in the Chamber. Before I move to the substance of the debate, I acknowledge the presence of His Excellency Mr Vadym Prystaiko, the ambassador of Ukraine to the UK, and his colleague.

Today, right hon. and hon. Members have the opportunity to recognise the holodomor officially as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. His Majesty’s Government’s long-standing policy is not to recognise a genocide unless a competent court has declared it as such, which is very unlikely in relation to a series of events that took place 90 years ago, so this is likely to be the only chance we have for the UK to be added to the ever-growing list of countries that recognise the atrocities committed by Stalin’s USSR in Ukraine in 1932-33 for what they were: a genocide.

Ninety years ago, in the spring of 1933, millions of Ukrainians starved to death. However, there was no natural famine in Ukraine. There was plenty of grain to go around, but it was all subjected to Moscow’s impossibly high grain tariffs. Moscow then exported millions of tonnes of grain to the west while Ukrainians were dying in Stalin’s forced famine. The word “holodomor” means to inflict death by hunger, and that is exactly what the USSR did in Ukraine. I will come to the terrible details of the famine, but, in discussing genocide, it is important also to understand the context and the motivations of the USSR’s leadership in Moscow.

While holodomor means “death by hunger,” the term has come to refer to the entire Stalinist campaign to destroy Ukrainian identity and nationalism at the end of the 1920s, leading to the forced famine of 1932-33. Once Stalin had consolidated his power as party leader by the end of the 1920s, he began to impose much harsher controls on independence, including banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the arrest, deportation and execution of Ukrainian nationalists and the cultural elite. Intellectuals, writers and artists committed suicide rather than be deported to Russia. Wholesale agricultural collectivisation took place from 1929, while wealthy peasants had their property taken away. By the mid-1930s, 100,000 such families had been deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

I turn to the terrible details of the famine, which was the final piece of Stalin’s attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation and people. Stalin was aware—we have seen this demonstrated so many times over the past year or so of the war—that the Ukrainian national spirit and identity reside strongly in the rural and agricultural communities across the country. In response to resistance to agricultural collectivisation in 1932-33, Stalin’s Government imposed impossibly high grain requisition quotas, which had to be satisfied before any grain could be kept by the local population. In 1932, not a single Ukrainian village met the quota assigned to it. Anyone who kept grain destined for Russia was executed by firing squad. Special police roamed the countryside, searching homes and summarily executing those found to have stored food, however small the amount. Men, women and children starved to death in their villages. But this was not a famine; there was enough grain to feed the entire population comfortably. The grain was exported to Russia and Ukrainians were prevented from escaping their country.

At the height of the famine, 25,000 people died of starvation every day, including children who were obviously too small to feed themselves. Some tried to commit suicide to escape the horror of starving to death. Gareth Jones, a well-known journalist, wrote:

“I walked…through villages and 12 collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread; we are dying’”.

Those who refused to steal or to leave died of hunger. Those who tried to steal were shot. Those who tried to leave were returned to their villages to face the same impossible choice. Villages turned to cannibalism to survive. The dead were unburied and the sick untended. Those are difficult details for us to hear.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I attended the holodomor memorial in Kyiv with the hon. Lady. All the things she describes are laid out in great detail there. I was so overcome with emotion I could stay for only 10 minutes, although the visit was over an hour. It is unbelievable that we have not recognised it as a genocide. It is so very clearly a genocide. In the United Kingdom we need to review how we define genocide if we cannot define the holodomor as one.

[Mrs Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which shows that recognising the genocide has cross-party support. We are all concerned about that.

The exact number of victims is unknown because the Soviet Union refused to allow reporting of the famine, but it is estimated that between 7 million and as many as 10 million people died in Ukraine itself, with more in the neighbouring Soviet states. There was no natural famine in Ukraine, as I said, yet millions died from starvation due to Stalin’s policies. The cultural elite were deported, Ukrainian culture and language suppressed, and rural communities broken. The Russians closed their Ukrainian borders and refused to send aid, while simultaneously selling millions of tonnes of grain to the west. In the aftermath of the holodomor, the Soviet leadership resettled some of the decimated villages with ethnically Russian communities, aiming to eradicate Ukrainian independent identity. All of that is very clear evidence that the holodomor meets the conditions required for genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, the man who defined genocide, put it very clearly in a speech at the 20th commemoration of the holodomor in New York City in 1953. He described it as

“perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification—the destruction of the Ukrainian nation”.

He recognised that there were no attempts at “complete annihilation”, as had taken place in the holocaust. However, as he says, in an incredibly powerful quote which rings true to this day, given what is happening in Ukraine now:

“And yet, if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people”.

I have no doubt that the holodomor amounted to genocide, an attempt by Stalin to destroy the Ukrainian people.

I will now turn to why I believe the House should agree to the motion. As a matter of principle, we as a country should recognise genocides whenever and wherever they occur. The crime of genocide is rightfully seen as one of the worst atrocities that can ever take place. All countries should identify it and stand against it in the strongest terms. The UK Government have constrained themselves by recognising only those genocides that have been declared as such by a competent court. One of the biggest challenges in obtaining a court ruling is that, in international law, referrals often need the consent of the states involved. This process is even more difficult when the successor state to the accused, the Russian Federation, is one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Therefore, irrespective of the weight of evidence that the holodomor was a genocide, it is incredibly unlikely that we will ever see the case tried by a competent court.

In the absence of official Government recognition, today’s substantive motion will constitute a resolution of the House of Commons specifically designating the holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people. I have often been asked, “Why now?” That is a perfectly reasonable question, 90 years after the event, but I believe the House of Commons should recognise the holodomor as a genocide. After all, those who survived it have now died. In the two previous cases where the House has recognised a genocide, they were ongoing, so the resolution of the House could help to serve as a warning to the perpetrator that they would not get away with it.

The memory of historical events, particularly historical trauma, is fundamental to national identities. Through my work on the International Development Committee, I have been closely involved in hearings where we analysed the impact of Srebrenica and the importance of its recognition on Bosnian national identity today. I have also visited Rwanda on multiple occasions and have heard the same argument. As the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) said, we visited Ukraine earlier this year and went to the holocaust memorial centre, which is a moving place to go and a reminder of the worst periods of Ukraine in living memory—until now.

The importance to Ukrainians of recognising the holodomor is shown by the fact that the Ukrainian Parliament has criminalised holodomor denial in Ukraine. That matters not just to victims but to the perpetrators, who need to be reminded that they cannot get away with it. The House should act now because the holodomor is still relevant both to Ukraine and to Russia, and to the ongoing maintenance of international legal norms. The second reason for acting now is the situation that hangs over this whole debate: the war in Ukraine.

In the current war in Ukraine, as I heard during my visit to Kyiv in February, the Russians have been accused of crimes against humanity. We were shown cars burnt out and riddled with bullet holes, where Russians had gunned down civilians trying to escape their homes. We must give confidence to the Ukrainian Government and the international legal order that the UK Government —or at least the UK Parliament—will not stand for human rights abuses and war crimes. Putin has said that his current intention is to eradicate the whole concept of Ukraine—very like Stalin’s. That potentially falls within the definition of genocide. I believe that international order should act, first to ensure he is not able to carry out his threat and secondly, to hold him to account for his intention.

Recognition of the holodomor is important for the Ukrainians living in Ukraine, for Ukrainian refugees in this country and for descendants of Ukrainians living in this country who came here many years ago, and who wish for it to be recognised. It is so important that we do that, because we are beginning to become an outlier. Australia, Canada, Ireland and Brazil have all officially recognised the holodomor as a genocide. Until recently, both Germany and the USA were in a similar position to the UK, as their Governments did not recognise a genocide unless it had been confirmed by an international court. However, since the Russian invasion, in an attempt to show their support, both countries have passed resolutions in the Bundestag and in Congress respectively, recognising the genocide at a parliamentary level.

In March, the French lower house, the National Assembly, officially recognised the holodomor, and the Senate followed suit last week. At the turn of 2023, Bulgaria, Belgium and Iceland joined the ranks of countries officially recognising the holodomor. On Tuesday, the Slovenian Parliament declared the holodomor a genocide. In coming months, the Spanish Parliament and the Parliament of the Netherlands will have the opportunity to do so.

Given the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is more important than ever for the UK to show our support, to deter Russia from any potential thoughts of genocide, to reassure Ukraine that the international legal order will hold anyone who commits crimes to account, and to show solidarity with our recently greatly increased Ukrainian communities in the UK, in memory of the terrible tragedy.

I would like to finish by reiterating my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for giving me the opportunity to secure this debate, which is incredibly important for every single Member across the House and, as I said, the Ukrainian communities in all our constituencies.

The holodomor was, to my mind and to paraphrase Raphael Lemkin, the archetypal genocide. The USSR murdered millions of Ukrainians, using policies of forced starvation and forced migration, reminiscent of what is going on in Ukraine today. Stalin in the 1930s, like Putin today, was aiming to destroy the nation of Ukraine and the concept of Ukrainian identity, so I hope that today we will vote to recognise the holodomor as a genocide. Then we can send a clear message to Putin, and to the world, that the UK Parliament stands with Ukraine and that war crimes, either historical or current, will not be tolerated.