Ukrainian Holodomor

Debate between David Mundell and Roger Gale

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Mundell]

I agree. My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Part of Putin’s strategy is to create as many problems as possible for other countries, and then to blame those problems on somebody else. In this House, we must always be clear that the energy crisis, at its heart, comes from Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

As my hon. Friends have mentioned, it is very difficult to say exactly how many people died in 1932-33. Estimates vary, but a 2003 UN report put the figure at about 7 million to 10 million people. Those numbers do not, however, tell of the privations experienced, which we have just touched on. They do not tell of the slow and painful deaths. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) mentioned the turning to cannibalism; many people were compelled to do that. But the holodomor did not come from a poor harvest, bad weather or poor stewardship of land, which we often associate with the Soviet era; it was man-made—by Stalin and his apparatchiks. It was a deliberate act, the culmination of an assault by the Communist party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian people. Their agricultural produce was requisitioned from them by the Russian leadership. Their land was taken from them. They were starving, but banned from leaving their homesteads. Many had no choice but to die. None of it needed to happen. It was the result of deliberate decisions and what was the reason? The productive agricultural lands of Ukraine were a patchwork of small holdings, and people having a little more than enough to feed their own families made them ideological enemies of the Soviet state. That so-called “class element” has perhaps given some commentators cause to question whether the holodomor constituted a genocide. They are, however, making a distinction without a difference. It is clear that the deliberate and systematic murder of millions of people cannot be classified in any other way than as genocide. We in the UK need to recognise that.

I pay tribute to people such as Dr Peter Kormylo in Scotland, who has long campaigned on these issues. As I said in my opening remarks, these issues did not come to the fore because of recent events, but they are all the more poignant, as others have said, because of those events. We can send a very clear message to the Ukrainian people that we not only recognise the suffering they are experiencing at this moment, but understand the suffering they have experienced previously to get them to this point in their history. Therefore, it is very important that the House follow the advice of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire and adopt the position that she so eloquently set out.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the SNP spokesman.