The Parliamentary Assembly stresses
that the present war of aggression of the Russian Federation against
Ukraine must be seen in the context of an earlier attempt to wipe
out Ukrainian nationhood, namely the Holodomor, whose 90th anniversary
was commemorated in November 2023:
1.1 the Holodomor, genocide by artificial famine, resulted
in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, shielded from the view
of foreign observers located in urban areas;
1.2 hitherto secret documents, published after the “Orange
Revolution”, show that the famine was the intended result of the
policies imposed by the Soviet regime. The artificial famine targeted
mostly Ukrainians within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
as well as Ukrainians living in other regions of the Soviet Union;
only ethnic Kazakhs, who may well have been targeted by the Kremlin
for similar reasons, suffered comparable loss of life;
1.3 according to the official Russian narrative, the famine
was the unintended result of erroneous economic policies pursued
by Joseph Stalin. However, documents show there was no shortage
of grain until the authorities confiscated even the seed grain that
would have ensured the following year’s harvest. Documents also
show that the confiscation of food targeted not only grain, but
also all foodstuffs found in the houses of Ukrainian farmers in
brutal searches carried out by officials, even when family members
were already dead or dying on the floor;
1.4 the deadliness of the artificial famine was heightened
by the fact that NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
troops surrounded the stricken villages and regions, preventing
the inhabitants from escaping and blocking any foodstuffs from entering
the target regions;
1.5 the Soviet Union also refused international aid offered
by several countries to alleviate the suffering in Ukraine and instead
exported confiscated Ukrainian grain abroad;
1.6 the artificial famine was preceded by a campaign of show
trials, enforced disappearances and other forms of repression against
the Ukrainian intellectual elites – the cultural backbone of Ukrainian nationhood.
This campaign of terror and repression targeting the Ukrainian “intelligentsia”
took place years before Stalin’s purges and terror campaign in the
late 1930s, which also engulfed numerous ethnic Russians and members
of other Soviet nationalities;
1.7 these special measures, in particular the confiscation
of all foodstuffs in house-to-house searches and the NKVD blockades
as well as the repression targeting the intellectual elite were
applied only in Ukraine and other regions chiefly populated by Ukrainians,
not in other parts of the Soviet Union suffering from famine;
1.8 the Assembly therefore determines that the systematic
destruction of first the political and cultural leaders, who served
as the cultural backbone of the Ukrainian nation, and then millions
of ordinary Ukrainians, was deliberately intended as a genocide.
Genocide, as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“the Genocide Convention”),
does not require the physical elimination of all members of the
target group. It is sufficient that living conditions are made so
difficult that the existence of the group as such, in whole or in
part, is put in jeopardy;
1.9 until the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians continued
to suffer from the leaden silence about the Holodomor enforced by
the Soviet regime. After Ukraine became independent, and in particular
since the “Orange Revolution”, the Ukrainian people have enjoyed
a revival of their language, culture and political consciousness,
with unquestionable support for human rights and the rule of law.
Such resilience in the face of genocide and historic and present
brutal repression deserves the greatest admiration.
