Today, more than 30 states have recognised Holodomor in Ukraine as a genocide. The crime committed 90 years ago is now finally receiving its fair share of attention not only from researchers but also from politicians. Moscow’s continued efforts to prevent Ukrainian grain from reaching ports in Africa and Asia have also contributed to shaping this collective understanding. Once again, the world can see that genocidal practices are a common strategy and a common practice for Moscow.
French philosopher André Glucksmann, who systematically studied genocidal practices in various countries worldwide, mentions one little-known historical fact in his book “Dostoevsky in Manhattan”. He refers to the famine of 1891 that occurred in the Russian Samara, which, according to the researcher, had “not only natural but also political reasons.” Peasants from surrounding villages, recently freed from serfdom by Emperor Alexander II, revolted against taxes and the conditions for land redemption. To suppress the revolt, army units surrounded the rebellious villages and completely cut off their food supplies. “Famous writers, Tolstoy and Chekhov, began collecting aid for the victims of this organised famine. On the other hand, there was a young lawyer recently expelled to Samara from St. Petersburg. His brother, a benevolent person, was executed for attempting to assassinate the emperor. He declared, “No food aid to the peasants! Let them die because they must know: there is no hope in the king or in God!” writes Glucksmann. “The young lawyer was the future leader of the world proletariat. Even then, Lenin began experimenting with the “policy of the worst”. Hunger pushes the peasant masses toward revolution. The worse, the better, even if this path is strewn with corpses”, says the philosopher.
In André Glucksmann’s opinion, the events in Samara, as well as the genocide of the Circassians in the Caucasus at the end of the 19th century, help to understand better the genocide that happened in Ukraine in 1932-1933.
Ukrainian Holodomor is not an exception, but on the contrary, its mechanisms are similar to the crimes that occurred both earlier and later in other regions of the world. This clearly indicates its genocidal nature,” Glucksmann noted in an interview with one of the authors of this text.
When Western countries were purchasing grain from the USSR confiscated from starving Ukrainian peasants in 1932-1933, former chairman of the French State Council, Eduard Herriot, wrote: “When they tell me that there is famine in Ukraine, I shrug my shoulders”. An active supporter of rapprochement with Moscow, Herriot indeed did not see any corpses on the streets as he was invited to go for a walk during his trip to the USSR. “In the Potemkin villages where Herriot was brought, real peasants were replaced by state intelligence agents—who were happy and smiling,” write Andre Glucksmann and Thierry Wolton. “However, as is known from the memoirs of one eyewitness, a day before the arrival of the foreign guest, the ‘real peasants’ were mobilised to clean up the numerous corpses from the streets.”
In the 1930s, Stalin easily took the lives of six and a half million Ukrainians without external help, only with the silent consent of the world community”, tells the book published in 1986. “Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam did not have the luxury of such resources. To finance his program of exterminating dissenters, he extensively relied on Western generosity”.
Hunger as a weapon has been employed in both Tsarist and Soviet Russia, as well as in Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Somalia, among others. Since 2018, International Humanitarian Law (IHL) strictly prohibits the use of hunger as a method of warfare. At that time, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2417, unanimously condemning the use of hunger against the civilian population as a method of warfare and declaring any obstruction of humanitarian aid a violation of international law. Since then, the use of hunger as a weapon has been increasingly discussed. Recently, the humanitarian organisation Oxfam stated that hunger is being used as a weapon in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, particularly against the civilian population in Gaza. According to the World Food Programme, hunger has been repeatedly used as a weapon of war in countries such as Ethiopia and Yemen. Thus, the understanding that hunger can be used as a weapon is prevalent today, both among the poorest countries, where the population most often suffers from this type of weapon, and at the UN level.
At the same time, totalitarian regimes do not shy away from using it, often in various projections. The way Vladimir Putin currently manipulates access to food for the poorest segments of the world’s population, threatening Ukraine’s grain shipments via the Black Sea or by shelling Ukrainian grain storage facilities, is a clear manifestation of how hunger is used as a weapon today. This aligns with the theories of economist Amartya Sen, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for demonstrating that famine and starvation result from the fact that some people are unable to access an adequate amount of food rather than a lack of food in a country or region. Ukraine is willing to transport its grain to the poorest countries, while Russia is ready to destroy or steal and resell it, repeating Soviet crimes of the interwar period.
Amartya Sen began researching the causes of famines, particularly because he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943 with his own eyes. More than 3 million people perished in the tragedy, provoked by human actions rather than scarcity or poor harvests.
The Holodomor of 1932–1933 has been recognised as the genocide of the Ukrainian people, mainly by Western countries. At the same time, it is important to communicate the issue of Holodomor to Asian and African countries, where people have also been affected by the use of famine as a weapon. For example, the politically induced famine by the British colonial administration in Bengal could be a crucial element for understanding and exchanging ideas between historians and publicists from both countries.
