National Network for Equitable Library Service

Among some of history's famines, the Holodomor's death toll is considerably lower than others, such as the the Chalisa and South India Famines between 1782 to 1784, which killed roughly 11 million people altogether, or the Chinese Famine of 1907, which claimed up to 25 million lives in northern China. The Holodomor, however, which ravaged Ukraine between 1932 and 1933, was not a natural occurrence, but a ghastly man-made famine brought about by Stalinist policies. While Ukrainians marked this tragedy as the Holodomor (a composite of the Ukrainian words hunger (holod) and extermination (mor)), and the modern Ukrainian state recognized the period as a genocide in 2006, the Holomodor was deliberately swept under the rug for several decades. As a result, it remains widely unacknowledged to this day, and the nature of the famine - particularly whether it should be considered a genocide - is still debated by scholars.