Telegraph e-paper

Germany to call Stalin’s Great Famine a ‘genocide’

By Roland Oliphant SENIOR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

GERMANY will declare Joseph Stalin’s starvation of 3.5 million Ukrainians a “genocide”, in a move described as a warning to Vladimir Putin not to weaponise hunger against the country this winter.

In November 1932 Stalin requisitioned from peasant communities grain needed for sowing the following year’s crop. Some historians put the death toll from the 1932-33 Holodomor, or “death by hunger”, that followed as high as 10 million.

Deputies will next week vote on a resolution formally putting the famine on a footing with the Holocaust. The draft resolution says: “People across Ukraine, not just in grain-producing regions, were impacted by hunger and repression” and the orchestrated policy “meets the historical-political definition from today’s perspective for genocide”.

The Soviet government denied the famine and attempted to cover up the scale of the deaths.

Ukraine has long regarded the famine as a deliberate act of genocide aimed at wiping out the distinctly Ukrainian peasant population.

The Kremlin and some historians dispute the genocide label because other grainproducing areas in the Soviet Union, as such as Kazakhstan, were also affected.

World News

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2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://dailytelegraph.pressreader.com/article/281986086566392

Daily Telegraph