Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Golodomor?

I have always been fascinated by history, in fact it is one of the two concentrations of my major that I am focusing on, but there is still a lot about history that I don’t know about. One issue that I am just now learning about is the holodomor or the golodomor in the Soviet Union during the early years of the 1930s. What happened was the majority of the agricultural regions in the Soviet Union, including places such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, etc, were seized of their grain and most of their produced goods were sent to Western Russia. This was an attempt to sustain the population in Western Russia that had grown rapidly. However, by taking the grain from these regions, millions of people went hungry and between 6 to 8 million people died in the years 1932 to 1933. There has been much debate over Golodomor (Mass Hunger) and if it was really a genocide attempt by the government. This is where the term Holodomor comes from—because changing the ‘g’ to an ‘h’ makes it look more like the word Holocaust. However, the European Parliament has rejected calling it a genocide attempt by Stalin. Nonetheless, what happened was awful and something that I didn’t know about.

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