Causes of the Holodomor in the context of "Stephen G. Wheatcroft"

The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine, was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.

While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization but once it set in, starvation was selectively weaponized, and the famine was "instrumentalized" and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish them for resisting Soviet policies and to suppress their nationalist sentiments.

The Holodomor, a 1932–1933 man-made famine, killed 3.3–5 million ethnic Ukrainian people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (as part of the Soviet Union), included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader Soviet famine of 1930–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the USSR. Scholars debate whether there was an intent to starve millions of Ukrainians to death or not.

While scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made, the topic remains a significant issue in modern politics with historians disputing whether Soviet policies in the era constitute genocide. Specifically, scholarly debate of the question centres around whether or not the Holodomor was intentional and therefore constitutes a genocide under the Genocide Convention. Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide. Western historians hold varying views. Most scholars who reject the argument that state policy in regard to the famine was genocidal do not absolve Joseph Stalin or the Soviet regime as a whole from guilt for the famine deaths and still view such policies as being ultimately criminal in nature.