Why it’s important that the Senate recognize the Holodomor as genocide

Extermination by hunger, from Stalin to Putin. Today the vote in Palazzo Madama on the most massive massacre in European history after the Shoah, the motion signed by senators from the Fdi and Pd

It is a historical question, but one that concerns current events more than ever. Today the Senate debates a motion “on the recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people”. Holodomor comes from the Ukrainian words holod (famine) and moryty (to kill) and is precisely the “extermination by hunger” carried out by Stalin’s Soviet Union to break the resistance of the Ukrainian peasantry to collectivization and liquidate the national elite. The famine, already manifested in the spring of 1932 following the collectivization of 1930-31, and then attenuated by the harvest, it was deliberately aggravated at the end of the year by a tough policy of crop requisitioning and restriction of mobility for those trying to migrate to the cities in search of food. It was about the largest massacre in European history of the 20th century after the Holocaust: four million dead in just six monthsfrom January to June of 1933.