The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 12th October voted to recognize the 1930s starvation of millions in Ukraine under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a “genocide.”
Key points
- The motion to acknowledge the Holodomor in such grave terms passed with 73 votes for and one against.
- The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by starvation”) was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932-33 caused by the forced collectivization of farmers under Stalin.
- Ukraine has regarded the famine as a deliberate act of genocide by Stalin since 2006, while Russia still rejects this account, and places the Holodomor within the broader context of famines that devastated parts of the Soviet Union at that time.
