Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 26 – Experts at
the Kyiv Institute of Demography say that Ukrainian suffered the greatest
number of excess deaths as a result of the Holodomor in 1932-33 – 3.9 million
in all – but that Kazakhstan suffered a higher percentage of population loss –
22.4 percent as opposed to Ukraine’s 13.3 percent.
According to the Institute, there
were approximately 8.7 million excess deaths in the USSR in those two years
over what would have been expected given population trends at that time as a
result of Stalin’s manmade famine (unian.net/society/2259494-demografyi-nazvali-tochnoe-chislo-poter-naseleniya-ukrainyi-vo-vremya-golodomora-v-1930-h-godah.html).
Suggestions that
there were seven, ten or even twelve million deaths in Ukraine are unjustified,
the demographers say. The data do not support such claims. It is justified to add to the losses the
number of children one would have expected to be born but weren’t. In the case
of Ukraine, that would be approximately 600,000 for that period.
That would bring the Ukrainian loss
to 4.5 million. Most of these losses were among the peasantry, the demographers
say; but approximately 300,000 urban Ukrainians died of hunger as well in those
two years. In terms of losses in other republics, 3.2 percent of the population
in the RSFSR died from hunger, 1.3 percent in Belarus, and fewer elsewhere in
the USSR.
Within Ukraine itself, Kyiv and
Kharkiv oblasts were hit particularly hard with a million deaths in each. There
deaths in the rural areas amounted to 40 to 54 percent of the pre-famine
population. Elsewhere in Ukraine, the
losses and percentages were significantly lower, the demographers
continued.
The scholars also noted that the
situation in Ukraine differed from other portions of the USSR in terms of “a
high concentration of deaths over a relatively short period of time.” Some
three million of the deaths occurred in the course of the first seven months of
1933, statistics show.
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