Problem of Famine 1932-33 in the USSR – Certain International Legal Aspects

Today, the Ukrainian side attempts to juridically qualify the famine of the 1930s in the Ukraine as genocide. However, these tragic events took place not only before the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of the Genocide in 1948 (which entered into force in 1951; in Russia – on August 1, 1954), but even before the very term “genocide” was coined by R. Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, in 1943.

As stated in Article 13 of the draft articles of the International Law Commission on Responsibility of States for the Internationally Wrongful Acts, an act of a State does not constitute a breach of an international obligation unless the State is bound by the obligation in question at the time the act occurs. Therefore, these components cannot be applied to the events that took place before the criminalization of genocide.

According to Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on Genocide (Article 6 of the ICC Statute), genocide means "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical or religious group as such".
The existence of a direct intent is a key component here. In case of genocide it means the direct intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.
The question of whether to include certain groups into the category of genocide victims raised heated debates during the preparation of a draft convention against genocide (inter alia, at the 74th and 75th meetings of the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly on October 14-15, 1948). Finally, the majority of States voted against the expansion of a scope of this concept.
The text of the 1948 Convention on Genocide makes it clear that acts leading to the extermination, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical or religious group yet committed without an intent to do so do not represent genocide.

Of course, it is difficult to question the fact that crimes of genocide themselves had been perpetrated long before this term was first introduced in an international document, namely in the GA Resolution 96(1) (A/RES/96(1)) of December 11, 1946. Thus, events that took place before 1951 can also be qualified as genocide from an academic point of view. Then indemnity claims could be lodged against the majority of States, in particular against the USA and Canada for the extermination of Indians, against Australia for the extermination of native Australians, against Belgium for the extermination of the Congolese under King Leopold II, against Germany for genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in Namibia, etc.

Mass famine in the early 1930s is known to be a result of a drought, forced collectivization and dekulakization (repressions against rich peasants, or kulaks) carried out nationwide, not only in Ukraine. Victims of famine also included millions of Russians, Kazakhs, Tatars, Bashkirs, and other ethnic groups residing in the Middle and Lower Volga Region, North Caucasus, Central Chernozem, South Urals, West Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Thus, famine mostly affected the population of today’s Russia and, to a lesser extent, that of Ukraine.

Decisions on collectivization and dekulakization were taken by the multiethnic leadership of the USSR and Soviet republics. The extermination of the Ukranian population was not an end in itself for the Bolshevik regime, which is testified by the fact of providing food aid to the regions and areas mostly affected by famine. Historians estimate that the Political Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) provided up to 2.2 million tons of crops, foodstuffs and forage for these purposes during the first months of 1932. The Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic accounted for at least half of this amount.
In the book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, Western writers, the fact of genocide of the Ukrainian people is denied; according to the authors, the Ukranian SSR and North Caucasus received 256 thousand tons of Government food aid during the period from February to June of 1933, whereas all other regions combined received only 55 thousand tons.
In view of the above, it may therefore be stated that internationa law gives no grounds whatsover to qualify 1931-1933 famine in the Ukraine as genocide of the Ukranian people.