In the years 1932 and 1933, one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in human history

occurred in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union.

Millions of people died, yet the event was ignored by most of the Western press and

wasn't even officially acknowledged by the Soviet government until the 1980s.

Today most people in the world still aren't aware of one of the greatest tragedies of the

20th century. Learn more about the Holodemore and the engineered famine that killed

millions of people on this episode of Everything everywhere daily. The word

the word holodomor is a Ukrainian word derived from the phrase

Moriti holodom which means to kill by starvation. The word is

intentionally not synonymous with the word for famine. The creation and usage of

the word are designed to stress a famine that was inflicted upon someone on purpose

similar to the difference between the English words murder and death. With that in mind

to understand the events of holodemore we have to back up a few years to after the Communist Revolution when

Lenin was the leader of the Soviet Union. In theory, in the Soviet Union, all private

property was outlawed. However, in 1921, Lenin instituted what was known as the New Economic Program.

During the Russian Civil War, which followed the revolution, all businesses in the country were nationalized.

However, in what he considered a temporary pragmatic move, Lenin's new economic program

allowed for some free market reforms to exist alongside Soviet state-run enterprises.

For the purposes of this episode, with respect to farmers, he removed the policy of forced grain seizures and replaced it with a tax which could be payable in grain.

Soviet agricultural policy during the Civil War was a disaster.

When anything and everything you produced could and would be taken without any compensation,

no one had much of an incentive to work.

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