Talk:Holodomor

Semi-protected edit request on 14 March 2025

This definition is Russian propoganda. The cause was Russia and intentional. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.224.34.176 (talk) 20:07, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Agree that the Russian KGB is trying to distort the terrible genocide while they do it again in their invasion. 2607:FEA8:E3C0:6640:51FE:35E3:ADE:2686 (talk) 18:24, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Gawaon (talk) 10:01, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 11 April 2025

The entire second paragraph that argues that there is a scholarly debate about whether the Holodomor was intentional or not has zero citations. It at least needs some additions of “citation needed.” We know from climate change discourse and smoking discourse that uncertainty can be manufactured and weaponized. Especially with the history of inaccurate reporting at the time that the famine didn’t exist, I think there’s a duty to show that scholars themselves think there is a debate. Thank you! 97.117.64.13 (talk) 14:04, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: The lead of an article typically avoids citations. The details in that paragraph are sourced in the main article body — Czello ^(music) 14:18, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Lede

While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional and whether it was directed at Ukrainians and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union.

This claim should be either sourced and clarified or removed since the existence or lack of a written document explicitly ordering a genocide is alone not a valid point of contention for whether a genocide took place. See the functionalism debate on the Holocaust. 24.126.12.119 (talk) 18:04, 27 April 2025 (UTC)

This is discussed in more detail in the body and so doesn't need repeated citations in the lead, per MOS:LEADCITE. Gawaon (talk) 13:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Just write "there was no written document explicitly ordering a genocide" along with the source of this statement. Remove any other extra part from the statement. Dark1618 (talk) 11:58, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Verbosity

The first two paragraphs contain a lot of verbosity; I recommend removing a lot of words that do not add to the content. Mechanical Keyboarder (talk) 02:06, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Sure, but you altered the meaning of passages and removed key context—blindlynx 12:45, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

So what was reason for the famine?

I read more than 3/4th of the history section untill i lost my patience. Its nothing but a huge wall of text. I guess there is two side: pro-socialist, anti-socialist. I suggest you describe both side of the narative separately and concisely under each section. Dont just counter-attack each sentence. Dark1618 (talk) 12:11, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

History is rarely simple. If you think it's simple, you're probably doing it wrong. Gawaon (talk) 15:29, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

The reason for the famine

There is an interesting article published in 2017 that describes the terrible agricultural practices of the Soviet Union. A person single-handedly messed up the Soviet agricultural policy for several decades. Then, Stalin kept him in place even after repeated failures. His practices were copied by Communist China and that led to tens of millions of more deaths.

The Soviet Era's Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in Russia (2017) is about Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist and scientist that was placed in charge of agricultural policy for the whole of the Soviet Union.

Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. Other dubious scientific achievements have cut thousands upon thousands of lives short: dynamite, poison gas, atomic bombs. But Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation. Only guns and gunpowder, the collective product of many researchers over several centuries, can match such carnage.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Joseph Stalin—with Lysenko’s backing—had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted. Stalin refused to change course, however, and ordered Lysenko to remedy the disaster with methods based on his radical new ideas. Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, for instance, since according to his “law of the life of species,” plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. He also forbade all use of fertilizers and pesticides.

Instead, as the journalist Jasper Becker has described in the book Hungry Ghosts, Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree. Bakorenko (talk) 15:30, 4 July 2025 (UTC)