Quote Originally Posted by gRomoZeka View Post
Oh, don't start again.

Genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", and nothing of said above applies to "golodomor". Modern nationalistic Ukrainian politics prefer to label it genocide to strengthen the opinion, that "Russians" (or rather Stalin regime) deliberately tried to annihilate all Ukrainians.

Still, peasants starved to death not because Ukrainians were specifically targeted, but because peasantry in general faced unbearable demands of the state. The same starvation scenario happened to Russian peasants in Volga region in 1921-1922. Was it Russian genocide against Russians, then? Well, no. It was cruel economical policy, which hurt agricultural regions indiscriminately regardless of ethnic (or any other) groups living there. You can call it genocide against peasants, figuratively speaking... but that's it.

There's also a well-known fact that photographs which are used routinely to demonstrate the terrible consequences of Ukrainian "golodomor" to Western public in books and media (starving children, skeletal-looking corpses, etc.) are in fact photos of Russian peasants, starved to death near Volga. That does not make what happened to Ukrainians any better, but it gives a (deliberately?) wrong impression of what was going on during that period.
Ok, if it makes you feel better, you can call it "deliberate mass killings". And I would still insist that it was genocide, maybe not ethnic genocide but "class genocide" - the bolsheviks just wanted the people that were more successful than them to die, and of course, to rob their houses and grab what they had managed to produce so that the bolsheviks wouldn't have to make it on their own.