The genocidal man made famine imposed upon the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-1933 known as the Holodomor killed not only people of Ukrainian nationality, but also a large number of people belonging to national minorities living in the territory. This was especially true of predominantly rural ethnic groups such as Germans and Poles. This paper will focus on the collective experience of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine during dekulakization, forced agricultural collectivization, and the Holodomor itself. In total it will cover the years 1928-1933 as a key turning point in Soviet state violence towards ethnic Germans from being predominantly class based in the period from 1918-1922 to mostly being based on ancestral national origin in 1937-1938, and later entirely based upon ethno-racial targeting in 1941-1955. This movement from targeting class enemies to internal enemy nations was not limited to the ethnic Germans. It involved the disproportionate and later almost total repression of a number of ethno-national groups in the USSR during the Stalin regime. A significant number of these targeted groups were diaspora groups with ancestral and cultural origins outside the USSR. These included in addition to the Germans, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Koreans, Chinese, and others. In Ukraine large numbers of Germans, Poles, and Greeks lived before World War II and massive deportations eastward by the NKVD greatly reduced their numbers. Ethnic Germans made up one of the largest and oldest diaspora groups in the USSR and especially Ukraine up until this time. German settlers began arriving in what would become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Soviet era in the late 18th century. This immigration greatly increased in the 19th century starting during the Napoleonic Wars and official policies by Paul I and Alexander I to settle the territory annexed from the defeated Crimean Khanate by Catherine II. German speaking Lutherans, Catholics, and Mennonites settled in the Black Sea region of the Russian Empire in large numbers during the first half of the 19th century and became quite prosperous. Most of them settled in rural areas on land provided by the Russian government and their descendants remained farmers up until the 1941 deportations. During the 1918-1921 Civil War and 1921-1922 famine ethnic Germans both in Ukraine and other areas such as the Volga were targeted by the Bolsheviks and others such as Makhno’s anarchists due to their relative wealth. This would give way to the relatively benign policies of NEP and
fantastic article by one of the top scholars on this subject
AG Bridges