The famine of 1932-1933 was not genocide against the Ukrainian people, stated Education and Science Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Tabachnyk, the Kyiv Post reports.

"The dying out of the Ukrainian village, Russian, Moldovan ones and so on, means the famine took place, but in my opinion, it was the political motivated destruction of the peasantry and the social system, it was not ethnically motivated," the minister said on September 1 during a phone-in session in Kyiv.

According to Tabachnyk, "to some extent the famine of 1931-1933 and the one in 1946-1947 were artificial and due to improper management decisions."

Background Information

The Holodomor was a famine in the Ukrainian SSR from 1932–1933, during which millions of inhabitants died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.6 million to 10 million.

Historian Robert Conquest claimed that the famine of 1932–33 was a deliberate act of mass murder, if not genocide, committed as part of Joseph Stalin's collectivization program in the Soviet Union. In 2006, the Security Service of Ukraine declassified more than 5 thousand pages of Holodomor archives. These documents suggest that the Soviet regime singled out Ukraine by not giving it the same humanitarian aid given to regions outside it.

After elections of 2010, the new president and his team refuse to name Holodomor a genocide.