During 1932-33, between three and 6 million Ukrainians starved to death in a famine imposed by Stalin as a means of destroying Ukrainian nationalism.
The impact of the famine on Ukrainians was no less traumatic than that of the Holocaust upon the Jews. The Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman identified a number of similarities between the two genocides in his novel Forever Flowing.
Although Demidenko attempts to attribute responsibility for the famine to leading Jewish Communists, the Jewish presence in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party had infact sharply declined by this time. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev had all been purged. The only remaining Jew in the Soviet leadership was Stalin's loyal servant, Lazar Kaganovich.
To be sure, Jews continued to be disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party, comprising 13.4% of the party membership as opposed to 4.9% of the total population of the Ukraine. And some leading Ukrainian Communists such as Khatayevich, Kulyk, Lifshits, Hurevich, and Ravich-Cherkassky were of Jewish origin. Yet, there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Jews as an ethnic group or even Jews as individual Bolsheviks played a significant role in the Ukrainian famine.
For one, accounts of the famine by survivors or leading historians - such as Robert Conquest - attribute clear responsibility for the millions of Ukrainian deaths to the Soviet leader Stalin who was of Georgian origin.
For another, the two leading figures in the Ukrainian Communist Party at that time - Stanislav Kossior and Vlas Chubar - were respectively of Polish and Ukrainian origin.
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