In Ukraine, the number of victims of the Holodomor has been counted

Population losses in Ukraine due to famine in the 1930s amounted to 3,9 million people, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.

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This figure was calculated by Ukrainian scientists and announced by Deputy Director of the M. V. Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Alexander Gladun during the press conference “Losses of the population of Ukraine as a result of the Holodomor of 1932-1933,” Ukrinform reports.

“According to our calculations, losses due to excess mortality amount to 3,9 million people. Very often in the speeches of politicians and in the media you can hear the numbers 7,10, and now they are talking about 12 million losses. Therefore, we, as scientists, tried from a demographic point of view to assess the reliability or possibility of such large losses for Ukraine,” Gladun said.

The scientist advises to be very careful about such inflated data, since they basically have no demographic justification. In turn, the chief researcher at the M. V. Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Natalya Levchuk, spoke about the research methodology and information base, thanks to which it was determined that the losses amounted to 3,9 million people.

Levchuk said that first an assessment was made of the demographic costs of the famine for Ukraine in the context of the former Soviet Union. Then, an assessment of demographic losses was carried out separately for the urban and rural population of Ukraine at the national and regional levels (in particular in the 7 regions that were part of Ukraine at that time), as well as at the district level of 392 administrative districts as of April 1933.

At the same time, she explained that the calculation took into account not only direct, but also indirect losses.

“Losses from hunger are not all those who died during this time, but their excess. That is, this is the difference between the actual number of deaths during the famine and the expected number that would have occurred in the absence of the famine. These are direct losses. The difference between the number of actual deaths and the expected number of, so to speak, non-crisis deaths. Indirect losses are the number of births, those who could have been born in the absence of famine, but were not born, and which are calculated as the difference between the expected number of births and the number of those who were actually born,” Levchuk said.

“Based on a thorough critical analysis of demostatistical archival information, we carried out a so-called demographic reconstruction, that is, a reproduction of the demographic dynamics of Ukraine, the main parameters of its demographic indicators between the censuses of 1926 and 1939, and on this basis an assessment of losses,” she noted.

According to her, the first place in terms of relative losses is occupied by Kazakhstan (22,4%), and in second place is Ukraine (13,3%), followed by Russia (3,2%), Belarus (1,3%), and the countries of Transcaucasia and Central Asia even less.

“Thus, the losses of the population of Ukraine as a whole amount to 3942,5 - these are direct losses, and the deficit of births is about 600 thousand,” she added. The scientist emphasized that the study showed that peasants suffered the most, but there was also famine in the cities.

Thus, of the mentioned 3,9 million losses in cities, the losses amount to about 300 thousand. According to the regional distribution of losses, of the then 7 regions that were part of Ukraine, the Kiev and Kharkov regions suffered the most. The second group is formed by Vinnitsa, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa regions. Relatively the lowest losses are in the Chernihiv and Donetsk regions.

At the regional level, the most affected areas of central Ukraine were the so-called forest-steppe zone - in the modern administrative division of Ukraine - the regions of Cherkassy, ​​Poltava and Kyiv regions. In the Kiev region these are Tetievsky, Volodarsky and Stavishchensky districts. In the Poltava region there are Globinsky, Reshetylivsky and Oposhnyansky districts.