On Wednesday, November 30, a motion was adopted with the votes of SPD, Greens, FDP and CDU/CSU. AfD and the Left abstained. According to the statement the Bundestag decides to classify the so-called "Holodomor" (death by starvation) as Stalin's genocide against the Ukrainian population. What is meant by this term is the famine that affected parts of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s and which is repeatedly presented by some bourgeois "historians" either as a deliberate extermination of the Ukrainian population or at least as a necessary consequence of an allegedly ruthlessly implemented collectivization of agriculture.
In both cases, this has little to do with reality, and anyone who seriously studies Soviet history will quickly discover that the story of the "starvation genocide" is based first and foremost on the lies of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and other reactionaries such as British intelligence agent Robert Conquest. Conquest's work "Harvest of Sorrow" is generally rejected by historians as unscientific and his core thesis as absurd. While there is some dispute about how much influence human activity had on the extent of the famine, it is generally not classified as genocide.
The Bundestag, meanwhile, is not bothered by the fact that it is not at all common among historians to classify the famine in Ukraine as genocide. A whole series of bourgeois states also reject this definition, including Israel, for example, which sees in it a relativization of the crimes of Hitler fascism. However, completely without the involvement of scientific staff, the Bundestag determined in a lightning debate that the "Holodomor" should be classified as genocide. This leads to outrage even among anti-communists like the BZ or the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
For example, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes "As important as answers to these questions are, they should be given by historians and not by elected representatives of the people. Otherwise they exceed their competence. Moreover, they turn the memory-political procedure on its head. For first, a consensus should have emerged in academia, there should have been a public debate. Thus, however, the parliament decrees remembrance policy from above - and that with a disputed factual situation."
The Berliner Zeitung comments as follows: "No German Bundestag has so far recognized the blockade of Leningrad by the Wehrmacht as genocide; there the death of the population of millions by starvation was clearly intended. No Bundestag recognized the genocidal intent of the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Not even the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa received recognition by the Bundestag. Why not? Such decisions would entail claims for compensation. In the face of the disaster caused by Germany, the deputies steal away from history with slender feet, they bow to Ukrainian pressure. But twisting historical facts according to political expediency is a characteristic of dictatorships."
In keeping with the tradition of the German government, this definition is also used to mobilize against Russia, which also refuses to classify the famine as genocide. As they have done repeatedly in recent months, the German imperialists are using anti-communist stereotypes to discredit Russian imperialism.
However, this decision is also relevant for the revolutionary movement. For with a recently launched tightening of the Incitement of the People Paragraph 130, the denial of war crimes or genocides will be punished more severely. Defending Comrade Stalin, under whose leadership socialism was built in the Soviet Union and starvation ended, which claimed countless lives again and again before the October Revolution, is thus made a punishable offense.
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