Holodomor - Etymology

Etymology

The word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means "death by hunger," or "to kill by hunger, to starve to death." Sometimes the expression is translated into English as "murder by hunger or starvation."

Holodomor is a portmanteau word of the Ukrainian word holod meaning "hunger" and mor meaning "plague." The expression moryty holodom means "to inflict death by hunger." The Ukrainian verb moryty (морити) means "to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody." The perfective form of the verb moryty is zamoryty – "kill or drive to death by hunger, exhausting work."

The word was used in print as early as 1978 by Ukrainian immigrant organizations in the United States and Canada. However, in the USSR – of which Ukraine was a member – references to the famine were controlled, even after de-Stalinization in 1956. Historians could speak only of 'food difficulties', and the use of the very word golod/holod (hunger, famine) was forbidden.

Discussion of the Holodomor became more open as part of Glasnost in the late 1980s. In Ukraine, the first official use of the word was a December 1987 speech by Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, on the occasion of the republic's seventieth anniversary. An early public usage in the Soviet Union was in February 1988, in a speech by Oleksiy Musiyenko, Deputy Secretary for ideological matters of the party organization of the Kiev branch of the Union of Soviet Writers in Ukraine. The term may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, in his article on the topic.

"Holodomor" is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, published in 2004. The term is described as "artificial hunger, organised in vast scale by the criminal regime against the country's population."