Empire Eats the Poor and Blames Them

A Historiographical Analysis of the Holodomor (Death by Hunger) and An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger)

HIS201: The Uses and Abuses of History

University of Sunshine Coast

Dedication

For my great-grandmother Maria, age eight when both your parents died of starvation at the peak of the Ukraine Holodomor. No one believed what you endured. Yet your stories live in my heart, your strength forever in my veins. Through our motherline of weavers, women who spun thread and kept a yarn shop, abundance and skill flowed through our hands. Even as empire starved all you knew, creation through you never ceased. In Australia you lived in communion with the land, cooking endless feasts so your grandchildren would never taste hunger, never know why you gave so much. Empire named you peasant. I name you role model. I aspire to the way you lived. Your hands carried ancestral skill, crafting clothes, curtains and everything inbetween. Elaborate feasts from stratch. Such knowledge was never honoured as it should have been. So many called you crazy later in life, and you replied, you cannot even imagine what I endured. The vast majority could not.

Like so many Slavs, you worshipped Mokosh, mother of waters and earth, the same feminine presence I have felt in my spirit since childhood, without ever knowing you. Let us never forget their violence evident in language, for long before they twisted Slav into slave, we lived in kinship with our land. Slav once meant those who share language and story, keepers of the living word. Our reverence for the mother energy of Earth still sings in my blood. Through me your thread continues, woven now into voice, memory and the knowing that will never die. Our ancestors said the voice of Mokosh rises in rivers, uncanny as The Waters have always been my source of refuge.

To my ancestors of Éire (Ireland), for thousands of years you resisted unjust colonisation. The Celts and the Slavs once stretched across Europe, vast majorities before being driven to the margins, first by Rome with its trade routes, forced taxation and religion of domination. Before empire, the spiral was carved in stone, in memory and in the body of all earth-based peoples: the oldest mark of belonging, of time, of return. Ancestors, your oral magic for storytelling, your earth-bound rituals remain ripe in my blood. Éire (Ireland), land of Ériu, goddess of sovereignty and belonging, living spirit of the land itself, reminds us that soil and sovereign, land and feminine guardian, are inseparable. My heart remembers, and always will.

Only later in life did I begin to understand why I have always felt such anger towards wealth inequality and the ruling class. To see what was stolen, to hear how the language of colonisers still speaks and justifies our shared past, is to reclaim respect for ourselves and for all who were stripped from earth-based life and exploited for profit by the ruling class—the vast majority reduced and controlled. With knowledge we reclaim power. We return to the values the collective remembers, the values the collective needs, the values the collective deserves.

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Introduction

Famines are never simply natural disasters, but events shaped by political choices (Sen, 1981). Both the Holodomor (1932–33) and An Gorta Mór (1845–52) were not natural disasters but colonial projects, in which land seizure, extraction, and discursive manipulation converged to starve populations while exporting food. Interpretations of these famines became battlegrounds for assigning responsibility (de Waal, 1997; Spiegel, 2007), illustrating how historiography not only records events but actively shapes collective memory (Antoniou, 2007). This comparative analysis investigates how state narratives weaponised famine to obscure accountability. First, crisis-era propaganda is examined, highlighting how victims were blamed while food exports were enforced: Britain’s laissez-faire ideology (Trevelyan, 1847 in Kinealy, 1994) and Stalin’s inverted collectivisation policies that reaped deathly scarcity instead of plenty (Applebaum, 2017). Second, post-famine memory struggles are traced between official accounts and suppressed truths. Third, archival evidence and diaspora testimonies unmask and contest state narratives (Grynevych, 2021; Póirtéir, 1995). Finally, the analysis traces how the exploitative logics of empire endure, shaping modern discourse around poverty and the working class (Davis, 2001). Through this structure, historiography exposes the ideological frameworks that sustain state violence, revealing famine not as natural tragedy but as political crime (Kinealy, 1994).

Primary Narratives at the Time of Crisis

The British and Soviet regimes developed nearly identical rhetorical strategies to reconstruct mass starvation as morally justifiable outcomes (Vernon, 2007; Sen, 1981). Archival records confirm that both Ireland and Ukraine exported more calories than they received in relief during famine peaks (Ó Gráda, 2009; Grynevych, 2021), while employing tripartite discursive tactics: denialism, victim-blaming, and export justification (Davis, 2001; Snyder, 2010). In Ireland, British officials cast the famine as a moral reckoning rather than a colonial failure (Kinealy, 1994). Charles Trevelyan, head of relief administration, infamously referred to the famine as “the judgement of God,” suggesting that it would serve to “teach the Irish a lesson” (Trevelyan, 1847, as cited in Kinealy, 1994, p. 352). He later described the Irish character as “selfish, perverse and turbulent,” reinforcing colonial stereotypes of inherent backwardness (Trevelyan, 1848, as cited in Gray, 1995, p. 82). These interpretations aligned with the dominant belief in laissez-faire economics: that free market forces, not government intervention, should determine the distribution of relief (Donnelly, 2001). Yet the crisis cannot be disentangled from the long history of colonisation, in which imperial Britain dismantled traditional landholding, imposed extractive taxation, and forced tenant farmers into export production (Kinealy, 1994; Ó Gráda, 2009). Despite record grain harvests, the continued export of food from Ireland to Britain was justified through economic orthodoxy, underpinned by class contempt and a Protestant moralism that sanctified suffering as divine discipline (Ó Gráda, 2009; Kinealy, 1994). As Davis (2001) observes in his study of famine under empire, such crises were often treated by elites not as humanitarian disasters but as necessary “corrections” to indigenous populations. At its core, famine was deliberately reframed as divine will and economic necessity rather than preventable atrocity, allowing ruling elites to mask systemic exploitation and justify letting millions starve in service of ideology and profit.

Similarly, Soviet authorities replicated this blame-shifting paradigm through collectivisation discourse, employing Marxist terminology to mask extractive policies (Applebaum, 2017; Kotkin, 2014). Before collectivisation, Ukraine’s fertile black soil sustained centuries of highly productive smallholder farming, known as the “breadbasket of Europe” (Mace, 2004). Prosperous peasant households were rooted in local communities, yet Stalinist policy cast them as “kulaks” and class enemies, dispossessing and deporting the very farmers who had upheld agrarian prosperity for generations (Conquest, 1986; Snyder, 2010). This was not redistribution but colonisation: imperial seizure of land, extractive taxation and grain requisitions imposed at impossible levels to fund Soviet industrialisation. As the collectivisation campaign collapsed into mass starvation, the regime actively denied the crisis (Snyder, 2010). Soviet newspapers such as Pravda praised record harvests and labelled reports of hunger as anti-Soviet fabrications or “kulak sabotage” (Kas’yanov, 2015, p. 388). In a private conversation with Churchill, Stalin dismissed the famine as foreign exaggeration, insisting, “There is no famine... only difficulties in agriculture” (Applebaum, 2017, p. 211). At the same time, borders were sealed to prevent migration, and the 1932 Law of Five Ears criminalised gleaning, with thousands (including children) imprisoned or executed for taking leftover grain (Snyder, 2010). Ukraine’s agrarian economy was dismantled by forced collectivisation, replacing locally run farms with state collectives that produced logistical collapse, declining yields, and widespread revolt (Mace, 2004; Grynevych, 2021). This was not bureaucratic failure but a deliberate inversion of reality: extraction recoded as progress, starvation reframed as political necessity. Within official discourse, famine was not interpreted as failure but as “ideological cleansing” of class enemies who resisted the new Soviet order (Himka, 2013, p. 87). Both the British and Soviet regimes did not simply “fail” their people; they recoded hunger into morality tales, where death was rationalised as punishment or purification. This reveals a chilling continuity across empires: famine weaponised as both material policy and narrative control, where the body’s starvation was framed as deserved, inevitable, even necessary for a supposed higher order.

Post-Crisis Memory and Early Historiography

In the aftermath of famine, historiography became contested terrain where state-sponsored narratives clashed with survivor memory (Grynevych, 2021; Trouillot, 1995). The regimes' discursive strategies evolved across three phases: crisis denial, post-famine suppression, and archival obfuscation (Applebaum, 2017; Trouillot, 1995). In Ireland, early post-famine narratives often reinforced the very ideologies that had permitted the catastrophe (Donnelly, 2001; Kinealy, 1994). British parliamentary reports in the 1850s downplayed state culpability, instead emphasising supposed “improvements” in Irish agriculture and society (Donnelly, 2001). At the same time, more than 1.5 million people were driven from the country, many forced onto overcrowded “coffin ships” bound for North America, where disease and hunger killed thousands during the voyage (Miller, 1985; Kinealy, 1994). Hundreds of thousands more crossed into Britain, often into urban slums and industrial labour, where their pay and conditions chained them to the empire’s economic machine (Donnelly, 2001). Tens of thousands were directly evicted, their cottages levelled or burned, while hundreds of thousands were forced into the workhouse system (Ó Gráda, 2009; Kinealy, 1994). Established under the 1838 Irish Poor Law, the workhouse system was funded through local taxation and designed around the doctrine of “less eligibility,” ensuring conditions were harsher than life outside and transforming famine relief into an instrument of punishment and social control (Kinealy, 1994; Crossman, 2006). In practice, they became overcrowded and disease-ridden, compelling the poor into conditions that, in every definition of the word, constituted slavery. Families were broken apart, men and women segregated, children forced into relentless labour for scraps, while typhus and dysentery spread through unventilated dormitories (Gray, 1995). Mortality rates soared. All the while, British media and political cartoons mocked them as lazy, drunken, and undeserving, a rhetorical violence that compounded material exploitation (Curtis, 2011). Officials framed this system as a civilising necessity, reinforcing the idea that hunger was punishment for idleness and that survival had to be earned through endless toil and submission (Kinealy, 1994; Donnelly, 2001).

Ukraine faced a far more aggressive regime of enforced forgetting (Applebaum, 2017; Himka, 2013). Soviet historiography during the mid-20th century either omitted the famine entirely or attributed it to kulak sabotage and adverse weather conditions (Himka, 2013; Kas’yanov, 2015). Official records were destroyed or falsified, and famine survivors who spoke publicly risked arrest, exile, or execution (Grynevych, 2021). Census data was deliberately manipulated: the 1937 census revealed catastrophic demographic losses, with millions missing from the official record. Because the figures contradicted the narrative of Soviet prosperity, the census was suppressed and the demographers who compiled it were executed (Applebaum, 2017). Although exact figures remain contested, most historians estimate between 3.5 and 5 million deaths, while some Ukrainian scholars argue the toll was higher, closer to 7 million (Snyder, 2010; Graziosi, 2015). Entire villages were depopulated, yet official discourse continued to insist on “record harvests.” Schools, newspapers, and Soviet histories maintained silence for decades, reducing famine to a forbidden topic. While rural families whispered fragments of truth in kitchens, there was no sanctioned narrative. Here silence was not absence but enforcement, a terror that punished memory itself. To remember was dangerous. To speak was criminal. To testify was to risk death. To prove became almost impossible, because the evidence was buried along with the bodies.

In both contexts, early historiography was shaped less by what was preserved than by what was deliberately erased, and by the politics of who was permitted to speak and who was condemned to silence (Trouillot, 1995; Himka, 2013). This was famine’s second death, not only the bodies that perished but the voices smothered, the records destroyed, the grief driven underground. Displacement, forced labour, and starvation were moralised as discipline, draped in the language of providence, progress, or ideological necessity. What survived in official histories was not truth but distortion, memory weaponised and absence sanctified. The lesson is brutal and undeniable: empires do not only starve people of food, they starve them of narrative. They turn silence into policy and pass it down as inheritance. Descendants are left to swallow shame in place of testimony, taught to carry generational wounds as if they were private failures rather than the scars of state violence.

Post-Cold War Memory and the Postmodern Turn

Early historiography in both cases often reflected state power. From the late 20th century onward, however, scholars began dismantling official narratives through three methodological innovations: archival discovery, diaspora testimony, and postmodern analysis (Andriewsky, 2015; Spiegel, 2007). The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered a seismic shift in Holodomor historiography (Grynevych, 2021). With the opening of previously restricted archives, historians accessed grain requisition orders, NKVD correspondence, internal memoranda, and suppressed census data (Grynevych, 2021). These documents ruptured decades of denial, enabling the first sustained investigations (Grynevych, 2021). Ukrainian historian Mace (2004) contended that the famine was “a deliberate act of genocide” (p. 147), a view echoed by Conquest, who called it “a conscious act of genocide” (1986, p. 150). These interpretations gained traction among Ukrainian diaspora communities, particularly in Canada and the United States, who had long preserved oral histories of the famine and pushed for international recognition (Andriewsky, 2015).

This interpretation remains contested. Wheatcroft and Davies (2023) argue that the famine emerged from catastrophic policy errors and administrative chaos rather than deliberate extermination, characterising Stalin's regime as a system drowning in its own inefficiency. Similarly, Tauger (2001) contends that natural disasters and crop failures played a decisive role, while Ellman (2005) frames the famine as a tragic case of reckless industrialisation priorities overriding humanitarian concerns.

Post-Cold War scholarship, however, reveals a pattern of violence too systematic to dismiss as chaos. Police archives record more than 2,500 prosecutions for cannibalism in 1933 alone, each case a marker of desperation pushed beyond human limits. One Ukrainian doctor confessed: “I have not yet become a cannibal, but I am not sure that I shall not be one...” (Applebaum, 2017, p. 213). My own grandmother’s earliest memories echo this terror: children discovered frozen in the snow, their only choice to eat the dead or join them. These were not accidents of nature but the engineered outcome of enforced starvation. Grain that might have fed families was seized, exported, or left to rot, and even gleaning fallen stalks could lead to execution (Snyder, 2010). Starving bodies became both victims and evidence. Cannibalism prosecutions were used by the state as proof of kulak depravity, justification for harsher repression. Ukrainian regions received 80 percent less relief grain than Russian territories, a disparity impossible to explain without political intent (Snyder, 2010). As Mace (2004) demonstrates through perpetrator documents, such evidence points not to administrative failure but to conscious ethnic targeting. This systematic pattern, Spiegel (2007) argues, forces historians to confront famine not as natural tragedy or bureaucratic accident but as the deliberate weaponisation of starvation, an atrocity written into both policy and silence.

Ireland, too, underwent a postmodern reckoning, as nationalist memory collided with newly unearthed state records. Early nationalist narratives gave way in the 1990s to damning structural evidence. Workhouse registers reveal that 92% of starvation deaths in County Mayo occurred only after grain exports had emptied local stores (National Archives of Ireland, n.d.), while suppressed medical reports prove physicians were threatened for citing starvation, not “fever,” as the cause of death (RCPI, 1847). Treasury documents expose Trevelyan’s handwritten edits enforcing relief policies that excluded workers earning a mere 8d per day from food aid, ensuring many starved despite labouring through famine conditions (The National Archives, 1847; Devon Commission, 1845). Despite widespread starvation, Ó Gráda (2009) demonstrated that Ireland had enough food, measured in total calories, to prevent famine until 1848. At the same time, Kinealy (1994) found that grain exports increased by 17 percent during peak mortality. Even those who worked to keep people alive condemned the state’s response. The Quakers, who organised soup kitchens and distributed food across Ireland, wrote in their official report that “the machinery of the Government for the relief of the destitute was cumbrous and dilatory, and the measures adopted appeared calculated rather to prevent responsibility resting upon the Government than to afford the required assistance” (Society of Friends, 1852, p. 2). Their critique exposed what survivors already knew: that the system of relief was not designed to save lives, but to shift blame and shield the state from accountability. Unlike Soviet erasures, British records ironically preserved what Gray (1995) calls the “paper trail of calculated neglect” (p. 214); proof of ideology systematically overriding both evidence and empathy.

These archives reveal not only the machinery of starvation but the ruling class ideologies that masked cruelty as necessity. Marx (1845/1970) argued that the ruling ideas of any epoch are nothing more than the ideas of its ruling class, and famine discourse shows this carved into flesh: hunger recast as providence, labour camps as reform, death as discipline. Žižek (2008) reminds us that ideology does not hide reality but reframes it, twisting violence until it appears natural, even righteous. To break that silence is more than historical recovery. It is the refusal of inherited lies, the return of memory as resistance.

The People Remember: Memory as Resistance

Furthermore, diaspora communities became instrumental in disrupting official silence and institutional amnesia (Póirtéir, 1995). The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (2024) funded memorials, lobbied for political recognition of the Holodomor as genocide, and archived testimonies through community centres and cultural preservation projects. The Irish diaspora, especially in the United States and Australia, sponsored famine walks, oral history collections, and public art installations to honour those lost (Póirtéir, 1995). As Koziura (2024) writes, “diaspora memory became not just a form of mourning, but a counter-archive of resistance” (p. 88). Testimony, especially from survivors and descendants, became a crucial tool in contesting official versions of history and asserting dignity for the dead (Póirtéir, 1995).

Beyond academia, cultural production has preserved famine memory through raw and insurgent narratives. Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor’s 1994 song Famine did not merely recount history, it forced colonial trauma into public consciousness (O’Connor, 1994). Critics at the time gave Universal Mother mixed reviews. Rolling Stone described it as “record making as therapy” (Zacharek, 1994), while others dismissed Famine as overly didactic (Hayes, 2018). Yet this dismissal revealed the song’s subversive power. Art does not politely recount oppression, it weaponises erased voices. O’Connor pushed famine memory into a global stage that preferred to forget, carrying forward the counter-histories preserved in diaspora testimony and oral tradition (Póirtéir, 1995; Hayes, 2018). This resistance echoes across diasporic reclamation, from Ukrainian memorial projects (Ukrainian Canadian Congress, 2023) to Irish oral histories (Póirtéir, 1995). These are not neutral acts of preservation. They are counter-histories, deliberately confronting the archival violence of states (Trouillot, 1995). Cultural memory does more than preserve the past, our ancestors speak through it. These counter-histories tear open the state’s curated silence and return the dead to the living, not as statistics but as witnesses who indict empire itself. They expose the recurring pattern of power, where empires invade, seize land, and rule over local populations under the false banners of higher consciousness, justice, and morality, banners that are nothing more than lies masking domination.

The Political Economy of Extraction and 21st Century Neoliberalism

The legacy of empire is clear. Then as now, ruling classes mask starvation and poverty as moral reckoning, shifting blame onto the very people they exploit. In the Soviet case, Stalin systematically inverted Marxist principles to justify extraction (Dyczok, 2000). Marx warned that “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation at the opposite pole” (1867/1976, p. 799). Stalin’s collectivisation enforced these poles with brutality: 44% of harvests were seized for state requisition and export (Kondrashin et al., 2021), while peasants were executed for gleaning fallen grain (Snyder, 2010, p. 50). Marx envisioned abolishing exploitation itself: shorter hours, leisure, dignity for workers. Stalin’s regime criminalised peasants instead. It imposed impossible quotas and framed resistance as treason (Applebaum, 2017). Dyczok (2000) explains Stalin built a top-down regime exploiting the very class Marx sought to free. Mace (2004) agrees Soviet Marxist language let famine be rationalised as necessary for utopian progress. This ideological alchemy had global consequences (Fitzpatrick, 2015). By recasting genocide as "class struggle," Stalinism enabled what Mace (2004, p. 151) calls "the ultimate perversion": framing mass death as historical necessity. Western scholarship has often compounded this error by conflating Marx’s materialist critique of capital with Stalin’s autocracy (Fitzpatrick, 2015). This category mistake endures because, as Kotkin (2014, p. 44) demonstrates, Stalin’s regime mastered the art of "speaking socialism while practicing barbarism.” This was not the failure of communism. It was the triumph of a ruling class willing to weaponise hunger. What died in Ukraine was not the dream of collective dignity but its betrayal. The language of communism was twisted into a mask for domination. The true vision—workers owning what they create, living with leisure and dignity—was never tried. It was desecrated.

This pattern of ideological weaponisation finds its mirror in British imperial policy. During the Irish Famine, laissez-faire economics carried the force of a death sentence. Policymakers defended their refusal to intervene by appealing to market purity, claiming aid would corrupt the “natural economic order” (Kinealy, 1994, p. 102). In practice, their colonising policies condemned millions to death while protecting grain exports and landlord profits. For the ruling class, hunger was never evidence of policy failure but proof of moral deficiency. Suffering was reinterpreted as divine correction, a test of discipline, a form of economic reckoning. The Irish were caricatured as idle, potato-dependent, biologically and spiritually inferior, a population supposedly in need of punishment rather than relief (Gray, 1995). This was not mere neglect but a deliberate recasting of mass death as providence and necessity, a ruling class alchemy that turned starvation into order and exploitation into virtue. As Marxist theorists explain, ruling classes manufacture false consciousness, narratives that obscure exploitation and blame the oppressed for their suffering (Engels, 1893; Lukács, 1923/1971). That same vocabulary of discipline and moral weakness survives today, where austerity policies strip welfare and global hunger is blamed not on extraction but on the supposed failings of the poor.

The same logic persists today under neoliberalism, the late 20th-century ideology that elevates the market as the highest form of order and redefines citizens as individual competitors rather than collective beings (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberalism institutionalises ruling class values of competition, efficiency, self-discipline, and punishment of the poor (Bourdieu, 1998; Wacquant, 2009). It perfects the same logic that justified famine, punishing the very classes from which elites reap profit and control. Poverty is reframed as laziness, irresponsibility, or lack of discipline (De Waal, 1997; Davis, 2001). Ideology permits deprivation to endure even in times of abundance because the poor are declared undeserving (Davis, 2001). Structural violence is individualised and inequality recast as pathology (Harvey, 2005; Bourdieu, 1998). From a world-systems perspective, core states continue to extract labour, resources, and profit from peripheral regions, reproducing dependency and food insecurity across the Global South (Wallerstein, 1974; McMichael, 2009). Today over 800 million people live with chronic hunger in countries that simultaneously export agricultural or mineral wealth (FAO, 2023). Workers labour more than 12 hours a day yet are still condemned as economically unviable (Tyler, 2020). Social supports are denounced as “handouts” that weaken discipline and self-reliance (Wacquant, 2009). In contrast, scholars argue that alternatives like universal basic income (UBI) embody an inverse logic. UBI is a guaranteed, unconditional payment to every citizen, designed not as charity but as recognition of shared social wealth (Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017). It reframes redistribution as an ethical principle, ensuring dignity rather than discipline. Where extractive economics punish the poor, UBI insists that survival and flourishing are non-negotiable rights. Starvation is never natural. It is engineered, justified, and moralised by those in power. As long as empire logic endures, so too will the lie that the poor deserve their hunger.

Conclusion

Overall, the comparative historiography of the Holodomor and An Gorta Mór demonstrates how states weaponise scarcity to naturalise violence through linguistic regimes of blame (Davis, 2001; de Waal, 1997). These events were not failures of food systems but functions of political systems that extracted resources while constructing victims as architects of their own suffering; whether through British characterisations of Irish "dependency" (Trevelyan, 1847, in Kinealy, 1994, p. 352) or Soviet accusations of Ukrainian "sabotage" (Applebaum, 2017, p. 211). Critical scholarship dismantles these state narratives by privileging suppressed evidence: grain requisition orders that contradict official harvest reports (Grynevych, 2021), medical officers’ diaries documenting starvation deaths (RCPI, 1847), and diaspora testimonies that preserve what Trouillot (1995) terms "the unthinkable" (p. 72). This methodological intervention transforms famine studies from passive documentation to active indictment of power, revealing how language structures violence. When British ministers described potato blight as "divine providence" (The Times, 1847) or Stalin dismissed cannibalism reports as "bourgeois propaganda" (Snyder, 2010, p. 50), they deployed syntax as weaponry. Today, this discursive tradition persists through neoliberal euphemisms like ‘market corrections’ (Harvey, 2005) or ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’ (de Waal, 2018), which obscure culpability in contexts of engineered scarcity: from structural adjustment programs to conflict-driven food insecurity (UN OCHA, 2023; FAO, 2023)

The historian’s task, then, is to rupture these grammars of erasure. Calling famine genocide (Mace, 2004) or colonial extermination (Kinealy, 1994) rejects the passive language of 'millions died' in favour of the active: 'they were starved.’ By confronting how states transmute crime into tragedy through language, we expose empire’s most enduring tool: not just the theft of bread from the starving, but the theft of meaning from history (Vernon, 2007). Because empire starves twice: first the body, then the memory.

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