Холодомор ~ Word of the Month

This is our new monthly language column that has taken the reins over from our long-running Survival Russian column in the magazine. Each month we focus on a word or phrase trending in Russian culture and society.

Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities began in 2022, as did threats to deprive Ukrainian citizens of heat in freezing temperatures. Now, in 2026,  the coldest winter since Russia began its full-scale invasion, Ukraine is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. Thousands of Ukrainians have been without heat in -20°C (- 4°F) temperatures, and headlines with the word холодомор (kholodomor) have begun to appear in the media.

The portmanteau plays on the similarity between the words голод (hunger) and холод (cold), turning голодомор into холодомор. And if голодомор (hunger + plague) indicates a massive famine (“execution by hunger”), холодомор means “execution through cold.”

Yet, голодомор is not just a word. Historically, it originates in the Ukrainian language, and refers to the man-made tragedy of the early 1930s, when millions of Soviets died when Josef Stalin used famine to suppress private peasant farms and subjugate them to the state. (The Ukranian word is written as the Russian – голодомор – but it is pronounced with a soft g, and thus transcribed as Holodomor.)

Xолодомор took place throughout the USSR, but was particularly acute in Ukraine, because there it also involved the suppression of national resistance to Soviet rule.

In 2006, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada declared the Holodomor of the 1930s to be an “act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.”

Thus, the term холодомор refers not only to mass freezing or starvation, but also implies the deliberate murder of civilians. This, in turn, touches on the collective trauma of the Second World War, which has risen to become the main historical touchstone in Russian reality, now underscored by the fact that this winter the length of Russia’s full-scale war with Ukraine surpassed the duration of the USSR's participation in the Second World War, as reported in the media.

A related story caused a great stir in Russia this month. It was that of a Kyiv woman, pensioner Yevgenia Besfamilnaya, who survived the Holocaust only to become a victim of Russia’s modern холодомор, freezing to death in her Kyiv apartment.

Cold is a constant feature in the history of warfare a la Russe, seemingly absorbed into our consciousness through various classic works of fiction. It dates back at least to Napoleon's ill-fated attack on Russia in 1812 (when “General Winter” decimated his forces), and was more recently reflected in the posts of patriotic bloggers threatening Europe with an “ice age” when it was deprived of Russian gas.

But the Holodomor also threatens Russia. Not only because, as a result of Ukraine's retaliatory strikes, Russia’s border regions are also increasingly bereft of electricity and heat. In fact, the winter of 2025-2026 has broken all records for the number of utility failures across Russia. For example, residents of Bodaibo in the Irkutsk region spent most of February without heat while temperatures outdoors plummeted to -40°C (-40°F). This was not due to military retaliation strikes, but instead due to insufficient investment in critically worn-out infrastructure, or, to put it simply, economic decline and the state's unwillingness to spend money on anything other than war.