Population Loss in Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

During the twentieth century Ukraine experienced far-reaching changes in the development of its population. This was in part due to the demographic transition from high levels of fertility and mortality, typical of underdeveloped societies, to conditions of low parameters of population reproduction. Ukraine also endured major catastrophes — the First World War, the civil war, the epidemics and famine of the early 1920s which followed in its wake, the man-made famine of 1932–3, the mass repressions of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, the Second World War, the deportations of the 1940s, and the famine of 1947 — all of which disturbed the normal process of the natural movement of the population.