SOCIALISTS have condemned a vote by the German parliament to label the Soviet famine of 1932-33 a “genocide against the Ukrainian people,” pointing out that it pushes a false equivalence between the Nazis and the Soviet Union.

The Bundestag passed a motion on Wednesday night that said the famine should join “the list of inhuman crimes committed by totalitarian systems in the course of which millions of lives were wiped out in Europe.”

Christian Democrat Michael Brand claimed Stalin had deliberately chosen to attack Ukraine through artificial famine, saying: “Never again must the mass murders committed by the Holodomor [as Ukrainian nationalists refer to the famine] and the Nazis in Ukraine be done in the name of Germany or Russia.”

For the Greens, Robin Wagener claimed the famine was intended to suppress Ukraine’s language and national consciousness, though promotion of the Ukrainian language was such a core part of Soviet nationalities policy that modern Russian nationalists have accused the Bolsheviks of inventing the language.

The motion was backed by most Bundestag parties though the Left Party abstained, pointing out that the 1930s famine affected other parts of the Soviet Union, including much of Russia, just as severely as Ukraine.

Spokesperson Gregor Gysi said the motion tried to portray Hitler and Stalin as equivalent, and used terms for the famine “which have until now only been used for the Shoah” (Holocaust).

Germany should give up the “search for a second Hitler and a second Auschwitz” and not risk relativising the Holocaust by inappropriate comparisons, he argued.

Britain’s Communist Party leader Robert Griffiths said the attempt to portray the Soviet Union as akin to the Nazis was part of a dangerous revision of history rehabilitating far-right movements across eastern Europe.

And Luxembourg People’s News editor Uli Brockmeyer said given the deliberate starvation of Soviet citizens by Nazi occupiers during World War II Germany was “the last state in the world” that should be levelling such accusations.

Even anti-Soviet historians such as Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin have rejected the “Holodomor” narrative, pointing out that the Soviet famine was general rather than confined to Ukraine and was not planned by the Soviet government, which directed food relief to the worst hit areas once it realised the scale of the hunger.