"Holodomor"? Let me eat some humble pie here, and admit I have no clue -- what does the word mean? Yes, I've heard the basic facts of a Stalin imposed "famine" on Ukraine, somehow ignored or covered up by the Western press, where millions died, in what years, 1928?
Seems curious though, that Russians might want a "common position on the tragedy." How about the facts of history?
Holodomor is the Ukranian word (holod, ‘hunger’, and mor, ‘plague’) for the imposed famine in 1932/33.
After the Bolshevik Revolution most farms in the Ukraine remained in private hands. In the fall of 1932 the NKVD and Red Army came in and confiscated the harvest, leaving farmers with nothing to eat and no money to buy food. Between two and a half and three and a half million people, mostly children, many if not most Jews, starved to death or died of diseases associated with famine. The Soviets then moved to “save” the people of the Ukraine from the inefficiencies of bourgeois capitalist agricultural practices by collectivizing their farms and deporting large numbers of those who resisted collectivization to more fertile areas, like Siberia.
That’s the history. The The Soviet Union and the Communist Internationale denied it and western reporters with communists leanings either wrote articles denying the claims of survivors who escaped the famine or just kept it out of the western press.
One good source is “Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism” by Roy Medvedev. Medvedev was a Georgian Marxist historian who wrote in the Soviet Union during the “Glasnost” era. (Presumably no relation to the current Russian President.) He’s not the most accessible writer and his translator is pretty inept but there are a lot of interesting tables in the appendices.
There is the gold standard by Robert Conquest and his book is “Harvest of Sorrow Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine”
http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Sorrow-Soviet-Collectivization-Terror-Famine/dp/0195051807
In November 2005, Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.