It seems that the famine that killed four million people in Ukraine between 1932-33 was at least partly organized by the regime of Josef Stalin. Recently published correspondence between Stalin and two of his closest advisers shows that in the summer of 1932 Stalin consciously decided to lend a helping hand to the incipient famine.
In the new communist society as Stalin envisioned it, all peasants should be forced to work together in Kolkhoz:collective, state-run farms. The proceeds went directly to the state, which would then redistribute the food among the population.
Correspondence between Stalin and his closest advisers Vyacheslav Molotov and Vasilii Blokhin shows that in the summer of 1932 the idea arose in Stalin that a joint front of land-owning peasants ('kulaks') and local communist leaders opposed his collectivization policy. The success of collectivization was especially important in Ukraine, because there were extensive grain fields in that area, which provided an important part of the food supply.
Political tool
It was then that Stalin decided to use the pre-existing famine, which had been raging in Kazakhstan and the Volga Basin since 1931 and slowly threatening to reach Ukraine, as a political instrument. In this way the Ukrainian resistance could be broken once and for all. Until now, the famine had mainly economic causes and was not yet a matter of conscious politics.
Stalin sent Molotov to Ukraine to “bring local communists back into line.” Armed police groups were ordered to confiscate all food still available, including private stocks and grains of wheat intended for sowing the following year.
In addition, Stalin ordered to close all shops in areas that did not comply with the increased quota that the Kolkhoz had to pay for the benefit of the state. In addition, rebellious villages were closed off by police cordons to prevent the starving population from fleeing the village in search of food. The blockades also ensured that messages about the 'famine as a weapon' would not spread.
In 1932-33, some four million people died of starvation in Ukraine. On the ever-fertile Kuban Plain in the Northern Caucasus, an area belonging to Russia but mainly populated by Ukrainians, half a million more people fell prey to starvation.
The Holodomor ("death caused by starvation") as the period is known in Ukraine, is a pitch-black page in Ukraine's history. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament agreed to officially call the famine "genocide." Many countries (the Netherlands do not) recognize the Holodomor now as genocide. Whether or not to recognize an event as genocide is often mainly politically motivated. It can no longer be denied that there was at least partial intention in the game.