Famine and collectivization
1932–1933
The Holodomor
A man-made famine in Ukraine, enforced by quotas, blacklists, and a ban on leaving.
After collectivization, grain procurement targets for Ukraine were set beyond what the harvest could bear. Brigades searched houses, including with metal rods in chimneys and yards. Villages that failed to deliver were placed on “blackboards”: no goods, no credit, no right to mill grain. On 22 January 1933 Stalin and Molotov ordered the blocking of peasant flight from Ukraine and the North Caucasus.
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s demographic reconstruction estimates about 3.9 million excess deaths in Ukraine in 1932–34, mostly rural, mostly in 1933, plus a large birth deficit. The USSR-wide famine, including Kazakhstan and the Russian south, was larger. The full mechanisms, the genocide argument, and the cover-up are on the Holodomor page.
Where to check it · HURI / MAPA demographic project; Anne Applebaum, Red Famine; the Stalin–Kaganovich correspondence.