The Holodomor

In June of 1933, at the height of the Holodomor, 28,000 men, women and children in Ukraine were dying of starvation each day. The land that was known worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-made famine of unprecedented scale.

Stalin and his followers were determined to teach Ukraine’s farmers “a lesson they would not forget” for resisting collectivization, which meant giving up their own land to work on government controlled farms. Moreover, the famine was meant to deal “a crushing blow” to any aspirations for independence from the Soviet Union by the Ukrainians, 80 percent of whom worked the land.

While millions of people in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Soviet Union was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population. For 50 years, surviving generations were forbidden to speak of it, until the Soviet Union was near collapse.
http://holodomorct.org/