恶人谷

Actually, to be more precise, there were no natural reasons for this famine. There was no weather issue. There were no insects, none of the things that normally cause famines. This was a famine that was entirely caused by political decisions.

First there was a general decision about collectivization. And that meant that the Soviet peasantry - and this is all over the Soviet Union, not just in Ukraine - were forced to leave their homes and to join collective and state farms...

And the effect was a huge drop in food production. Partly, as people left their homes, they had no incentive on the new farms to work, but also just the general disruption led to a - far less food being available.

inside the cities, it was easier to control people. You could nationalize industry. You could make people work. ... in the countryside, People had their own property. So this was, in effect, removing people's private property as a way of controlling them.

The activist teams went house to house, and they took people's food away - literally all of their food, everything that they had and confiscated it. Secondarily, after the famine in 1933, 1934, 1935, there were Russians sent from other parts of the Soviet Union to colonize the empty Ukrainian villages.

Part of collectivization and part of why collectivization was possible was that Stalin demonized a part of the rural population, calling them kulaks. And this is a word that meant rich peasants. ...

But the demonization of the kulaks was useful to Stalin because it created divisions and hatred inside Ukrainian villages. And he would turn - the system was designed to turn part of the population against the other part. Why are you suffering? Why don't you have enough food? Why is your family so poor? It's the fault of the kulaks. Blame the kulaks. They're responsible for all of your problems. And he used that kind of rhetoric actually all across the Soviet Union, in the cities as well.