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.
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