On 7 August 1932 a law came into force that stipulated that all food was state property and that mere possession of food was evidence of a crime.
You want to control people? Control their food.
I'll kill my food.
F U B O!
I just looked that up and the rest of the paragraph is “food for thought”: Among the most enthusiastic enforcers of the law were urban members of youth organisations, educated under the Soviet system, who fanned out into the countryside in order to prevent the “theft” of state property. They constructed and staffed watchtowers (over 700 in the Odessa region alone) to ensure that no peasants took food home from the fields. The youth brigades lived off the land, eating what they confiscated from the peasants. They often humiliated the starving peasants by forcing them to box each other for sport, or forcing them to crawl and bark like dogs. Under the pretext of grain confiscation, the brigades routinely raped women living alone.[58]