[Sam Gamgee]

Maybe I’m getting that mixed up though I thought Russian Georgia also faced heavy persecution?

[ek_hornbeck]

Only in the sense that pretty much everyone suffered under Soviet rule, but no, Georgians were never really singled out for persecution under Stalin - both because Stalin and Beria were themselves Georgian, and because Georgia didn't have a strong push towards independence in the 1930's.

In contrast, in Ukraine there was strong nationalist and anti-communist sentiment among the farmers, so Stalin set out to crush them by depriving them of any possible means of supporting themselves (though it's debated how much of the famine itself was intentionally engineered vs. simply the consequence of failed Soviet agricultural policy).