The Soviet leaders, upon being confronted with the massive deficit of grain in the winter and spring of 1932/33, falsely attributed the shortages to the kulaks and to more extensive sections of the proletariat who were assumed to have been influenced by them. Stalin persecuted the Kulaks. Stalin felt they were responsible for undermining, with their protests and opposition, the agricultural plans for the agriculture of the central Soviet government. The kulaks were perfect targets. The kulaks owned small plots of land and employed other more impoverished peasants under them. The Kulaks were eradicated and murdered in great numbers by deportation and starvation under the Soviet campaign of dekulakization.
Holodomor is a term used in Ukranian meaning killing by starvation. Holodomor is the name given to the national catastrophe of 1932 - 1933, which took millions of lives. The famine was a deliberate policy of the Communist regime aimed at the elimination of the Ukrainians.
Communists instigated the origins of the Holodomor in Moscow that was led by Stalin in the 1920s. On January 1928, the Communists introduced compulsory grain acquisitions. The state took most or even all of the grain harvests from farmers at reduced prices. Meanwhile, the regime began a campaign against a wealthy class of peasants known as the kulaks. Dekulakization conceived to confiscate property, land and forcefully evict peasants. Most kulaks had been deported to Siberia.
The Communists, in 1929 initiated wholesale collectivization. Most independent private farms were obligated to join in state collective farms known as kolkhoz. The majority of members of collective farms were forbidden from benefitting from the fruits of their work.
Forced collectivization prompted mass uprisings and protests in Soviet Ukraine. Throughout the 1930's there were more than 4,000 anti-state demonstrations in Ukraine. Historians estimate that about 1.2 million peasants took part in protests. The resistance was brutally squashed, and by October 1931, 68% of farms and 72% of the arable land had been collectivized and was state-owned.
A large number of collective and individual farms were demolished after grain procurements in 1931. In the spring of 1932, more than 100 thousand Ukrainians died from starvation. The extensive loss of life could have been avoided. On July 1932 – Soviet authorities imposed deliberately unrealistic plans for grain procurements on Ukrainian households.
Furthermore, on November 18, 1932, fines were introduced in Ukraine. Food and cattle were confiscated from households that had“outstanding debts” due to the unrealistic grain procurement plans. During the same month, the Soviet authorities regulated special groups to rummage and confiscate cattle and food from households. The campaign implicated the entire personnel of police, security agencies and the local members of the Communist Party.
On January 22, 1933, Joseph Stalin issued a directive prohibiting farmers from fleeing the famine-stricken territories in Ukraine and Kuban. In the first six weeks of the instruction, more than 186 thousand peasants were forcefully driven from their homes and condemned to die from starvation.
The Communists turned hunger into a weapon. The famine paralyzed the demographics for many decades. It led to psychological and moral changes in the consciousness of the people.
Hunger weakened the traditional way of life of the Ukranian. Subsequent, of the Holodomor, Ukrainian society remains afflicted with trauma. Tens of millions of survivors went through extreme suffering and could not effectively recover from their experiences.
The Russian collectivization of farms resulted to be an absolute failure that shortages occurred year after year, even after the Soviet Army was sent into the countryside to help sow, tend, and harvest food. The five-year plan quotas were never amassed. By the 1970's farm production could not feed the Soviet population. The bulk of the food had to be imported from the United States simply to be able to maintain subsistence levels.
Naimark, Norman M. Stalin's Genocides. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.