Nicolas Werth

killed some 6.5 to 7 million people, including an estimated 4.2 million in Ukraine and the Kuban, 1.3 to 1.5 million in Kazakhstan, and more than a million in the rest of the Soviet Union.

when the Stalinist leadership purposefully aggravated widespread scarcities and local famines in order to achieve precise political goals

following on Stalin’s elaboration of his “national interpretation” of the grain requisition crisis and his singling out of Ukraine as a “unique” national republic whose party had been infiltrated by “Ukrainian nationalists and Petliurites”

such as the infamous “blacklisting” of collective farms, villages, and sometimes even whole raions that did not “fulfill the plan.”

A vicious, repressive Chekist campaign was launched against “Ukrainian nationalism,” targeting the intellectual, religious, and political elites of the Ukrainian nation—some 200,000 people were arrested by the state’s security organs in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-33

Instructions ordering house-to-house searches for “hidden grain” paved the way for the confiscation of all foodstuffs under the pretext of “fining” reluctant peasants, collective farms, villages, and even whole districts that did not meet the grain- and meat-procurement plans.

Since the pioneering works of Robert Conquest and James Mace compelled historians of the Soviet Union to tackle the question of the “man-made” famines of the early 1930s

At the peak of the 1933 famine a small number of people received such negligible assistance.

A minimal food allowance is to be distributed solely to those who conscientiously participate and have already started working

The Kazakh famine was the direct but unplanned result of the total destruction of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakh economy

it was aggravated by the strong anti-Kazakh prejudices of local officials

suffered the consequences of the Stalinist “revolution from above” more acutely than any other social or national group. Between thirty-three and thirty-eight percent of them disappeared during the famine.

Hundreds of thousands—as many as 700,000 according to Viktor Kondrashin—died from famine in the Volga and Central Chernozem Regions

Although very high, the death rate (up to five percent of the total population in the lower Volga Region) never reached the staggering levels that occurred in regions populated by Ukrainians (where the losses represented

ten to twelve percent of the total population, and much more in some rural areas).

Unlike in Ukraine, there was clearly no national issue here, no major political threat coming from a national movement supposedly linked with émigré or foreign countries.