The Holodomor

Any resistance or failure to properly fullfil the expectations underlined by the Five Year Plan was indisputably deemed treason and therefore punishable by execution.

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 The most viciously hunted targets of Stalin’s terror-operation, were the “kulaks,” or the “rich” farming peasants who owned acres of land, hired their own workers, or owned numerous livestock. The definition of “kulaks” was conveniently stretched  to include every perceived “enemy of the state” including “poor workers.” Upon exposure, these ‘traitors’ were executed, exiled, or sentenced to grueling work in forced-labor camps.

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While his subjects were already drowning under the initial quotas, in 1932, Stalin decided to spike these requirements up by 44 percent. Though the crops were planted, cultivated, and rigorously grown with their own hands, the peasants were forbidden from consuming any of it. They were also barred from eating from the livestock that they tended. By this time, three quarters of farms were already “collectivized.” Although the original plan called for the collectivization of only 20 percent of all farms, under a decade later in 1938, 97 percent of all individual farms would forcibly be converted to collective farms.

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The stores of grain were shipped overseas where Stalin traded them for engines used to fuel his Five Year Plan. Any spoken word of the “famine” was strictly prohibited, instead, the government pressured the press to gloss over the destitution with euphemisms such as “malnutrition due to disease.”   These blatant lies obviously distorted the cause of the famine and, therefore, cleared the government and most importantly Stalin, from personal culpability.