http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mdzikovs/golod.htmlThe Great Famine in Ukraine
Ubelievably emaciated bodies on the streets. All food taken away. People, all of the same nationality, dying horrible slow death from starvation. No one knows the exact number of dead, but the estimates range between 4 and 10 million victims. Does this sound familiar? Something like that happened during World War II to Jews. This horrible crime was called "Holocaust", and is rightly recognised and remembered as one of the worst atrocities of the war, directed at eliminating a nation.
But something like that happened earlier. In 1932-1933, Stalin was dissatisfied with Ukraine. People didn't want to give up their individual property in favour of collective farms. So a "solution" was found. All food was taken away from villages, by force. People trying to hide even small amounts of food were arrested and sent to labour camps. Trains were monitored so that peasants could not leave. 7 million dead is probably a good guess, though no one will know for sure. In Ukraine, these years are known as "Holodomor" - "slow killing by starvation". It has been called a Ukrainian Holocaust, a genocide.
This is a story as told to me by my grandmother, who was a survivor of Holodomor. "The hunger was horrible. There was nothing to eat, and it was a bad crop year, so you could not even find mushrooms or berries in the forest. Hunger is the worst at first, but after a while something happens, and it feels like you don't want to eat anymore, even if you desperately need it. We had nothing to eat. We gathered some of the things we owned and walked/hitchhiked with my elder sister to Moscow region. We exchanged it for flour and walked back". That was around 900 km distance. My grandmother was 14 at a time, and that trip saved their lives.
The story continues. "One day an old man came near our house. He was so very thin. He begged for some food. Our mother took pity on him. She told him to eat only a little, because if you eat too much too fast, your stomach will seize and you may die. But he was so hungry, he could not stop, and he got sick and died quickly."
The people who survived joined the collective farms the next year. In many areas in the eastern Ukraine the population was so decimated that many new people had to be moved in, mostly from Russia, and that region remains primarily Russian speaking to this day.
Regretfully, this crime of Stalin regime is much less known abroad. Recently, Ukraine commemorated the victims, and started a campain to get the artificial famine 1932-33 internationally recognised as a genocide.
These sites give more history and statistics about Holodomor.