Holodomor

The Holodomor was a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-1933, at the height of Joseph Stalin' s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Punitively high grain procurement quotas, the seizure of foodstuffs from Ukrainian villages and restrictions on peasant movement that prevented starving people from fleeing to areas with food combined to produce mass starvation across the Ukrainian countryside; death-toll estimates commonly range from roughly 3.5 to 5 million, though figures vary across scholarship. Ukraine and a number of other countries formally recognize the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people, a characterization that remains debated among some historians who emphasize the famine' s broader Soviet context, including comparable famine deaths elsewhere in the USSR during the same collectivization campaign.