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The Holodomor: How Joseph Stalin Purposely Manufactured A Famine

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The Holodomor: How Joseph Stalin purposely manufactured a famine.

The Holodomor was a horrific famine and genocide that affected the United Socialist Soviet Republic, and more importantly Ukraine in the years of 1932 and 1933. The famine was orchestrated by Joseph Stalin and the Russian government when Ukraine’s agriculture and 80% peasant population had started to grow in power. As a result, around 5 million people were killed during the famine, and 3.9 million of those people were Ukrainians. While Ukraine’s agriculture led to more power among the farming peasants, it threatened Joseph Stalin knowing Ukraine might be able to once again become an independent country. Therefore, he endangered the USSR as a whole by engineering …show more content…

Therefore, the peasants were unable to own their own farm and to even obtain a steady income for themselves and their families. Stalin viewed the rise of power among the large peasant population as a threat of losing control over Ukraine, which was a huge contributor and one of the original countries in the USSR. In the summer of 1930, secret reports identified the first signs of starvation among some villagers before starvation started to become more common. This meant that before announcing the switch to collectivization in Ukraine, Joseph Stalin could have perhaps tested it out on a marginal number of people. After Stalin brought collective farms about, peasants lost their freedom of movement and were stuck on the fields of the farms unable to leave even if they wanted to visit their loved ones. Clearly, this created a void in most families by being unable to see them for long periods of time. If someone were to leave the farms, the punishment would be death by starvation, which was feared by just about everyone. Furthermore, this means that if someone leaves the farm, the government will discontinue supplying the smallest amount of food to the farmer which is hardly keeping them …show more content…

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