Quick summary: 1932-1933 there is a natural bad harvest at the same time that Stalin is pushing collectivization and squeezing the peasants. People start to starve. Government thinks peasants are withholding grain on purpose, continues squeezing. People continue starving. Government finally catches on, relaxes the squeeze and sends relief, but something like 7 million are already dead - especially in the grain-producing regions of Ukraine (<4m), Southern Russia (~3m), and Kazakhstan (<1m).
First the Nazis, then the US in the Cold War, then modern Ukrainian nationalists paint this as a genocide of Ukrainians, ignoring the dead Russians and Kazakhs and the non-existence of ANY documents or statements were the Soviet authorities demonstrate hatred of Ukrainians or intentions to starve any people. "Holodomor" is Ukrainian for "starving to death", a term possibly chosen for sounding like "Holocaust." They also inflate the number of dead to like 10-20 million. (Even honest historians' estimates vary because they're mostly based on comparisons with expected population growth, not actual dead bodies.)
Background: For the Soviet government, not squeezing the peasants wasn't an option. It was industrialize or charge invading tanks with cossacks on horseback. Industrialization to prepare the USSR for the coming WWII required exporting grain to purchase machinery, required peasants to migrate to the cities to work in factories and construction.
Why didn't the peasants cooperate with the government willingly? Some peasants were rich or reactionary, but most had continued the tradition of resisting greater state control as they had done for literally centuries - they didn't trust any government to have their interests at heart. (The Bolsheviks didn't really identify with the peasants the way Mao did, which hurt trust.)
The famine was partly natural - it had been a regular occurrence prior to mechanized agriculture. But grain continued to be exported at the same time - similar to the Irish famine and the Indian famines under the British. The Soviet authorities weren't trying to starve people, they just happened to be trying to maximize grain production and fight peasant resistance precisely when the peasants were hit by a natural disaster.
But the answers like that of /u/emizeko that entirely acquit the Stalinist government of all complicity ... are too partisan and miss real history. We have letters written to Stalin in 1932 by patriotic communists detailing the brutal abuse of regular peasants by officials and the famine conditions. We have records of policies that dealt out draconian punishments for peasant non-compliance. The infamous "Law of the Spikelets" punished peasants for gleaning - collecting leftover grains missed on an already harvested (collectivized) field that would just be left to rot otherwise. It was meant to incentivize people to join collective farms for food security, but it ended up punishing those trying to survive starvation in a famine.
Quick summary: 1932-1933 there is a natural bad harvest at the same time that Stalin is pushing collectivization and squeezing the peasants. People start to starve. Government thinks peasants are withholding grain on purpose, continues squeezing. People continue starving. Government finally catches on, relaxes the squeeze and sends relief, but something like 7 million are already dead - especially in the grain-producing regions of Ukraine (<4m), Southern Russia (~3m), and Kazakhstan (<1m).
First the Nazis, then the US in the Cold War, then modern Ukrainian nationalists paint this as a genocide of Ukrainians, ignoring the dead Russians and Kazakhs and the non-existence of ANY documents or statements were the Soviet authorities demonstrate hatred of Ukrainians or intentions to starve any people. "Holodomor" is Ukrainian for "starving to death", a term possibly chosen for sounding like "Holocaust." They also inflate the number of dead to like 10-20 million. (Even honest historians' estimates vary because they're mostly based on comparisons with expected population growth, not actual dead bodies.)
Background: For the Soviet government, not squeezing the peasants wasn't an option. It was industrialize or charge invading tanks with cossacks on horseback. Industrialization to prepare the USSR for the coming WWII required exporting grain to purchase machinery, required peasants to migrate to the cities to work in factories and construction.
Why didn't the peasants cooperate with the government willingly? Some peasants were rich or reactionary, but most had continued the tradition of resisting greater state control as they had done for literally centuries - they didn't trust any government to have their interests at heart. (The Bolsheviks didn't really identify with the peasants the way Mao did, which hurt trust.)
The famine was partly natural - it had been a regular occurrence prior to mechanized agriculture. But grain continued to be exported at the same time - similar to the Irish famine and the Indian famines under the British. The Soviet authorities weren't trying to starve people, they just happened to be trying to maximize grain production and fight peasant resistance precisely when the peasants were hit by a natural disaster.
But the answers like that of /u/emizeko that entirely acquit the Stalinist government of all complicity ... are too partisan and miss real history. We have letters written to Stalin in 1932 by patriotic communists detailing the brutal abuse of regular peasants by officials and the famine conditions. We have records of policies that dealt out draconian punishments for peasant non-compliance. The infamous "Law of the Spikelets" punished peasants for gleaning - collecting leftover grains missed on an already harvested (collectivized) field that would just be left to rot otherwise. It was meant to incentivize people to join collective farms for food security, but it ended up punishing those trying to survive starvation in a famine.