"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics"-these are the words of Joseph Stalin, a man who understood that "killing was a tool; properly used it could eliminate enemies, terrorize survivors into submission, and overwhelm outsiders beyond their ability to intervene" (Altman 41). The Soviet government claims that the famine of 1932-1933 was due to "conditions beyond human control," that it was an unfortunate but unintended consequence of the collectivization effort (Altman 47). The reality is that this disaster was not the result of inflation, crop failure, natural disasters, nor war. The shocking truth, which has been buried under sixty-five years of Soviet propaganda and Western corruption, is that the famine was engineered by Stalin and used as a weapon to annihilate between seven and ten million Ukrainians.Realizing that the Soviet Union was fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries, Stalin devised a Five-Year Plan to industrialize the nation. Modernization was expensive, and in order to fund his new project, Stalin knew that the Soviet Union needed to increase its agricultural exports. To accomplish this he outlawed the private ownership of land and organized collective farms. Stalin demanded collective workers give a huge majority of their crops to the government.The Ukrainians, a fiercely independent group, opposed Stalin's plan. Many refused to surrender their land. Some burned their crops and slaughtered their cattle in protest (Glennon 207). Millions more left the farms for cities, seeking jobs in the developing industry, which drastically hurt food production. Penalties for resisting the collectivization drive were forced labor camps or execution (Glennon 207). Stalin's first attempt at collectivization failed. Collectives produced less food than independent farms had. Determined to succeed in his efforts, in July of 1932, he raised the grain quota to an impossible 6.6 ...
