"Eighty years ago, millions of Ukrainians died in a famine that many label a genocide by the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin."

"Some historians, like Yale University's Timothy Snyder, who has done extensive research in Ukraine, place the number of dead at roughly 3.3 million. Others say the number was much higher.
Whatever the actual figure, it is a trauma that has left a deep and lasting wound among this nation of 45 million.
Entire villages were wiped out, and in some regions the death rate reached one-third. The Ukrainian countryside, home of the "black earth", some of the most fertile land in the world, was reduced to a silent wasteland.
Cities and roads were littered with the corpses of those who left their villages in search of food, but perished along the way. There were widespread reports of cannibalism.
Ms Karpenko says that when school resumed the following autumn, two thirds of the seats were empty."

"They say that Joseph Stalin wanted to starve into submission the rebellious Ukrainian peasantry and force them into collective farms.
The Kremlin requisitioned more grain than farmers could provide. When they resisted, brigades of Communist Party activists swept through the villages and took everything that was edible.
"The brigades took all the wheat, barley - everything - so we had nothing left," says Ms Karpenko. "Even beans that people had set aside just in case.
"The brigades crawled everywhere and took everything. People had nothing left to do but die.""

"As the hunger mounted, Soviet authorities took extra measures, such as closing off Ukraine's borders, so that peasants could not travel abroad and obtain food. This amounted to a death sentence, experts say.
"The government did everything it could to prevent peasants from entering other regions and looking for bread," says Oleksandra Monetova, from Kiev's Holodomor Memorial Museum.
A file picture taken on October 22, 2012, shows Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R) and his visiting Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Yanukovych (L), like the Kremlin, says Holodomor was not genocide
"The officials' intentions were clear. To me it's a genocide. I have no doubt.""
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25058256
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25058256