Jonah, that’s a fine piece, but it’s worth adding that the Holodomor must (as I think you’d agree) also be seen within the context of the wider Stalinist repression of non-Russian peoples and cultures. Throughout his career Stalin was acutely aware (a) of the ‘national’ question; and (b) the role that the peasantry could play in the development and protection of a national consciousness. When he acted against non-Russian nationalities, it wasn’t ’just’ about the destruction of an awkwardly independent social-economic group. The number of nationalities involved in these repressions is almost too long to list (who now remembers the Ingrians?), but if we turn specifically to the case of the Ukrainians, the largest (and thus potentially the most dangerous) of all the nationalities, what we see from the late 1920s onwards is an increasing assault on their intelligentsia and Party hierarchy (sometimes, but certainly not always, the same thing), essentially as a device to ‘behead’ the nation, a familiar Soviet technique.

With the destruction of the peasantry as an independent force, Stalin was turning his attention to the heart. It’s certainly true that there were ‘economic’ and ‘social’ reasons behind the terror-famine, but it is defies belief that the destruction of the Ukrainian nation was not another important part of the agenda. What was done to the Ukraine did not involve the killing of every Ukrainian, and was never intended to. Strictly speaking, therefore, it was not exterminationist in the Nazi sense, but in aim, methods and consequences, it was a genocide – however you define it.