Executive Summary
6) In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.
7) The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.
In the Fall of 1932 Stalin used the resulting “procurements crisis” in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensity grain seizures further.
9) The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.

10) Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.
11) Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.
12) In January 1933, Stalin used the “laxity” of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.
13) Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: To intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.
14) While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin’s interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are paralleled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
15) Attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available.
16) Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.
……………………….

2 Department at the State University of New York, 1986). Eve Soumerai, The Ukrainian Terror-Famine’ a Case Study in Stalinist Communism (Hartford, Connecticut-Western Massachusetts Center for Human Relations of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1987).