Cheezy,
I cannot agree with you regarding the Holodomor. It is not Ukrainian propaganda, there are testimonies of Ukrainian peasants who said how the Soviets were confiscating their food supplies and guarding fields to prevent the collection of remaining crops (most of crops were anyway confiscated by the State). I will try to write more about this later. I saw a documentary in which Ukrainian witnesses (and their children) were talking about their experiences, but I'm not sure if it is available with English subtitles. It is available on You Tube, if I remember correctly.
The plural of anecdotes is not data.
For a while, the officials did not believe claims of famine. Local officials even adopted some rather archaic methods (used during the darker days of the Civil War) whereby they would cut a village off from the world for a few days, in order to prompt them to dig out their secret reserves. If the starvation continued, they knew that the people weren't lying. Once it became apparent that there was in fact a famine, however, grain was sent
into the affected areas, not out. But again, as I said, there was nothing which specifically targeted Ukrainians, it affected Russians, Kazakhs, Bashkorts, just the same.
Probably the truth is in the middle - to some extent it was natural famine, but to some extent also deliberate policy to eliminate "uncomfortable peasants" (please remember that most of Ukrainian peasants were conservative and religious, many of them were also nationalists or monarchists who wanted the return of Tsars to the throne and the return of old Imperial times - they were not enthusiastic followers of Communism, as some people may think - thus their death was very comfortable for the Soviet government - the fewer Ukrainian peasants, the stronger support for Communism).
As I said, it was impossible to tell who was a Ukrainian, or a Russian, or a Ukrainian-speaking Russian, in those times. The passport system had just barely been introduced and was incomplete. Even if Ukrainians did feel that way, which I don't feel comfortable stating that they generally did, famine would be the very last way to deal with that fact.
Stalin did not worry to Voroshilov, in a private letter during the famine, that "we may lose the Ukraine," for no reason. It would also be extremely stupid to stir up an ethnicity through ethnic-based victimization, which lives on the borderlands, has contacts in other countries (Ukrainians in Poland, for example), and whom the Soviets had extensive intelligence on attempts to stir up trouble for them in that region by the Polish and Japanese governments. There is quite simple no way and no reason for a purposeful famine in Ukraine, or for victimization of Ukrainians in any way at that time.
