In this distilled account, Stanislav Kulchytsky ably incorporates a vast
array of sources and literature that have become available in the past
three decades into a highly readable narrative, explaining the motives,
circumstances, and course of this terrible crime against humanity. As
the author shows, the Holodomor was triggered by the Bolshevik effort to
build a communist socioeconomic order in the Soviet Union. Excessive
requisitioning of grain and other foodstuffs in the collectivization
drive led to famine and deaths in grain-producing regions of the USSR by
early 1932. In Ukraine, punitive measures authorized by the Kremlin's
top leadership greatly worsened the famine in late 1932 and turned it
into the Holodomor, which claimed more than three million lives in the
first half of 1933.