page_title: Causes of the Holodomor
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Causes of the Holodomor / Deliberately engineered or continuation of civil war / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration to the Soviet categories of peasants: bednyaks, or poor peasants; serednyaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the higher-income farmers who had larger farms than most Russian peasants.
context_page_description: The causes of the Holodomor, the name of the famine that ravaged Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 whose estimates for the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range between 2.2 million and 10 million, are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some historians theorize that the famine was an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization. Others claim that the Soviet policies that caused the famine were an engineered attack on Ukrainian nationalism, or more broadly, on all peasants, in order to prevent uprisings. Some suggest that the famine may fall under the legal definition of genocide.
context_section_description: During the 1930s, the Soviet Union was lead by Joseph Stalin, who sought to reshape Soviet society with aggressive economic planning. As the leader of the Soviet Union, he constructed a state whose policies have been blamed for millions of deaths.
  A campaign of political repression, including arrests, deportations, and executions of people proclaimed traitors engaged in sabotaging collectivism, often targetted for belonging to specific demographic groups rather than as individuals, occurred from 1929 to 1932. The bourgeois  were labeled kulaks and were class enemies. More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and build socialism in the countryside. This policy was accomplished simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union and effectively brought all agriculture in the Soviet Union under state control.
  The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" was announced by Stalin on December 27, 1929. The decision was formalized in a resolution, "On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization", on January 30, 1930. The kulaks were divided into three categories: those to be executed for treason  or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; those to be exiled for treason to Siberia, North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after determined to be traitors the government  confiscation of their property occurred ; and those considered traitors or where guilty of terrorism to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.
  The combination of the elimination of kulaks, collectivization, and other repressive policies contributed to mass starvation in many parts of the Soviet Ukraine and the death of at least 7 to 10 million peasants in 1930–1937.
caption: May 1926 illustration to the Soviet categories of peasants: bednyaks, or poor peasants; serednyaks, or mid-income peasants; and kulaks, the those that possessed capital and significant wealth those who had much larger farms than most Russian peasants
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