Spring 1933, a Ukrainian village with a church and no bread. Brigades have searched the houses for hidden grain and taken it. Watchtowers stand over the fields. People who walk to the city for food are turned back at the station, and villages that miss their quota are blacklisted.
Why then
Collectivisation is Stalin's second revolution: force the peasants into state farms and break the household that can say no. Ukraine resisted, and Moscow already distrusted Ukrainian national feeling. When the 1932 harvest falls short, the quotas are not cut. Grain is still exported.
What they wanted
Moscow wants grain to pay for factories, and a countryside that cannot revolt. Local officials who ask for lower quotas are purged, and the rest learn to meet them.
What changed
Between three and a half and five million people die in Ukraine. In Kazakhstan the same policies kill more than a third of the Kazakh people. Inside the Soviet Union the famine cannot be mentioned for half a century.
Still argued
Anne Applebaum argues Stalin aimed the famine at Ukrainians as a nation; others, R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft among them, see a system that starved everyone in its way and treated Ukraine worst. Ukraine and many other states call it genocide.