How many died under Stalin's famine and terror, and was the Holodomor a genocide?

Estimates are large and contested. For the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, it is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. One estimate puts 3.3 to 3.9 million of them in Ukraine, 2 to 3 million in Russia and 1.5 to 2 million in Kazakhstan. The Great Purge that followed is estimated by scholars to have killed 700,000 to 1.2 million. And whether the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, was a genocide is an open question among historians.

What caused the famine? It struck the major grain-producing areas, and major factors included forced collectivization of agriculture under the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. About one million kulak households were liquidated, with property confiscated and their members executed, imprisoned in the Gulag or deported.

Scholars agree that the Holodomor was primarily man-made. They dispute whether it was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it was genocide, partly because no attested document explicitly orders the starvation of any area. Some historians say Stalin deliberately engineered it to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others say it was primarily a consequence of collectivization and industrialization. A middle view holds that it began as an unintended byproduct, then was weaponized against Ukrainians.

After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Stalin launched show trials, and the NKVD carried out mass arrests and executions. Public discussion of the famine was banned until the glasnost period in the 1980s.