The *Holodomor, more accurately called the Soviet (artificial) famine of 1932-33, was not a genocide, in that it did not target any ethnic or religious group. It was a consequence of murderously harsh collectivization policies and hit much of the agricultural/rural regions of the USSR – Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

Both my Russian and Ukrainian family members died in it – some from natural causes, some after being arrested, including for trying to eat unused government grain. Ukrainians were the number one victims because Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, not because there was ever a policy that set out to hurt Ukrainians specifically: there are no documents or statements that say so. In fact there was a government policy of promoting Ukrainian culture up to that period. Urban Ukraine never suffered from the famine – it only received starving refugees coming from rural areas.

The event was a great tragedy and a great crime of the Stalinist government, but it’s been turned into a “genocide” by Ukrainian nationalist propaganda since the 1990s. They use it, in part, to promote the idea that ethnic Russians, who comprise ~15% of Ukraine’s population, somehow replaced Ukrainians who died in the famine, and therefore don’t have rights that need to be respected – when no historian supports the idea.