Nor can it, by any stretch of the imagination, be put down to bureaucratic oversight. By the early autumn of 1932 Stalin and his ministers undoubtedly knew, because local communists repeatedly told them so, that the countryside was starving, but ordered that food requisitions continue none the less. Right through the famine, storehouses full of ‘emergency supplies’ were kept locked and guarded, while people died in thousands in the villages round about.
