That autumn it would still have been possible to turn back. The Kremlin could have offered food aid to Ukraine and the other grain-growing regions of the USSR, as the regime had done in 1921 and as it had begun to do, in fits and starts, already that year. The state could have redistributed all available resources, or imported food from abroad. It could even have asked, as it had also done in 1921, for help from abroad. Instead, Stalin began using stark language about Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus, a Russian province that was heavily Ukrainian. “Give yourself the task of quickly
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