1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine. And it was absolutely manmade. During this time, the USSR exported tons of apples and tomato paste, barrels of pickles, honey, milk, and almost two million tons of grain in 1932 alone. Stores of crops, rotting sometimes as they awaited exportation, sat at railway stations and on the sides of roads under guard while the people starved within sight of them. Grain procurement quotas were kept unreasonably high, even though the spring seed grain had already been seized and the farmers of Ukraine had nothing left to give.
