A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We won the war.

Mendel Khatayevich (Jewish Soviet politician) (Second Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine) quoted in “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine” by Robert Conquest, 1987