Others dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation – as is frequently implied by that term – citing the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union,[24] and instead focus on other factors such as the class dynamics which existed between the kulaks with strong interests in the ownership of private property.

Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labour force.

"[40] The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses being Kyiv and Kharkiv, which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country.

[5] Mark Tauger criticized Natalya Naumenko's work as being based on: "major historical inaccuracies and falsehoods, omissions of essential evidence contained in her sources or easily available, and substantial misunderstandings of certain key topics".

[42] According to Tauger, warm and wet weather stimulated the growth of weeds, which was insufficiently dealt with due to primitive agricultural technology and a lack of motivation to work among the peasantry.

Tauger has argued that when the peasants postponed their harvest work and left ears out on the field in order to glean them later as part of their resistance to collectivization, they produced an excessive crop yield, which was eaten by an infestation of mice which destroyed grain stores and ate animal fodder, a situation worsened by snowfall.

[54][55] Several scholars have disputed the allegation that the famine was a genocidal campaign which was waged by the Soviet government, including J. Arch Getty,[56] Stephen G. Wheatcroft,[2] R. W. Davies,[57] and Mark Tauger.

[59] History professor Ronald Grigor Suny says that most scholars reject the view that the famine was an act of genocide, seeing it instead as resulting from badly conceived and miscalculated Soviet economic policies.

Tauger stated that it is difficult to accept the famine "as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide" but that "the regime was still responsible for the deprivation and suffering of the Soviet population in the early 1930s", and "if anything, these data show that the effects of [collectivization and forced industrialization] were worse than has been assumed.

[34] Niccolò Pianciola, associate professor of history at Nazarbayev University, goes further and argues that from Lemkin's point of view on genocide all nomads of the Soviet Union were victims of the crime, not just the Kazakhs.

Historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft attributes the famine in Kazakhstan to the falsification of statistics produced by the local Soviet authorities to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of their superiors that lead to the over extraction of Kazakh resources.

[107] Although nominally targeting collective farms failing to meet grain quotas and independent farmers with outstanding tax-in-kind, in practice the punishment was applied to all residents of affected villages and raions, including teachers, tradespeople, and children.

[citation needed] Special barricades were set up by State Political Directorate units throughout the Soviet Union to prevent an exodus of peasants from hunger-stricken regions.

Unable to find work or possibly buy or beg a little bread, farmers died in the streets of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and other major cities of Ukraine.

[16] In contrast, historian Stephen Kotkin argues that the sealing of the Ukrainian borders caused by the internal passport system was in order to prevent the spread of famine related diseases.

According to Oleh Wolowyna, 390 "anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary insurgent and chauvinist" groups were eliminated resulting in 37,797 arrests, that lead to 719 executions, 8,003 people being sent to Gulag camps, and 2,728 being put into internal exile.

[5] Pavel Postyshev was set in charge of placing people at the head of Machine-Tractor Stations in Ukraine which were responsible for purging elements deemed to be class hostile.

[120] Kaganovich relentlessly pursued the policy of requisition of grain in Poltavskaia and the rest of the Kuban region and personally oversaw the purging of local leaders and Cossacks.

To justify this, Kaganovich cited a letter allegedly written by a stanitsa ataman named Grigorii Omel'chenko advocating Cossack separatism and local reports of resistance to collectivization in association with this figure to substantiate this suspicion of the area.

[120] However, Kaganocvich did not reveal in speeches throughout the region that many of those targeted by persecution in Poltavskaia had their family members and friends deported or shot including in years before the supposed Omel'chenko crisis even started.

Abzhanov, Director of the Institute of History and Ethnology[138] of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences stated that "One-sixth of the indigenous population left their historical homeland forever.

[citation needed] The first reports regarding malnutrition and hunger in rural areas and towns, which were undersupplied through the recently introduced rationing system, to the Ukrainian GPU and oblast authorities are dated to mid-January 1933; however, the first food aid sent by central Soviet authorities for the Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk regions 400 thousand poods (6,600 tonnes, 200 thousand poods, or 3,300 tonnes for each) appeared as early as 7 February 1933.

While the numbers of such reports increased, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine's central committee issued a decree on 8 February 1933, that urged every hunger case to be treated without delay and with a maximum mobilization of resources by kolkhozes, raions, towns, and oblasts.

On 6 April 1933, Sholokhov, who lived in the Vesenskii district (Kuban, Russian SFSR), wrote at length to Stalin, describing the famine conditions and urging him to provide grain.

A special resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine for the Kiev Oblast from 31 March 1933[152] ordered peasants to be hospitalized with either ailing or recovering patients.

According to Conquest, when enforcing the settlements of tribes the party has been explicitly stated the goal to "eradicate the economic and cultural anachronisms of the nationalities" or more specifically "destroy bai semi-feudalist" [further, the 15th Communist Congress is referenced for similar statements] and turn Kazakhstan into the food-producing reserve for Soviet Siberia and Far East.

Other Western journalists reported on the famine at the time, including Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, who both severely criticised Duranty's account and were later banned from returning to the Soviet Union.

Instead of a broad definition that would have included the Soviet crimes against kulaks and Ukrainians, Applebaum writes that genocide "came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust.

Applebaum further states: "The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–1933 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror.

Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people ... That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.