1917: The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, take control of Russia.
1918: The former Leader Czar of Russia, Alexander Nicholas II, was murdered/executed.
1922: The Soviet Union is formed, and Ukraine becomes one of its many republics.
1924: Lenin passes, and Joseph Stalin takes over as leader.
1928: Stalin creates a program of agricultural collectivization, where farmers are forced to give up all private land, equipment, and livestock to join state owned, factory-like collective farms. Stalin then decides that collective farms would not only feed industrial workers in the cities but could also provide abundant amounts of grain to be sold overseas, with the money used to finance his plans for industrialization.
1929: Many Ukrainian farmers still refuse to join Stalin's collective farms, which they regarded as similar to the serfdom of earlier centuries. Stalin introduces a policy of "class warfare" in the countryside in order to break down resistance to collectivization. The successful farmers, or kurkuls, are branded as the class enemy, and brutal enforcement by troops and secret police is used to "liquidate them as a class." Eventually anyone resisting collectivization is seen as a kurkul.
1930: 1.5 million Ukrainians fall victim to Stalin's "dekulakization" policies. Over the extended period of collectivization, armed dekulakization brigades forcibly confiscate land, livestock and other property, and evict whole families. Nearly half a million individuals in Ukraine are dragged from their homes, packed into trains, and shipped to various remote, desolate places like Siberia where they are left with no food or shelter. Many victims, especially children, die in transit or soon thereafter.
1932-1933: The Soviet government purposely increases production quotas for Ukraine to impossible heights, ensuring they could not be met. Starvation becomes widespread. In the summer of 1932, a decree is implemented calling for the arrest or execution of any person – even a child -- found taking as little as a few stalks of wheat or any other food item from the fields where they worked. Discriminatory voucher systems are also implemented, and military blockades are erected around numerous Ukrainian villages to prevent the import of food into the villages and the hungry from leaving in search of food. Brigades of activists from other Soviet regions are brought in to sweep through the villages and confiscate hidden grain, and eventually any and all food from the farmers' homes. Stalin states of Ukraine that "the national question is in essence a rural question" and he and his commanders determine to "teach a lesson through famine" and ultimately, to deal a "crushing blow" to the backbone of Ukraine, its rural population.
1933: By June, at the height of the famine, people in Ukraine are dying at the rate of 30,000 a day, with approximately one third of them being children under age 10. Between the years 1932-34, about 4 million deaths are attributed to starvation within Ukraine's borders, not including deportations, executions, or deaths from ordinary causes. Stalin denies the presence of a famine in Ukraine to the whole world, while continuing to export millions of tons of grain, more than enough to have saved every starving man, woman and child.