Estimation of the loss of life Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths. Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians.

Scholars continue to debate “whether the man-made Soviet famine was a central act in a campaign of genocide, or whether it was designed to simply cow Ukrainian peasants into submission, drive them into the collectives and ensure a steady supply of grain for Soviet industrialization.” According to Simon Payaslian, the …

The United States does not yet officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide. The Baltic Assembly—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania collectively—has also condemned the Holodomor as genocide.

Major causes include the 1932–33 confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities which contributed to the famine and affected more than forty million people, especially in the south on the Don and Kuban areas and in Ukraine, where by various estimates millions starved to death or died due to famine …

Arrested in February 1937, Bukharin was charged with conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state. After a show trial that alienated many Western communist sympathisers, he was executed in March 1938.

When Stalin was twelve, he was seriously injured after having been hit by a phaeton. He was hospitalised in Tiflis for several months, and sustained a lifelong disability to his left arm.

During Lenin’s semi-retirement, Stalin forged a triumvirate alliance with Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev in May 1922, against Trotsky. Upon Lenin’s death, Stalin was officially hailed as his successor as the leader of the ruling Communist Party and of the Soviet Union itself.

Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary Marxist current of political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the ” …

The Bolsheviks (Russian: Большевики, from большинство bolshinstvo, ‘majority’), also known in English as the Bolshevists, were a radical, far-left, and revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov that split from the Menshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour …

The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army, fighting for the Bolshevik form of socialism led by Vladimir Lenin, and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army, which included diverse interests favouring political monarchism, capitalism and social democracy, each with democratic and anti-democratic …

The White Army had the stated aim to keep law and order in Russia as the Tsar’s army before the civil war and the revolution of Russia. They worked to remove Soviet organizations and functionaries in White-controlled territory. Overall, the White Army was nationalistic and rejected ethnic particularism and separatism.