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STEVE INSKEEP, host:
Vice President Biden is in Ukraine today, and he will pay respects at a memorial to what Ukrainians call Holodomor, or death by starvation. That was the famine of 1932 and 1933 that hit Ukraine, as well as parts of Russia and Kazakhstan. There had been other famines in the Soviet Union, but this one was different. One historian calls it Soviet dictator Josef Stalin,s original sin. Brigid McCarthy reports.
BRIGID MCCARTHY: It started with Stalin,s forced collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s. Millions of peasants, especially in Ukraine, responded to the confiscation of their land and livestock by refusing to work on the new state-run farms. Grain production fell. And by 1932, Soviet cities were running out of food. Stalin was furious, so he sent special detachments into the villages to seize whatever food they could find.
Petro Matulla(ph) lived in a village about 75 miles south of Kiev. He was only four years old at the time...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)