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Persecution In The Book Thief

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As mentioned frequently throughout The Book Thief, humans can be utterly terrible creatures. One particular case of this side of the human race can be seen in the Genocide of Ukraine, which was also called the Holodomor, meaning "death by hunger". About a quarter of the entire Ukrainian population perished as a direct result of this, which took place from 1932-1933. The average rate of death in Ukraine was 25,000 per day, which altogether added to a total of over 10,000,000 victims. Who is to blame for this persecution of the Ukrainian people? The group responsible was the Soviet Union, which was headed by one man - Joseph Stalin. Though the Ukrainians suffered a great deal under the rule of Stalin, they never gave up their fight for independence; Stalin may have killed their men, but he was never able to kill their determination. While the genocide specifically did not start until 1932, the very beginnings of persecution can be traced all the way back to 1917. This was the year the Bolsheviks took power in …show more content…

By the late 1920s to early 1930s, he began seizing land that had been given earlier to peasants and started to organize farms. Stalin was under the impression that collective farming would increase the production of food, but the people resented being forced to work for the state. In 1929, Stalin introduced a policy aimed toward these farmers who resisted turning their land over to the Soviet state. A year later, the policy was legalized by the Soviet Central Committee. Anyone who supported Ukraine's increasing desire for freedom was named an "enemy of the State". These farmers, referred to as kulaks, were dealt with through massive arrests and forced into labor camps. Some unlucky kulaks were deported into concentration camps located in Siberia. Despite the many forces against the kulaks, they still managed to find the willpower to resist the Soviet

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