The Convention on Genocide by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
In order to demonstrate that the famine was an act of genocide against the Ukraine we need to demonstrate "intent to destroy in whole or in part" the Ukrainian nation and that the Holodomor constitutes "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about ... physical destruction" of Ukrainians.
The correspondence between Stalin and Kaganovich during 2003 clearly demonstrates that they associated resistance to collectivisation in Ukraine with Ukrainian culture and were determined to "correct" the situation. In the Summer of 1932 Stalin wrote "I think that we are giving Ukraine much more than is necessary"; that "the state of affairs in Ukraine is terrible"; that the CP(B)U "is not a Party, but a parliament"; and that we should do something, otherwise we might lose Ukraine." Kaganovich argued that resistance in Ukraine was due to nationalists,"counter revolutionary Ukrainian organisations". A crackdown on Ukrainian culture, which was combined with harsh increases in grain requisitions followed.
We have noted that the regime was determined to break Ukrainian nationalism and many of the measures that followed were a reversal of policies initiated by Lenin which sought to defuse national feeling by tolerating national culture. Ukrainian writers artists and intellectuals would be murdered in vast numbers during this period. Stalin had written however that the nationality problem was intimately connected with the peasantry. He had also famously said that "if there is a person there is a problem. If there is no person there is no problem". The measures for food requisitioning were clearly intended to deal with his "problems" in Ukraine.
A bread commission headed by Molotov and Kaganovich was dispatched to Ukraine in November 1932. All edible foodstuffs were removed from Ukrainian villages and ethnically Ukrainian villages in the Kuban. Villages which supposedly resisted were placed noted on a "black board" system and socially isolated. The army prevented people fleeing North from Ukraine and surrounded starving villages and districts.In 1932 an order to remove even the seedstocks was issued.
Removing everything edible delibarately qualifies as deliberately "inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". The result was a huge death toll resulting in a shortfall of 11 million in the population of Ukraine by 1937. Those who deny this fact are accomplices of this terrible crime.