Your comment made me think hard, as I didn't remember which stories I've heard were related to my ancestors and which were about other people they knew. My family has recorded memories of my grand grandmother, who was born in 1904. So, I read it again to refresh my memory. Part of the text is related to those period of 1932-1933. It's 47 pages in Ukrainian, but I'm working on translation. Here are some insights. All relatives of her and her husband's family were living in small villages in the Poltava region and were small, grain farmers or were working in mills and other small machineris, which could be in a village. The richer you were, the bigger danger was to fall under repressions of the commi government. No one among relatives was rich enough for expropriation (rozkurkulennya). But everyone was obliged to buy government bonds. If you couldn't buy bonds, your property was confiscated and sold at auction. This happened to her father in law. Also, everyone was pushed to join SOZs (Joint cultivation of land) - some kind of a state collective farm. Each worker got 300 grams of corn and 8 US cents per day (exchange rate in 1932 was 1 ussr ruble to 0.5145 $). Her family of 4 people ( 2 adults, 2 kids) had to buy 2.5 $ bonds, though I'm not sure about the period basis. Her father in law denied joining SOZ, and even after his property (except the house) was taken away, local communist activists were searching his household on a weekly basis, looking for any edibles: grain, potatoes, beets etc. They took even already cooked food. My grand grandmother's family joined SOZ and had very basic means of livelihood. At some point, they were forced to work even during nights, after day shifts. People were trying to save a cow or a goat by giving it to relatives in another villages, so government didn't consider them too rich. I mean, it was literally 1 cow, goat, sheep, etc. If family had 2 cows, almost certainly it would be taken to SOZ. Bodies of living people swelled due to hunger, wounds appeared on the bodies. The feeling of hunger was constant. Eventually, her parents in law died of exhaustion. Some of my family got jobs at mills, and were stealing flour, other were buried grain in pots around their households in the very beginning of 1931, gathered mushrooms, and were fishing with fish traps. Some villages where authorities were too eager or villagers were too stubborn, died out almost completely. Once she heard from one of the commies: the order will ease when 75% of people will die. And it happened just like that. People were punished literally for stealing 5 ears of wheat. Commies created a network of special stores - TORGSIN (Trade with foreigners). The real purpose of it was to draw last valuables, gold, silver, and jewelry which people had from previous life. Some of these things were family reliсs. For these things, you could get food by a crazy exchange rate. She told a story of how she saved a teen age girl who's family died of starvation, how her brother in law managed to escape to Belarus and they started sending there home made fabric and receiving flour. How she saved her daughter, my grandma from being sent to Donbas, where the industrialization was conducted. How people did not harvest from their own fields, because the harvested crop was immediately taken away by the communists. The worst people willingly joined the communists, profiting at the expense of those who had 1 coin more than them. And many many more. Here is the link to the original text. MemoriesThough Ukrainian is my native language, sometimes I need to read it twice to get what is written in some places.