[Daniel Stone] looks for a "smoking gun" to the Ukrainian genocide, but finds none, and calls to his aid Michael Ellman who came up with the verdict "Not Proven." The quoted British scholar is a masterful polemicist, but he has never researched the famine in Soviet or post-Soviet archives, and the subject is not really his field of expertise.

Stone could have done better by quoting the Italian scholar Andreas Graziosi or the French expert Nicolas Werth, both of whom have worked in the archives, know the documentation very well and have come to a different conclusion. Nicolas Werth, remembered for his contribution on the U.S.S.R. in the Black Book of Communism, has come to the following conclusion: "On the basis of these elements (documents and their analysis), it seems legitimate from now on to qualify as genocide the totality of actions carried out by the Stalinist regime to punish by hunger and terror the Ukrainian peasantry."

On Dec. 14, 1932, the Communist Party and state authorities in the Kremlin blamed the national revival among Ukrainians, both in Ukraine proper and Russia (which had a population of eight million Ukrainians), for difficulties in grain deliveries to the state and banned the Ukrainian language in schools, administration and mass media in Russia, and introduced a more gradual Russification in the Ukrainian republic itself.