"Perhaps the most remarkable case of all is that of the Ukrainians. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the man-made famine caused by collectivization in the Ukraine was Stalin's brutal answer to what he regarded as the 'Ukrainian question'. A backlash against the relative autonomy of the Ukraine had begun as early as the spring of 1930. 'Keep in mind', Stalin had warned darkly in 1932, 'that in the Ukrainian Communist Party . . . there are not a few . . . rotten elements, conscious and subconcious Petlyurites' (supporters of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Simon Petlyura). To be sure, the effects of the 1932-3 famine were not confined to the Ukraine; Kazakhstan, the northern Caucasus and the Volga region were also affected. Careful analysis, however, reveals that the victims of the famine were disproportionately Ukrainian. It is surely no coincidence that fewer than one in ten Ukrainians had voted for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, whereas more than half had voted for Ukrainian parties."