"It was in fact one of the stated aims of collectivization to achieve 'the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism's social base - the individual land-holdings'. Collectivization was pushed further and faster there than in Russia. Grain quotas were deliberately stepped up even as production was falling. This explains why about half the victims of the famine were Ukrainians - nearly one in five of the total Ukrainian population. Nor did Stalin regard starvation as a sufficient solution to the problem of Ukrainian disloyalty. The composer Shostakovich recalled how itinerant Ukrainian folksingers were rounded up and shot. All of this was possible because the Ukraine was in effect being run as a Russian colony. Although Russians accounted for just 9 per cent of the republic's population, 79 per cent of the Ukrainian Party and 95 per cent of government officials were Russians or Russified."