The analysis of domestic and world historiography, documentary publications and archival sources is carried out from the perspective of the most pressing problem today: the Holodomor as genocide. The book raises the question of why the most serious and heinous crime of the Kremlin communist regime was possible. The author sees its root cause in the crisis that arose as a result of the accelerated construction of a utopian “commune state.” The crisis of 1932, the external expression of which was the famine of 1932–1933, in many regions of the USSR (including Ukraine) threatened the collapse of the multinational Soviet empire created by the Bolsheviks with “iron and blood.” To prevent this threat, Stalin used an arsenal of repression, including terror by famine, against the Ukrainian people. In November-December 1932, hundreds of Ukrainian villages were blacklisted, and in January 1933, a security operation disguised as grain procurements was carried out throughout Ukraine to seize non-grain food supplies from peasant estates. This operation turned the famine caused by the previous seizure of grain for grain procurements into a famine with millions of victims.