Joseph Stalin (Иосиф Сталин) governed the Soviet Union with an iron fist from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. A 2011 estimate by Timothy D. Snyder concludes that six million people were deliberately killed in Stalin’s purges and terror programs, which does not account for the millions who died of starvation.

Stalin crafted economic initiatives known as 5 Year Plans. Each plan had specific goals to be reached using methods that aligned with Stalin's ideas of Communism. The state-run collective farms were forced to use the flawed methods of Lysenkoism, and their lack of yield was a major factor in the famines of the 1930s. The 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (called the Holodomor in Ukraine) was particularly harsh, so much so that twenty-six countries recognize it as a genocide through governmental policies. It is thought that of the 5 million people who died of hunger during the Soviet famine years of the early 1930s, 3.9 million of them were Ukrainians.