Soviet grain quotas starved millions in Ukraine while the USSR kept exporting food
In 1932–33, Soviet authorities sharply raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas, seized households' seed grain, and sealed off villages and borders so starving peasants couldn't leave to find food elsewhere. An estimated 3.9 to 5 million Ukrainians died, while the USSR exported roughly 1.8 million tonnes of grain abroad in 1933 and denied for decades that any famine had occurred.