in the campaign “Terror by Famine: The Holodomor (1932–1933)”
Sealing off the starving region: peasants who tried to escape from the blockaded villages were intercepted on roads and at railway junctions. The directive sealed off precisely Ukraine and the Kuban: "all peasants who had managed to leave Ukraine and the North Caucasus were subject to return to their places of residence," while permits to leave were denied even "to the national districts of the krai, where there was no famine at all"[1]. Within 50 days "219.5 thousand peasants were detained, including 38 thousand in the Ukrainian SSR, 47 thousand in the North Caucasus, 44 thousand in the Central Black Earth region, 5 thousand in the Western oblast, 65 thousand on the railways"; of these, "186.5 thousand were sent home under convoy, almost 3 thousand were convicted, and all the rest awaited trial or were under investigation in filtration camps"[1]. The point of the operation lay not in sentences but in marching people back into the starving villages: the coded telegram "documentarily attests to his intention to organize absolute famine in the rural areas of Ukraine"[1].