Stalin had big plans for revolutionizing  the Soviet Union and nowhere where those plans bigger than Ukraine.  90% percent of the population in the republic were small time farmers who worked the same plots of land their ancestors always had. He wanted to dispossess all of them and force everyone into large industrial plantations where they would become employees of the state. Convinced that that the "fascist" Western democracies were itching to invade, he wanted to take the agrarian Soviet Union and turn it into an industrial superpower capable defeating the "capitalist encirclement" in just 5 years. However, to do that he needed money... lots of money and the Soviet Union would have to export grain... lots and lots of grain to get it.  But what if his own people didn't have enough to eat? In that case the industrialized "proletarian" regions would be fed and the backward agricultural ones would have to do without. He reasoned that to create this new bulwark of Socialism the peasants would have to be "sacrificed." Lenin had said that peasants "need to do a little starving" now and then and this would be no exception. The "Worker's Paradise" had no use for these vestiges of the feudal past and if some of these were lost it wouldn't be the worst thing in the  world. But he also saw Ukraine as a hotbed of "counterrevolutionaries," "kulaks," "wreckers," "Petliurists," and about a dozen other hidden "class enemies." They were all threats to Soviet power and had connections to "fascist" Western democracies. These were people that needed to be taught a lesson they wouldn't soon forget. What followed would be one of the darkest man made catastrophes on Earth but it would happen systematically, in deliberate stages. Stalin would later confess to Churchill that he had to "destroy 10 million." It would be known as the "Holodomor" or "death by hunger." It doomed the population of Ukraine to a slow, lingering death. Ultimately, 13% of the population perished in less than two years. Nonetheless, a sympathetic  New York Times reporter from the time would say "you have to break  a few eggs to make an omelet."  Do the ends always justify the means? Today, the United States, along with 18 other countries officially recognize it as a genocide. Unsurprisingly, Putin's Russia is not one of them. They do not teach it in schools and still deny it ever occurred. If you want to know why every day people would be willing to fight to the death in the streets of Kiev to repel a Russian invader, look no further.