and Kazakhstan. Sheila Fitzpatrick writes about one of Kotkin's controversial conclusions: that while Stalin's policy was the cause of the famines and he and his inner circle were completely aware of the resulting famines and did nothing to stop or mitigate them, Stalin was not deliberately trying to exterminate peasants. Fitzpatrick writes, "This is an unambiguous rejection of the view widely held by Ukrainians and reflected inter alia in Anne Applebaum’s recent account of famine in the Ukraine. In Kotkin’s view, Stalin’s actions ‘do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians ... There was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.’ Kazakhs in fact suffered proportionally much more than Ukrainians, with up to 1.4 million deaths out of a total population of 6.5 million, compared to Ukraine’s 3.5 million deaths out of 33 million. But Stalin wasn’t specifically trying to target Kazakhs either, even though in this region collectivisation was accompanied by a lethal policy of forced settlement of nomads. He was trying to get as much grain and other foodstuffs as he could out of peasants who didn’t want to give it up." Personal tragedy, purges and bloodshed Connecting Stalin's personal experience to that of the Soviet Union, Ronald Grigor Suny writes "The Soviet Union was profoundly isolated, as was Stalin himself, particularly after the suicide of his wife in 1932 and the murder of his friend Sergei Kirov in 1934." Two of the more personal episodes Kotkin covers are the deaths of his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1932 and his best friend Sergei Kirov in 1934, both events which had a major psychological impact on Stalin. However, the author does not fail to connect these events to the larger political world of the Soviet Union and specifically the intraparty conflicts and the final purges of the Old Bolsheviks that would follow. Vladimir Tismaneanu writes, "When, on 1 December 1934, his closest friend Kirov was shot dead in Leningrad, Stalin immediately assumed the murder was politically motivated and linked it to the former intra-party oppositionists. ... For Kotkin, this is a key part of explaining Stalin's inner thoughts at the moment he decided to ignore Bukharin's desperate requests to spare him the death penalty. Liquidating Bukharin and Alexei Rykov (Lenin's successor as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars) completed the destruction of Lenin's party. ... The man whom Trotsky once foolishly (and inaccurately)