speech" attacking Trotsky and others at the Central Committee session in October 1927 which resolved to expel them from the communist party. Holodomor Chubar originally backed Stalin's decision to force peasant farmers to join collective farms. He was one of the speakers at a crucial session of the Central Committee in November 1929 who attacked Nikolai Bukharin and others who opposed forced collectivisation. In March 1930, he reported that 63 per cent of peasant households in Ukraine had been collectivised. On 1 February 1932, despite evidence that the policy was creating a catastrophic fall in agricultural output and mass starvation, Chubar and Kosior co-signed an order, “On Seed”, ordering regional, city and district party committees to deny any seed aid to Ukraine's collective farms. This was the first of three documents bearing this signature from which the Kyiv Court of Appeal reached its verdict that Chubar was complicit in genocide. Chubar saw the impact of collectivisation for himself when he visited the countryside. On 10 June, he wrote to Stalin and Molotov on 10 June warning that "in March and April there were tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people dying from famine in every village." A few days later, with the backing of the Ukrainian Politburo, he sent a telegram to Moscow pleading for thousands of tons of grain to be sent to Ukraine. Stalin's response was that "Chubar is mistaken ... Ukraine has been given more than it should get. There is no reason to give more grain, and nowhere to take it from." His pleas for more grain angered Stalin, who gave Kaganovich and Molotov a written instruction on 2 July to go to Ukraine to deal with "Chubar's corruptness and opportunism" and hinted that both Chubar and Kosior would be removed from Ukraine. The Ukrainian Politburo met on 6 July. Kaganovich reported to Stalin that every member of the Politburo pleaded for a reduction in the quota of grain Ukraine was supposed to hand over, but he and Molotov "categorically refused". In Pravda, the following day, Chubar was quoted as having criticised heads of collective farms and other officials who accepted targets they knew could not be fulfilled, saying "it is wrong to accept an order regardless of its practicability" and then to justify the resulting chaos by saying it came from "orders from above". Yet, after the Politburo session, Chubar and Kosior signed