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This paper analyses the decision-making processes and the political mechanisms which led to the famine in Ukraine and the North Caucasus and, furthermore, to its intentional degeneration. The author focuses on the crucial period between the end of the summer of 1932 and the beginning of 1933. He revisits some of the questions hotly debated by both Russian and Ukrainian historians: the aims pursued by Stalinist leaders; the issue of food assistance provided at the eleventh hour to some, but not all, segments of the starving population; the uniqueness of the Ukrainian famine in relation to other famines which afflicted different regions of the Soviet Union at that time; and the legal classification of the Ukrainian famine.