jwb

Actually my understanding is that the kulaks were largely sent to gulags and the like where as entire regions of the ukraine and russia were systematically starved under the industrialization efforts. Most of those people weren't kulaks. Kulaks were essentially the economic upper crust of the peasant population.

And there might certainly be ethnic aspects to it as well but again I think that's down more to the circumstances that certain ethnicities inhabited the majority of the farmland where the crops were grown. Stalin himself wasn't even ethnically russian, he was from Georgia.

There were other ethnic persecutions as well such as against Catholics and poles but that largely comes down to a suspicion over where their true loyalty lies... A lot of the seeming nationalism the soviets displayed was strictly strategic and about wielding and preserving power imo.