Leading specialists examine the affinities and differences between the pan-Soviet famine of 1931–1933, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Kazakh great hunger, and the famine in China in 1959–1961. The first three articles deal with famine within a single state or Soviet republic and the remaining three offer comparative perspectives. With increased access to archives, scholars now have a sense of the dynamics, demographic impact, and consequences of the great political famines of the twentieth century, unleashed by Communist parties endowed with centralized planning mechanisms that they believed they could control and manipulate. In exploring the commonalities and specificities of the massive famines produced by the two largest Communist states, the authors also set forth numerous hypotheses and agendas for future research. Contributors: Lucien Bianco, Sarah Cameron, Rona Andrea Graziosi, Niccola Pianciola, Nicholas Werth, Zhou Xun