Notes:
Report to Congress for the Congressional Commission on the Ukrainian Famine.
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INVESTIGATION OF THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE
REPORT TO CONGRESS
COMMISSION ON
THE UKRAINE FAMINE

Adopted by the Comission
April 19, 1988

Submitted to Congress
April 22, 1988

Printed for the use of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine
UNITED STATES
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON: 1988
For sale […]

MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION ON THE UKRAINE FAMINE:
HON. DANIEL A. MICA, M.C (D-FL), Chairman
HON. GARY L. BAUER, Assistant to the President for Policy Development HON. WILLIAM BROOMFIELD, M.C. (R-MI)
SENATOR DENNIS DeCONCINI (D-AZ)
AMBASSADOR H. EUGENE DOUGLAS, Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Government, University of Texas, Austin
MR. BOHDAN FEDORAK, Public Member
HON. BENJAMIN GILMAN, M.C. (R-NY)
HON. DENNIS HERTEL, […]

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Members of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine………………………ii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………….iii
Executive Summary…………………………………………………………..v
Chapter 1: Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine……………1
Chapter 2: Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Ukraine…………37
Chapter 3: Soviet Press Sources on the Famine …………………………69
Chapter 4: Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine……………………….97
Chapter 5: The Famine outside Ukraine…………………………………..135
Chapter 6: The American Response to the Famine……………………..151
Chapter 7: […]

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Commission Efforts and Accomplishments
The purpose of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, as defined by its enabling legislation, is “to conduct a study of the 1932-1933 Ukrainian Famine in order to expand the world’s knowledge of the famine and provide the American public with a better understanding of the Soviet system by revealing the […]

Executive Summary
Thanks to the initiative of Commission member Dr. Myron Kuropas, curriculum
development became a major focus of Commission efforts. Commission members
and stiff attended various teachers’ conferences in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan,
Colorado, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Arizona. Dr. Kuropas, in addition
to organizing the first teachers* conference on the Famine in Chicago, also
participated in the Detroit conference and […]

Executive Summary
6) In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.
7) The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity […]

Executive Summary
17) The American government had ample and timely information about the Famine but failed to take any steps which might have ameliorated the situation. Instead, the Administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government in November 1933, immediately after the Famine.
18) During the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated with the Soviet government […]

Executive Summary
The Commission avoided detailed demographic research because of both the
scantiness of the material revealed in the 1939 Soviet census and the suspicious
circumstances surrounding such data. These two considerations would tend to
preclude the attainment of results likely to go significantly beyond the current level
of knowledge. Through the years various scholars have attempted to provide
mortality figures, […]

Executive Summary
cynicism, designed to justify repression against the peasantry as a whole.14 This is even more evident in Stalin’s infamous thesis of the intensification of the class struggle as the building of socialism progressed.15
Stalin also falsely alleged widespread sabotage of the state’s procurements campaign, i.e., that large amounts of grain were being […]

Executive Summary
Of course, in 1932 we also had some harvest losses because of bad weather in the Kuban and the Terek regions and also in some districts in Ukraine. But there can be no doubt that these losses do not amount to even half of the losses which occurred in 1931 because of the drought […]

Executive Summary
euphemism for famine in the USSR) in various parts of the Ukrainian SSR. 26 However, Molotov, who, along with Kaganovich, represented Stalin at the conference, noted the necessity of sending aid to the Middle and Lower Volga, the Southern Urals, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan as the reason why Moscow would permit no […]

Executive Summary
8) In the Fall of 1932, Stalin used the resulting “procurements crisis” in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further. 34
Throughout the preceding decade, the Ukrainian SSR had enjoyed greater relative autonomy than any other Soviet republic. Ukrainian communists openly called for Ukraine to […]

Executive Summary
procurements plan.” 40 Thereafter, the Soviet Ukrainian government increased pressure on the peasantry.
On November 20, the Ukrainian Soviet government ordered the verification of all bread resources on the collective farms and the immediate seizure of “stolen” bread. Collective farm board members were made responsible for the misappropriation of foodstuffs subject to the […]

Executive Summary
counterrevolutionary elements,” and sending more people to the villages and collective farms to help procure grain. 45
9) The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the extraction of agricultural
produce from the rural population.
The pursuit of the above-detailed policies at a time of agricultural scarcity could only lead to famine. That such a famine would not […]

Executive Summary
Terekhov’s co-authored account was couched in all the officially required euphemisms such as “harvest failure” and “grave situation.” Had Stalin in fact disbelieved Terekhov, he certainly had ample means of independent verification at his disposal, such as the secret police. Thus, Stalin’s professed disbelief of what Terekhov told him rings hollow. Stalin’s failure to […]

Executive Summary
upcoming sowing campaign. 56 At the same time he called for “substantial strengthening” of “repressive measures against kulaks, subkulak, Petliurists, wreckers, and other anti-Soviet elements. 57 These enemies were to be sought not only among the peasants, but also within the Party, and loyal Bolsheviks were obliged to be vigilant […]

Executive Summary
poods 63 of grain to Ukraine and another 15,300,000 poods to the North Caucasus Territory, specifically to the Kuban. According to the resolution, the reason for the loan was unfavorable weather, which had led to harvest losses in the steppe regions. Part of
the grain loaned was consumed as food, given out in […]

Executive Summary
The final showdown between Postyshev and Skrypnyk came at the June plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee. Postyshev accused Skrypnyk of being responsible for national deviations which had contributed to the procurements breakdown, thereby identifying every manifestation of Ukrainian national cultural self-assertion as one of the “machinations” of the class enemy. 70
Skrypnyk’s erstwhile comrades […]

Executive Summary
while stepping up efforts to meet it The grain procurements quota was re¬duced from 136 million poods, the figure set in May, to 97 million. Simultaneously, prominent officials of the territorial party and government were dispatched to the 31 districts most behind in their quotas to take ensure that grain seizures were intensified. […]

Executive Summary
On November 12, territorial party chief Boris Sheboldaev gave an extremely tough speech, in which he again raised the issue of exiling whole stanitsas from the Kuban. 80 The entire population of the Kuban stanitsas of Poltavs’ka, Medvidivs’ka, and others were exiled to the North. 81 From a Western account […]

Executive Summary
Stalin’s January 1933 intervention in Ukraine was also paralleled in the North Caucasus, As a result of the various repressive measures taken in late 1932, the revised procurements quota for the North Caucasus was actually fulfilled, albeit at tremendous human cost. 88
On January 23, 1933, the day before Stalin appointed Postyshev to […]

Executive Summary
16) Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians m 1932-1933.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as one or more specified actions committed with intent “to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group wholly or partially as such.” Among actions defined as genocidal, if intended to destroy a protected group wholly or […]

Executive Summary
The Commission has found no evidence that this knowledge played any role in the decision to normalize relations with the Soviet Union.
18) During the Famine certain members of the American press corps cooperated
with the Soviet government to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine. 98
The Soviet authorities denied that there was a famine when […]

Executive Summary
the collection Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933, edited by Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko. 105
In the Soviet Union, largely because of the stimulus of scholarship in the West, modest progress has been made in coming to terms with the Famine. In January 1988, an article in News from Ukraine, published by the […]

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Chapter 1
NON-SOVIET SCHOLARSHIP ON THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE
In order to understand non-Soviet scholarship on the Great Famine of 1932-1933, a few observations about this literature are necessary. Despite a clear link In Soviet ideology under Lenin and Stalin between what was called “the nationality question” and “the peasant question,” Western scholarship has persisted in treating each […]

Chapter 1
The study of Soviet politics, on the other hand, was deeply influenced in the im¬mediate postwar period by former Russian Mensheviks like Boris Nikolaevsky and Alexander Dallin, whose tendency to ignore the nationality question flowed from orthodox Marxism. Of today’s major scholars of the Stalin period, Moshe Lewin is most directly heir to this […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
However, her portrayal of the latter is tempered by details of their growing disillusionment in the later stages of the campaign.6 Viola has also pointed out elsewhere that the peasant opposition to collectivization, often led by women and dubbed bab’i bunty (women’s riots) in Soviet discourse, actually constituted a […]

Chapter 1
protested vociferously to the German authorities demanding his recall, albeit unsuccessfully. 10 His full story was published only a decade later. 11
Ewald Ammende, Secretary General of the European Congress of Nationalities, was tapped in 1933 by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna to head an Interfaith Relief Committee to aid victims of […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
prevented the spread of epidemics being spread to the cities. Yet, this makes his revelations all the more devastating. The Five Year Plan had led to “a gradual reduction in the standard of living, culminating in the great epidemic and famine of 1932-3.” He saw three causes for its occurrence, […]

Chapter 1
papers but in the medical journals, and officially it was reported as ‘Form No. 2′.” 17 After surveying the living conditions of health workers, improved financing for the public health system, scientific progress, and other achievements, Gantt wrote in his conclusion:
“Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 two severe famines and epidemics, taking […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
Soviet functionary, 8,000,000 in Ukraine alone according to what Adam Tawdul had been told by Mykola Skrypnyk and Vsevolod Balitsky. 22
The earliest attempt to determine the demographic consequences of the Famine on the basis of census data was made in 1940, by the influential Russian Emigre economist Sergei Prokopovich. Prokopovich […]

Chapter 1
winter of 1933-34. Each day in the Leningrad and Moscow train stations officers of the NKVD (secret police—JM) transport section gathered up the children who had arrived from the collective farms of Ukraine and the Central Agricultural Region in order to send them, obviously, to children’s homes and orphanages where they were left to […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
Pidhainy’s most interesting contribution to our story, however, is his recollection of meeting Ivan Kozlov, a prisoner in the Solovky who had actually led a peasant revolt during the Famine. Pidhainy describes him as a village scribe who
“for long years lived with illusions about the revolution until he saw the […]

Chapter 1
writers could be found who either described the situation in 1933 as one of semi-starvation or dismissed the Famine altogether. He cited some of the more important non-Ukrainian accounts then available and cogently argued the basic points in order to show that the Famine had been initiated and organized by Stalin as a genocidal […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
Were Solovey’s entire text ever translated into English, it would certainly be recognized as one of the major contributions to our understanding of the Famine.
In 1955 the Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Repressed by the Soviets (DOBRUS) published in often flawed English the second volume of The Black Deeds […]

Chapter 1

(in June 1933- JM) of Prosecutor of the USSR, “for the purpose of unification of the activities of the prosecutors of the union republics,” and with the object of “strengthening socialist justice and providing the proper protection for communal property in the USSR against the greed of anti-social elements.”
The issuance of this last decree […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
proceeded regardless. The demands of the Ukrainian peasants that after complete or partial fulfillment of quotas they should be permitted to keep some part in-order to survive, were deemed to be the opposition of class enemies to the government’s task. 42
Sosnovy described Moscow’s political offensive in December 1932 and […]

Chapter 1
inspired commentary, most related to collectivization and dekulakization, but the collection also contained a notebook listing deaths in one village during 1933. 45
From 1955 to 1960 the Ukrainian section of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich published a number of important works on the Famine in its organ Ukrainian […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
stop it They concentrated only on crimes involving the interests and property of the state. In desperation to get gold or silver to exchange for food at the torgsins (hard currency stores), grave robbing, especially involving the resting places of prominent citizens of the past who were likely to have […]

Chapter 1
population- though fully aware of the unfavorable climatic conditions in the Ukraine In 1931 and 1932, and though conscious of the decrease of the sowing area—not only forced the peasantry en masse into collective farms, but also, without defining what constituted “surplus,” arbitrarily intensified the requisitioning of foodstuffs and grain surplus from the peasants. […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
That which took place in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-33 was the most terrible of all the acts of the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine. Only later did it become clear that P. Postyshev, who unquestionably was familiar with the Kremlin’s secret plans, had grounds to state at
the November plenum of […]

Chapter 1
Timoshenko, like Dmytryshyn and Pigido, was able to take a certain amount of knowledge about the Famine for granted. In fact, he was able to state in reference to the Famine and the state procurements which brought it about:
We all now know that this enforcement of grain collection resulted in the horrible famine in […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
responsible for overseeing the grain procurements, and the procurements caused the Famine which resulted in a population deficit of 8,000,000.
A. P. Philipov accused Timoshenko of artificially linking agricultural policy to the nationality question. Yet, Philipov also conceded:
Unquestionably, there is some connection between the Soviet government’s attitude towards die various nationalities […]

Chapter 1
In 1930, which produced a bumper harvest of 23.1 million tons of Ukrainian grain, 7.7 million metric tons were extracted from the Ukrainian countryside—more grain than ever before or since. In order to meet this quota, state requisitioned sometimes took the seed grain and all the grain that had been stored in previous years. […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
Holubnychy’s argument remains an outstanding attempt to come to grips with basic issues necessary for an understanding of the Famine and must be considered seriously. However, it is difficult to agree with his analysis that it was caused merely by the circumstances existing at the time. In fact, the May […]

Chapter 1
Fainsod’s book is rivaled only by Leonard Shapiro’s 1960 masterpiece, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Robert Conquest’s 1968 study of Stalin’s purge of the later 1930s, The Great Terror. Neither had much to do with the Famine, and Shapiro gave it but a passing mention. Conquest, who later turned his full […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
Kostiuk described the intense struggle which accompanied collectivization in Ukraine, the breakdown of agriculture which led to outbreaks of hunger in the early months of 1932, and the confrontation between the Ukrainian party leadership and Stalin’s representatives at the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference in July 1932. Kostiuk pointed also to […]

Chapter J
Wasyl Hryshko’s Moscow Does not Believe in Tears, first published in Ukrainian in 1963, was revised and expanded over the years and finally appeared in English in 1983 as The Ukrainian Holocaust of 1933. According to Hryshko, the forced collectivization of agriculture entailed a national aspect from the initial wave of dekulakization, which […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
individual detachments which are going against the Soviet power and are supporting the sabotage of grain deliveries. It would be foolish if Communists assumed that the collective farm is a socialist form of economy and therefore did not respond to this blow by individual collective farmers and collective farms with […]

Chapter 1
The disruptions growing out of collectivization led to the famine and the death of millions of peasants. Obviously this is not a point that the Soviet leaders would wish to emphasize. And, in fact, they did such a good job of suppressing knowledge of it that few today know of the famine, and even […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
story by controling the Western press. Lastly, he mentioned the treatment of the Famine by the Soviet writer Ivan Stadniuk93. A year later Dalrymple supplemented his original article with a number of additional references, most notably the above-cited account by Dr. William Horsley Gantt 94.
Dalrymple’s work was extremely […]

Chapter 1
reserves, and the rapid growth of the urban population led to a sharp increase in food requirements in towns, while livestock products declined precipitately with the disappearance of so high a proportion of the animals. The government tried to take more out of a smaller crop… Procurements in 1931 left many peasants and their […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
A new offensive was launched—and first of all a terroristic wave against agencies and local authorities still too reluctant to re-engage in excesses. Thanks to powerful ’stimulants’, new records of anti-peasant repression were to be beaten. The local authorities had no other way out than to return the pressure […]

Chapter 1
cattle and the disappearing grain, the newly organised kolkhozy, caught in the zagotovki dutches, lacked both experience and interest in doing a proper job for ensuring the next crop.
Moreover, as if the cup was not yet full enough, the Government, fascinated by its heavy industry targets and mindless of minimal precautions, embarked upon […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
historiography of the collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture. 104 Most significant was Radziejowski’s calculation of a “demographic loss” of 9,263,000 Ukrainians between 1926 and 1939. He explained:
The demographic loss consists of those who died prematurely (that is, were killed), the children not born to persons prematurely dead […]

Chapter 1
mass constituency in the countryside. The co-opting of the left wing of Ukrainian revolutionary socialism by the Soviets led to the expression of Ukrainian aspirations by those whom their fellow Ukrainians viewed as traitors to the national cause—the Ukrainian communists. Meanwhile, the concessions made to the Ukrainians in the 1920s tended to legitimize a […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
significant were probably the papers by Bohdan Krawchenko and Sergei Maksudov. Krawchenko amply documented the chaos accompanying collectivization in Ukraine. Maksudov showed that even if one assumes that the 1939 Soviet census—which was taken shortly after a census was withdrawn for “diminishing the population”—were absolutely accurate and the mass resettlement […]

Chapter 1
Ukrainian eyewitness accounts published in the West in the 1950s and hitherto virtually untapped by Sovietologists. He demonstrated their veracity by comparing them with fictionalized Soviet accounts from the Khrushchev era. Conquest showed that in 1932 and 1933 an artificially created famine made the Ukrainian SSR, the contiguous and largely Ukrainian North Caucasus Territory […]

Non-Soviet Scholarship on (he Ukrainian Famine
Thus, the facts are firmly established; the motives are consistent with all that is known of Stalinist attitudes; and the verdict of history cannot be other than one of criminal responsibility.116
Such a conclusion combines the best of “mainstream” Sovietological research with the best of non-Soviet Ukrainian scholarship. From the evidence […]

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Chapter 2
POST-STALINIST SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE FAMINE
A surprising number of works published in the Soviet Union have in one way or another touched on issues intimately connected with the Famine of 1932-33. Indeed, two articles have been published dealing with these works—a survey of the Soviet historiography of collectivization in Ukraine by Janusz Radziejowski and […]

Chapter 2
collective farms.” 3 After discussing each of these factors, the textbook told its readers, “All this could not help but affect the level of the harvest: The 1932 sowing plan for grain crops was not met in 1932, which resulted in the creation of considerable food supply difficulties.” […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Experienced collective farm managers and qualified technical cadres were in short supply. 6
The difficulty of the situation lay not in the fact that people were starving to death, but rather that the sowing, harvest, and procurement targets were not met. However, the author’s allusion to the lack of consideration […]

On January 8, 1932, the Ukrainian Central Committee complained that the situation remained “extraordinarily disturbed” and decreed that January be a “shock month” in hopes of fulfilling the grain quota. Substantial numbers of workers were sent to the districts from the central organs, the government, and even Central Committee members. Seventy million rubles’ worth of […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
was low. Collective farm administrations arbitrarily disposed of resources needed to pay the collective fanners for their labor days. 12 District organs, Machine Tractor Stations, and banks often illegally disposed of collective farm monies and other resources, spending them without the knowledge or consent of the members. Lower […]

Chapter 2
the collective farm). It also forbade the distribution of any food to the peasants before complete plan fulfillment The “extreme struggle” with which the procurement campaign was carried out “further intensified” in December. The Ukrainian Central Committee ordered the establishment of special committees in every region (oblast’) to examine the reasons for the procurements […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
say one word about the hardships actually suffered by the agricultural population or about the official measures contributing to them. 17
Iu. A. Moshkov, whose work on the “grain problem” in the early years of collectivization has been extensively used by such Western scholars as R. W. Davies and S. G. […]

Chapter 2
A particularly acute class struggle surrounded the grain procurements. Playing on the petty proprietary vestiges of some backward collective farms, the kulak elements attempted to avoid giving the Soviet state any bread. In order to achieve their ends, the kulaks carried out counterrevolutionary agitation against the grain procurements and in every possible way tried […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
the Kuban where, on his orders and with his personal participation, massive repressions were carried out against party, state, and collective farm workers as well as against rank and file collective farmers. Fifteen Kuban stanitsas were put on the “blacklist.” In them the delivery of goods was stopped; collective farm […]

Chapter 2
from the harvest had been distributed on only 22.7% of Ukraine’s collective farms (meaning 773% of the collective farms gave the peasants nothing for their labor from harvest time almost up to the Spring sowing, if then). 25
Perhaps the apex of official revelations about the Famine came in 1964 when Pravda published an […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Not exactly a ringing condemnation of abuses or their results. Nor did he provide as many details on these errors as his Ukrainian predecessors had done.
A 1965 Russian-language article by I. E. Zelenin revealed a significant detail-how those who had already fulfilled the quota had to make up for those […]

Chapter 2
in Ukrainian by the UkSSR Academy of Sciences in 1960 for a mass audience in an edition of 100,000 copies, made no allusion to the “food supply difficulties.” But five years later, with the release of a Russian “translation,” of which 25,000 copies were published, the following paragraph was added:
The harmful effects of errors, […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
NATURAL RATE OF POPULATION GROWTH IN THE UKRAINIAN SSR
19274931
(per 1000)
Year 1927 1928 1929 […]

Chapter 2
machinery, killed livestock, and stole public property, causing the collective farm to be
broken up. 39
Whether called famine or “a severe shortfall in edible produced which amounted to the same thing, Soviet Ukrainian historians recognized that it had to be
explained.
Another notable work published in Kiev in 1967 was […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
in the distribution of natural proceeds (i.e., payment in kind—JM) local party organizations, district collective farm associations, and collective farm boards permitted the grossest violations of the party’s repeated directives. This sharply reduced the natural reserves for distribution to the collective farmers, who were engaged in production, and greatly harmed […]

Chapter 2
production arose on the basis of socialized cooperative collective farm property. In the process of the revolutionary transformation of the rural economy, there was some temporary lowering of the level of agricultural production. This is why one of the most important tasks of the Second Five-Year Plan was the liquidation of the breakdown which […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Raising the treatment of collectivization to the level of political principle meant that too much attention to what happened to the peasantry could be equated with political disloyalty.
In November 1969 this view was endorsed by Brezhnev himself, when he declared at the Third All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers:
In the process […]

Chapter 2
In general, it became difficult to find more than a passing reference to the Famine when an author mentioned it in order to explain something else. For example, the Russian Soviet ethno-demographer, V. I. Kozlov, explained the fact that the number of Ukrainians and Kazakhs in the USSR declined precipitously in the period between […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
In October of that year at the United Nations, Ivan Khmil’ of the Ukrainian SSR’s UN delegation, referred to the Famine as an “alleged famine which was supposed to have occurred in the Ukrainian SSR fifty years ago” and dismissed it as a “slander” perpetrated by “Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalists” who […]

Chapter 2
In reactionary historiography no little effort is made in giving battle to Soviet scholarship on the results of collectivization. Foreign “spetsy” (specialists) do not take the trouble to analyze statistical and factual data on the Ukrainian village objectively, but take as their main subjects the difficulties and errors which arose during the practical carrying […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Administration in the USA has been especially vigorous in its attempts to discredit the agricultural situation in Ukraine.
A new step in the escalation of the “psychological war” and the intensification of its interference in the internal affairs of the USSR is the provocative and hysterical campaign in Washington in […]

Chapter 2
At no point in the discussion did the reader learn that lives had been lost because of these errors. Instead, they were placed where the paranoia about revealing information about the Famine reached absurd heights. For example, O. F. Ivanov, senior instructor at Kiev State University, discussed a 1983 Senate agriculture subcommittee hearing on […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Attempts to speculate on historical events of 50 years ago to whip up anti-Soviet hysteria and encourage hatred for our country has turned out to be without prospects… But just as in the past, so now also, all this will gradually die down. 66
From the above-cited works, we […]

Chapter 2
Those in the Soviet Union who want to write about the past truthfully have won significant victories, but there have also been setbacks. In his speech of November 2, 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev stated that under Stalin “many thousands of people inside and outside the party were subjected to wholesale repressive measures.” 70 […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Even as it is, it is clear that life was extraordinarily difficult for the population. This is obvious, for example, from the production of milk, the sharp decline of which might serve as an indicator of the child mortality situation. In 1933 the production of milk was no greater than […]

Chapter2
But the transition to collectivized agriculture was far from simple. The unproven forcing of the tempo, the usual administrative methods of leadership, coarse violations of the principle of voluntariness, and distortions of the (party) line in relation to the middle peasant during the struggle against the kulaks greatly complicated the situation in the village. There […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
True enough, except that the officials in the Ukrainian SSR were merely responding to pressure from Moscow. 77
According to Kulchytsky, the peasants, lacking any incentive, “devised original tactics of sabotaging state purchases,” such as lying about the amount of grain produced and leaving part of the grain in the […]

Chapter 2
produced 400 million poods of grain, while the figure for the corresponding period of 1932 was a mere 195 million. A similar situation was observed in other regions of the country as well. 79
Once again, the article is as interesting for what it fails to say as for what it does. The Spring […]

Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Kulchytsky took pains to show that Moscow had tried to help the situation. He pointed to the January 19,1933 decree replacing the system of compulsory contracts (kontraktsiia) with firm quotas set by the state, 81 and hailed it as a return to “the Leninist principle of […]

Chapter 2
London Daily Express reported that the Soviet government had purchased 15,000 tons of wheat in order to alleviate the shortage of bread, Pravda published an indignant denial. 85
Kulchytsky concluded with the obligatory denunciation of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” who “try to prove that the famine of 1933 resulted from some special policy pursued by […]

Post-Stalinist Sonet Historiography on the Famine
giving a full enough account In an interview broadcast in English by Radio Kiev, Kulchytsky admitted that the Famine was “one of the so-called blank spots of history.” Only now were Soviets beginning to analyze the 1930s seriously. And this had actually been “promoted by an act of distortion of […]

Chapter 2
of millions” He called for “the removal of the blank spots” in Ukrainian history and culture. 89
Nothing as sweeping as Musiienko’s courageous statement has been heard either from official Soviet historians in Ukraine or from any quarter in Moscow. In April 1988 in the weekly tabloid Argumenty i fakty (Arguments and Facts), Academician […]

Chapter 3
SOVIET PRESS SOURCES ON THE FAMINE
The Soviet government’s denial of the existence of the Famine both at the time it occurred and thereafter is well known. From this often follows the erroneous assumption that the Soviet press offers little information about what happened in the Ukrainian countryside. Actually, the Soviet press reveals so much […]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
ever greater efforts in seizing grain. 5 However, in May 1932, when it was evident that the hardships wrought by the preceding procurements campaign had led to difficulties with the Spring sowing, the difficulties were blamed in part on the local authorities in Ukraine, who had […]