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
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 [...]

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 [...]

Chapter 3
and four times, on those who had already fulfilled the quota in order to make up for those who had not met their quota. The idea that the quotas had ever been too high was “anti-Bolshevik” and had to be repulsed. Only “Right Opportunists” and “Left Distortionists” would “capitulate before difficulties.” Bolsheviks would have [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
about the difficult situation facing the Ukrainian SSR in agriculture. After noting that the area sown in the Spring of 1932 was down 45% from the previous year, he made it clear that pessimism was widespread in the Party’s ranks:
It is known that in many districts, in many kolhosps—and even [...]

Chapter 3
no time can we tolerate dissension and laxity, and above all right opportunist and capitulationist attitudes in this fundamental problem of our work, the grain procurements campaign.
Ukraine’s Party organization must swiftly and resolutely liquidate in its midst those essentially anti-Party attitudes and rebuild its Bolshevik ranks in order to achieve the Party’s most basic [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
It must be said straight out that our situation is difficult, that last year’s grain procurements campaign suffered a breakdown, that we fell 70 million poods short, and that we have also suffered a breakdown in the food supply situation in a whole series of kolhosps and villages in a [...]

Chapter 3
poods of grain loaned to the collective farms for the previous Spring sowing. 20 At the same time, the exhortations, which had encouraged the “distortions” of the previous campaigns, were revived. The Party was told
The class struggle surrounding the grain procurements has sharpened with particular force. The kulak, defeated but [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
Ukrainian Central Committee. Simultaneously, the First Deputy Head of the All-Union OGPU, Ivan Akulov, was made head of the Donbas obkom. 25 The plenum resolution was largely concerned with the Fall sowing, then at its height. It reiterated the customary denunciation of “left” abuses without describing them [...]

Chapter 3
to mobilize all forces of the Ukrainian Party organization to overcome the breakdown of the grain procurements.” 29
On November 2 and 3, Khataevich emphasized the problem by delivering the same speech twice, beginning with the words, “At the present moment the task that is most important for the Ukrainian Party organization [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
As of December 6, 1932, Ukraine had procured only 653% of the quantity of grain demanded by Moscow. Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, and Kharkiv were singled out as the most backward of Ukraine’s seven regions. Out of 494 raions, in only 43 had the collective farm sector fulfilled the plan. In only [...]

Chapter3
The decree also called for speeding up the threshing under the strict supervision of the state, purging collective farms and their officials of so-called kulak counterrevolutionary elements, and for sending more people to the villages and collective farms to help procure grain. 39
Activists in charge of seizing grain also lived in terror of [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
December 29, Mendel’ Khataevich as Second Secretary of the CP(b)U sent a letter to all newspaper editors and all oblast’ and raion Party secretaries, ordering complete mobilization of the press in the “struggle for bread:”
The work of Ukraine’s district and regional newspapers has been unsatisfactory. This is seen especially clearly [...]

Chaptern 3
times. 45 On December 23, he secretly ordered the seizure of even the seed for the next crop. After his removal in January 1933, his successor revealed that Terekhov had stated:
The seed reserves may be collected and counted toward the fulfillment of the grain procurements. Certainly, this must be done [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
On December 27, 1932, the All-Union government proclaimed the establishment of an All-Union system of internal passports and simultaneously brought local militias (police) under the direct supervision of a specially created board headed by G. F. Prokofiev and under the OGPU.48 The passport system enabled the Soviet government to control [...]

Chapter 3
under known conditions the collective farm can be used by anti-Soviet elements for their own ends. 52
According to Stalin, problems had arisen from the fact that members of various counterrevolutionary organizations had been able to worm their way into the collective farms, turning them into veritable nests of counterrevolution.
We know that a detachment [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
collective farmer and every collective farmer wealthy.”
56 The audience, which was well aware of the starvation, responded with suitable enthusiasm.
In spite of all the measures taken by the authorities in Ukraine, the Central Committee in Moscow censured the Communist Party of Ukraine for its failure to meet [...]

Chapter3
could hardly have been enthusiastic at the prospect of receiving a new overlord who had been given a mandate to clean house.
Postyshev’s housecleaning was extremely thorough. A few months after taking control, he made clear its extent. By October 15, in those regions where the ongoing 1933 purge had been completed 27,500 of the GP(b)U’s [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
on record in favor of such seizures as an example of the sort of wishy-washy policy which would no longer be tolerated. The openly enunciated policy was now to seize as much grain from the agricultural population as possible. However, with the Spring sowing rapidly approaching, Postyshev declared that no [...]

Chapter 3
On February 5-7, a CP(b)U Central Committee plenum was held to approve the January 24 instruction officially. Kossior delivered the main speech, giving Postyshev full public support Moscow’s instruction, he stated, “Characterized not only the work of the three decisive regions but also the work of our whole Party organization in organizing and carrying [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
We believed many comrades when they assured us and swore to us that they would wage a resolute struggle for bread and fulfill the plan. But then started talk that demobilized and disarmed the Party organizations. These demobilizationist attitudes on the local level are explained by the fact that when [...]

Chapter3
Soon after the plenum, the Central Committee’s theoretical journal published a lead editorial emphasizing the same theme, calling the breakdown of the grain procurements “shameful,” blaming it for its failure to “force” from the first days of the harvest the peasants’ ‘Very first of their obligations—the obligation to the state in the matter of grain [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
To what does this lead? What is the enemy’s goal? He wants to undermine the strength of our state. For bread is a great force in the state’s hands. Bread in the state’s hands is a powerful tool of Bolshevik influence both upon the development of agriculture and of die [...]

Chapter 3
To turn serious attention to the proper implementation of Ukrainization, to cease carrying it out mechanistically, to disperse Petliurists and other bourgeois-nationalist elements horn the Party and Soviet organizations, to select and educate Ukrainian Bolshevik cadres painstakingly, and to safeguard the Party’s systematic leadership and control over the way Ukrainization is carried out. [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
Postyshev began with the now customary reminder of the January instruction:
The Central Committee of our Party set in January of this year before Ukraine’s Bolsheviks a whole series of most serious tasks. The basic and primary task is to extract Ukraine’s agriculture from that breakdown status which it has been [...]

Chapter 3
weaken the proletarian dictatorship, fervently preparing new actions against the USSR not excluding dreams of detaching Ukraine from the Soviet Union.” These spies and wreckers had wrapped themselves in “the tattered banner” of a unified Ukraine, which actually served the interests of the German fascists, and the Polish pans, who hoped for the restoration [...]

Soviet Press Sources on the Famine
years ago. Ersteniuk was a spy from the first and at present; free him and he would be a spy again. Iavorsky was at first and is now our mortal enemy; he is still our enemy. And all the while these people were running things. You see, Comrade Skrypnyk, that [...]

policy already implicit in the decision of December 14,1932, made explicit the link between Moscow’s policy toward Ukraine’s countryside and its policy toward Ukrainian national self-assertion.
Nationality policy (what to do about the USSR’s non-Russian nations) reflected
policy toward the countryside, and the “national question” was seen, as Stalin
himself put it, as “essentially a problem of the [...]

Chapter 4
SOVIET HISTORICAL FICTION ON THE FAMINE
Like the once-taboo subject of the Gulag, the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 has surfaced from time to time in post-Stalinist Soviet fiction and literary criticism in both Ukraine and Russia. Four writers who deal with the Famine at some length are Ivan Stadniuk in his novel Liudi ne angely [...]

process” is “scientifically” understood, Soviet fiction inherently has more freedom than history.
Historical fiction on the Famine of 1932-1933 appeared as a facet of destalinization, the high point of which was attained in 1962-1963. The first stage of “exposing Stalin’s crimes,” which Khrushchev began with his 1956 secret speech at the XXth Party Congress, merely rehabilitated [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Tikhii Don (Quiet Flows the Don), but also of the lesser known Podniataia tselina (Virgin Soil Upturned), a book acknowledged by Khrushchev, on this occasion, as being the definitive novel on collectivization. Khrushchev began by noting that:
In the Spring of 1933 our esteemed Mikhail Sholokhov raised his voice in protest [...]

Chapter 4
also interprets reality in the “proper*’ way while appearing to weigh both sides of the issue. But even more instructive is the light the letters shed on the extent to which a prestigious writer was able to protest the Famine at the time it was happening. Of course, it must be kept in mind [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Ivan Stadniuk, a highly popular “official” writer, whose novel was written earliest and has been reprinted many times since, in a recent article in the periodical Sotsialisticheskaia industriia (Socialist Industry), hints at the political “responsibility” of those who write Soviet historical fiction—the need to pay homage to the current official [...]

Chapter 4
associated can explain the fact that he has been allowed to go as far as he has. And even he has paid a price.
Alekseev was 15 at the time of the Famine, certainly old enough both to remember the horrors it wrought in Saratov province in the Volga Basin where he lived with his [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Famine was no longer a historical backdrop, as it largely was for Stadniuk and Lanovenko, but an event that had a decisive influence on the development of the novel’s plot as well as on the moral and psychological evolution of the main protagonists. In fact, so vital was the Famine [...]

Chapter 4
mother, for example) and certain lexical infelicities suggested that Tolstoy (or even Gorky, for that matter) was in no danger of being overshadowed by Alekseev in the area of autobiographical fiction.
But Lobanov’s stingy praise of the novel’s artistic merits was countered by lavish praise of its historicity. Lobanov clearly saw Fighters as a radical [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
method. In the direct sense of the word from now on the thirties are full of content which will stand the historian in good stead in his illumination of that time. But there is still another side to the issue. Long ago in the past sacred objects were built on [...]

Chapter 4
Nikolaev made it dear that Lobanov was guilty of violating long-established “historical truths” about the “socialist transformation” of the Soviet countryside:
Since when is the wholesale rejection of historical truths attained by the great socialist experience of the people called a discussion? M. Lobanov’s article is a phenomenal example of unconditional critical nihilism with respect [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Nikolaev attacked Lobanov for implicitly challenging fundamental assumptions about the conventions of socialist realism in delineating a sharp separation of “good guys” and “bad guys.” Since the 1930s it has been beyond question that the hero’s role be given to those who implemented state policy against class enemies or imposed [...]

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Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Soviet citizens, Oliinyk implies that the Famine of 1932 was a tragedy of equal magnitude. This is easy to do because under normal circumstances the word “famine” does, in fact, trigger images of an environmental disaster. The point is that in the question of the Famine, the differences between it [...]

Chapter4
the mid-twenties to after the Second World War. The contents of the novel consist of the numerous, ultimately surmountable, obstacles barring the road to communism—dekulakization, collectivization, the Vlasovite movement during World War II, the peasant’s inherent mistrust of technology, his sloth, his inordinate love of drink. Balancing, indeed outweighing, the latter are the luminous achievements [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
A chapter or so of each novel is devoted to the Famine of 1932-33, which appears chronologically after dekulakization and is treated as one of the aforementioned obstacles to building socialism. One of the most telling features of Soviet literary accounts of the Famine is the requirement that it either [...]

Chapter 4
reverses the role of victim and victimizes as though the armed party activists had all they could do to defend themselves from the old unarmed woman.
The same thick coat of whitewash is applied to Lanovenko’s Twenty-Five Thousander, a Russian by the name of Kremnev who arrives from Kharkiv to direct the MTS in Andriivka, [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Following Trifon’s directives, Oliana sets her sights on persuading villagers bereft of political consciousness to hoard their grain, instead of handing it over to the state. “Collective farms are the work of the devil … thresh the harvest and keep half of it yourself for a rainy day,” she advises [...]

Chapter 4
grain from the collective field, the deed returns to haunt the good-hearted fellow for the rest of his life, bringing on nightmares and eventually heart disease, “Platon Yarchuk felt as if he had literally offended a child or did something horribly shameful, from which his conscience gave him no rest.” 31
The real [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
already seen does claim, that he tried to be as objective as possible about the years of Stalinism.
Ultimately, Stadniuk is too slippery to be accused of anything, regardless of how the political winds might shift, and this is the secret of his success. In his passages on the Famine he [...]

Chapter 4
If the Famine in Lanovenko’s Undying Bread has an abstract quality to it, it is because none of the major characters actually starves to death, though many go hungry. Only the horses and cattle are described as being emaciated during what Lanovenko euphemistically calls the nestacha (shortage or scarcity), and only a single incident [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
personal plots for chickens to pick at. No pungent whiffs of home-brewed beer wafted through the chimneys. And there was a lot more that could not be found which would have confirmed the tranquil course of village life and the peaceful watch for a Winter made dreamy from prosperity.
A scanty [...]

Chapter 4
a potato remained, for although destroyed by frost the bag-shaped vegetable nevertheless contained a pinch of starch. The villagers waited for the bark of the linden trees to return to life and for buds to appear. After that would come the young nettle, goosefoot, sorrel, wheat. They hoped that nature would in some way [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
orders not to let anyone in, Platon enters Grigorenko’s abode only to discover his nephew lying comatose with a gaping hole in his head. A bloodied hammer lies nearby, signaling foul play. The culprit turns out to be Grigorenko’s wife, Khrystia, who in a fit madness tried to kill her [...]

Chapter 4
blend of ancient Greek tragedy and modern Soviet Ukraine is unsurpassed in the incongruity it generates.
Cliff hangers are present not only at the end of most acts but at the close of almost every scene. Thus, Khrystia, the kulak’s daughter is shown running on stage with her axe, although the reason is no longer [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Stepan: You destroyed the field … sapped the life-giving force from the land. That bag of
seeds, which you took home with you, would have come in handy a hundred times
over during reaping. Platon: Was I to blame that there was a famine?
Stepan: And what about the land? It too [...]

Chapter4
Famine scenes from critical eyes in the West, although a more plausible explanation is probably Tendriakov’s desire to bring to life the tough, rough-and-ready village types who pioneer socialism in Pozhary.
To a certain extent, the very fact that Stadniuk and Lanovenko take such great pains to paste together a pseudo-explanation of the Famine’s causes is [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
done—OS) must be halted temporarily. Since payments for labor days were typically made in grain or other produce, Slegov’s suggestion, for readers aware of the mechanics of the Famine, is the equivalent of a sentence of starvation for the villagers.
Whenever faced with a historically catastrophic state policy decision that must [...]

Chapter 4
play, Tendriakov’s novella reflects the shift in the wind after Brezhnev’s 1969 condemnation of those who wanted to “play up the costs” of collectivization. The creation of the character Lykov personifies the Stalinist myth of the enemy “with a party card in his pocket” who “sabotaged” the general welfare by keeping back too much [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Pozhary-OS). They were found on the edges of the fields and in the gutters along the roads. But those who managed to crawl to their destination filled the Pozharites with a sense of horror. Through the holes of their mangy rags you could see their lice-infested bodies and hear die [...]

Chapter 4
to Fighters contains many of the Famine scenes and themes which later appear in Fighters in a more developed form.
Taken together, three stories in Bread, the Name of Life yield a surprising amount of information on the Famine: “Samon’ka” (The Loner), “Astronomiia” (Astronomy), and “Vechnyi deputat” (The Eternal Deputy). Some of the allusions to [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
Alekseev returns to the theme of famine orphans in The Willow Does not Weep, a novel set in 1938. The novel opens with two sixteen-year old boys, Grisha and Serega (who like Vas’ka and Petia in the aforementioned short story are prototypes for Misha and Van’ka in Fighters) making a [...]

Chapter 4
Alekseev’s interest in children, particularly adolescents, doubtlessly has to do with his own experiences during the Famine in the Saratov region, but returning to the theme of children and the Famine again and again over the course of two decades has perhaps less to do with the exorcism of demons within himself than with [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
narrator, the adult Mikhail Alekseev, describes how a minor disagreement, the reason for which is soon forgotten by the boys themselves, rapidly polarizes the entire village into two warring camps. Alekseev, who, unlike either of the two authors previously mentioned, is a writer of some talent, does not hesitate to [...]

Chapter 4
Famine becomes a general tragedy affecting everyone in the village more or less equally and, like the serpent in Eden, casts the boys out of their unique paradise.
Ultimately, the Famine cruelly interrupts the boys’ renewed friendship, for Van’ka disappears forever from the village after burying his parents. It also destroys the entire system of [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
farmer to juxtapose three words—’drought,’ ‘bad harvest,’ ‘hunger,’ — each of which flows out of the other in terrible fashion. There are times when the tiller of the soil is no longer gladdened by the bright stars; when he vainly searches the white-hot horizon for even a small cloud; when [...]

Chapter 4
Ultimately, Alekseev’s refusal to elaborate further speaks volumes.
The description of famine-related phenomena given by Alekseev reveals the same reluctance on the part of the author to whitewash the facts. Although, as we have seen, Stadniuk and Lanovenko allude to forced grain requisitions both make it clear that the latter were engineered by what ultimately [...]

Soviet Historical Fiction on the Famine
ignore, for Kotunov is depicted doing precisely what an activist was supposed to do and did, that is, steal from the people. Ultimately, Kotunov’s treatment in the hands of his young captors is a lot less severe than was given peasants caught hoarding grain. Taking pity on his tears, they [...]

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Chapter 5
THE FAMINE OUTSIDE UKRAINE
In the Spring of 1933 the areas where famine raged included not only the Ukrainian SSR but also Kazakhstan, the Don and Kuban areas of the North Caucasus Territory, and the Volga Basin. 1 At that time, the forced collectivization of agriculture and the compulsory seizure of produce guaranteed peasants [...]

Chapter 5
27.4% in the Summer of 1930. The displaced herdsmen were not absorbed elsewhere. The regime provided the collectives with little in the way of food, seed, implements, and technical help. This seems to have been more the result of official neglect than of deliberate policy, but the last reference to Basmachi resistance appeared in [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
artel’, which was the norm elsewhere, was temporarily banned. This encouraged a limited restoration of private property in livestock, and on October 19 the Kazakh Communist authorities decreed that in specified nomadic areas a single family could own 100 sheep, eight to ten cattle, three to five camels, and eight to ten [...]

Chapter 5
national deviation, that of Mir Said Sultan-Galiev in the early 1920s, was the product of a Volga Tatar. 16 A policy of Tatarization, analogous to Ukrainization, was carried out in the Tatar ASSR in the 1920s.
We have no information about the Famine of 1932-1933 specifically in the Tatar and Bashkir areas, as [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
districts of Ukraine, and northern and eastern districts of the North Caucasus. 21 It was also mentioned by Viacheslav Molotov, who stated at the XVIIth Party Conference, that “the dry weather of 1931, which affected many districts in the east, deprived the USSR of several million poods of grain. [...]

Chapter 5
Conquest, however, points out that the Volga German Republic “seems to have been the main target” of the Famine in the Volga Basin. 26
Most of the information we have about the Famine in the Volga comes from German settlers. The German Evangelical Church received 100,000 letters from Soviet Germans, mainly appeals for assistance, [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
land without a landlord only if he could defend it Out of this soil grew the Cossacks, who could fight and farm with equal success. The three “hordes” of the North Caucasus were named after the rivers along which they lived. The Don Cossacks, the northernmost and first Cossack settlers in the [...]

Chapter 5
The Cossacks’ unwillingness to share their wealth and power with the fellow inhabitants of their rich districts made their protestations of democracy, autonomy and self-government hollow. In fact they took arms against the Bolsheviks in order to defend their feudal estate privileges against their neighbors. In order to justify themselves in their own eyes, [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
Commissariat of Education, as it was throughout the Soviet Union41. To an even greater extent than in Ukraine, anti-Soviet guerrillas operated there until the mid-1920’s.42 In 1929-1930, at the same time that thousands of members of Ukraine’s noncommunist intellectual, cultural, and spiritual elites were arrested in connection with the so-called Union for [...]

Chapter 5
“acute kulak resistance” there. 48 And no wonder. In terms of grain requisitions, the North Caucasus was ravaged as much as Ukraine. In 1930 , 38% of all the grain produced there was seized by the state to fulfill the compulsory procurements quota, and in 1931 the quota took up [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
bogus: It represented only what party officials decided was possible to seize with the maximum effort A former Soviet journalist later recalled that before dawn on the day after the arrival of Kaganovich’s mission, “the newsboys shouted the horrible headlines, ” The Petliurist kulak saboteurs of Kuban must be finished off and [...]

Chapter 5
We have stated publicly that we will exile to the northern regions criminal saboteurs and kulak supporters who do not want to sow. But can it be that we have not already exiled the kulak counterrevolutionary elements from this same Kuban in preceding years? We did exile them and in sufficient quantity. And now, [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
Three hundred and fifty-eight of the Kuban’s 716 secretaries of collective farms and stanitsa party organizations—a majority—were purged, and some party organizations were entirely disbanded. 63
As a special threat to local officials, the Kotov affair was reopened under the November 4 decree. Kotov, who had headed a stanitsa party committee in [...]

Chapters
The consequences of the policies carried out by Stalin’s immediate subordinates in the Kuban’s stanitsas in 1933 were identical to events in Ukraine. Accounts by eyewitnesses from the Kuban are identical with those from the Ukrainian SSR. One recalled, “Krasnodar, the capital city of the Kuban region, was strewn with corpses which no one bothered [...]

The Famine outside Ukraine
By the Summer most of the villages of the Polyviansk Machine Tractor Station had lost half their inhabitants as a result of the famine. 71
According to another account, the Salsk Railroad Station was filled with starving villagers in the Spring of 1933. Unable to buy tickets, many fell dead and their [...]

Chapter 5
Khrushchev did not reveal the contents or date of the second letter, but did read Stalin’s response to both:
I thank you for the letters, for they expose a sore in our Party-State work and show how our workers, wishing to curb the enemy, sometimes unwittingly hit friends and descend to sadism. But this does [...]

Chapter 6
THE AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE FAMINE
Despite ample and timely knowledge about the man-made Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, the US government did not publicly acknowledge what it knew or respond in any meaningful way. Similarly, a number of members of the American press actively denied in public what they confirmed in private about the [...]

Chapter 6
District of Columbia,” arrived in Washington from Zhashkiv, now a raion center in Cherkassy Oblast’, UkSSR.3 The letters were delivered to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia and forwarded to State. Kelley described the first letter as “apparently written from Russia, with regard to alleged conditions in Russia.” 4 [...]

The American Response to the Famine
the second he responded similarly; it also concerned “alleged conditions,” but “in
the Ukraine.” 5
When the Soviets announced the “May Reforms” of 1932, the Riga post was initially optimistic, but evolved a more reserved attitude over time.
On July 11, the Riga Legation sent its survey of Soviet economic conditions [...]

Chapter 6
centralization in the economic and political fields, with the maintenance of certain pretenses in regard to national policy or matters of (the) Communist Party and disregard of appearances in economic stipulations.” 9 In September, it pointed out that the May Reforms had removed the last traces of collective farm autonomy [...]

The American Response to the Famine
memorandum of a conversation with one of America’s leading academic experts on the USSR, Prof. Samuel Harper, who had just spent two months in the Soviet Union and returned with disturbing news, The food situation has become very serious and may become catastrophic in a year from now if no [...]

The American Response to the Famine
On January 27, 1933, Riga sent its report on Soviet economic conditions during the final quarter of 1932. The report noted that “there is an acute lack of food in many districts, and the demands on agriculture are tremendous.” 22
Riga filed only a brief report on the decree of [...]

Chapter 6
object of crushing criticism of Stalin’s policy among Government executives and concealing the true reasons of its failure by shifting the responsibility to quarters where it does not properly belong. 27
Rosja Sowiecka pointed out the unprecedented fact that among the accused were Party members. According to the journal, that the trial should be [...]

The American Response to the Famine
(swollen legs, ulcers, boils, apathy, etc.). She claims that in the villages near Kiev, many people are obliged to subsist on trees, wood pulp, and grass. Sentries posted on platforms guard many fields and shoot poachers at sight. In Podolia, Mrs. Stebalo learned that her parents had died of starvation. [...]

Chapter 6
Analyzing and quoting extensively Postyshev’s denunciation of Skrypnyk’s so-called national deviation at the June plenum of the CC CP(b)U, the journal observed that “the real object of Postyshev’s dictatorship” was the pacification” of Ukrainian nationalism, an allusion to the Polish pacification of Western Ukraine, which had been designed to knock out Ukrainian nationalism there. [...]

The American Response to the Famine
Given that recognition of the Soviet government was a lively issue in the Administration in 1933, it is difficult to believe that the President was not briefed on the nature and causes of the Famine. Yet, even if he was not, there was another source of information reaching the White [...]

Chapter 6
you are informed that although the Department appreciates the anxiety of American citizens whose relatives in Russia are suffering from lack of food, it is of the opinion that there are no measures which the Government may appropriately take at the present time in order to facilitate relief work being carried on in Russia. [...]

The American Response to the Famine
Kelley included the name and address of Am-Deruta Transport Corporation which purchased foodstuffs for Soviet citizens through torgsin stores. He added:
Although the Department cannot assume any responsibility for the integrity of the organizations mentioned, it is suggested that you may desire to communicate with the Am-Deruta Corporation with a view [...]

Chapter6
group wrote similar letters to Cordell Hull and the American Red Cross. Not even a pro forma response was sent
The first Ukrainian group to send an appeal to a member of the Administration was the US World War Veterans of Ukrainian Descent of New York. On September 18 the organization wrote [...]

The American Response to the Famine
who had been permitted to leave Ukraine on August 7 to join her husband, a farmer in Alberta. 60 The Consul General in Winnipeg was directed to inform the organization’s leaders that, since these conditions “do not appear to directly affect
………………………………
60 [...]

Chapter 6
American citizens or interests, the Department is not in a position to take any action.” 61
On October 13, the Ukrainian Community in Oshawa, Ontario, held a mass meeting to protest the Famine and Soviet policies responsible for it. Its resolutions were also sent to the US State Department.. 62 The [...]

The American Response to the Famine
Ukrainians sent a telegram from Brussels, asking that an American Committee of Inquiry be sent to Ukraine. The US consul in Brussels was instructed to give the now standard response that “although sympathy is felt for the sufferings of the persons referred to, there does not appear to be any [...]

Chapter 6
Jones had actually based his account largely on information gleaned from other Western correspondents and diplomats in Moscow. 77 Diplomats were forbidden to publish their observations in the press, and censorship made many journalists far more circumspect than Jones. For example, in January 1933, Ralph Barnes reported to the old New [...]

The American Response to the Famine
it was the same story-cattle and horses dead; fields neglected; meagre harvest despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the Government, now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either: despair and bewilderment. 80
In May 1933, Muggeridge gave the [...]

Chapter 6
Next to Duranty, the American reporter most consistently willing to gloss Soviet reality was Louis Fischer, who had a deep ideological commitment to Soviet communism dating back to 1920.83 But when he traveled to Ukraine in October and November of 1932, he was alarmed at what he saw. “In the Poltava, Vinnitsa, Podolsk, and [...]

The American Response to the Famine
masters of euphemism and understatement,” giving “famine the polite name of food shortage’ and ’starving to death’ is softened down to read as ‘widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition’.” 89
The “containment” of the Jones story is perhaps the most telling event in what Eugene Lyons called “the whole [...]

Chapter 6
report truthfully a good harvest, he also belatedly reported what he had known all along:
hard conditions had decimated the peasantry. Some had fled. There were Ukrainian peasants begging in the streets of Moscow last winter, and other Ukrainians were seeking work or food, but principally food, from Rostov on Don to White Russia and [...]

The American Response to the Famine
What struck me at the time was the double iniquity of Duranty’s performance. He was not only heartless about the famine, he had betrayed his calling as a journalist by failing to report it. 99
On the basis of Duranty’s remark, Chamberlain, then a Communist fellow traveler, decided to review a [...]

Chapter 6
famine and the situation in Ukraine which were laughably wrong. There is no doubt whatever that the authorities could manipulate him…104
Why did Duranty alter his reporting with each shift in Soviet policy? Duranty’s own words make it clear that he considered himself a virtual public relations man for the Soviets. In 1931 on one [...]

The American Response to the Famine
southern and southeastern Russia, from the Ukraine, the North Caucasus and from
Kazakhstan, where the nomadic natives seem to have suffered very much as a result
of the wholesale perishing of their livestock.” 108 Refused permission to visit
Ukraine and the North Caucasus until the Famine ended, he was [...]

Chapter 6
creates work and prosperity, and guarantees progress and economic security will not be resented by the great masses of people. 114
The Ukrainian-American community, its kin dying by the millions, did not remain silent in November and December of 1933, they marched in a number of cities to protest against US recognition of [...]

The American Response to the Famine
the Ukrainian population increased at an annual rate of 2% during the past five years, Skvirsky dismissed UNWLA evidence as spurious. The death rate in Ukraine “was the lowest of that of any of the constituent Republics composing the Soviet Union,” he concluded “and was about 35 percent lower than [...]

Chapter 6
enemies’.” At least one-fourth of the total membership of the CP(b)U had been purged. Three-fifths of the leading functionaries in the districts had been removed. Virtually the entire personnel of the central offices of the Ukrainian commissariats had been removed and replaced by Postyshev’s men.125 Meanwhile, Territorial First Secretary Sheboldaev had carried out a [...]

The American Response to the Famine
parts (Ukraine and the North Caucasus—JM) reached toward the spring of 1933 the stage of famine,” 130
William Randolph Hearst made a final attempt to use the Famine to attack FDR. His newspaper chain ran a series of articles on the Famine in 1935, in the style for which [...]

Chapter 6
in 1933 and gave the figure of four and a half million. Hearst serialized his story after Lang’s. 136
Perhaps the most interesting of these accounts, however, was that of Adam Tawdul, a Ukrainian-American whose family had known Skrypnyk in the Bolshevik underground before coming to the US in 1913. Tawdul returned to Ukraine [...]

The American Response to the Famine
My own attitude began to bother me. Was I not glorifying steel and kilowatts and forgetting the human being? AH the shoes, schools, books, tractors, electric tight, and subways in the world would not add up to the world of my dreams if the system that produced them was immoral [...]

Chapter 6
whom FDR first publicly broached the issue of recognition. 145 Duranty seems to have been determined that American public opinion not be negatively influenced on the eve of the Roosevelt-Litvinov negotiations. He thought it imperative that the United States and the USSR establish diplomatic relations and the Famine, especially if [...]

The American Response to the Famine
these men and women, insulted to the marrow by the iniquities of bourgeois society, were wiping out the insult Japanese fashion by committing intellectual hara-kiri…
The desire to “belong,” not to be a political dog in the manger, was a powerful inducement to silence, or at least to cautious understatement. [...]

Chapter 6
The big exception, of course, was Ambassador Davies, who described Stalin as “clean-living, modest, retiring” and a “stubborn democrat” who insisted on rights for his people “even though it hazarded his power and party control.”151 Davies never even believed Stalin’s show trials of the late 1930s were staged.152 His last dispatch from Moscow went [...]

Chapter 7
SUMMARY OF PUBLIC HEARINGS
Hearings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine were held in Washington, D.C.; Glen Spey, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Warren, Michigan; San Francisco, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Testimony from 57 eyewitnesses to the Famine of 1932-1933 was heard. Thus, the hearings were instrumental in collecting an impressive body of [...]

Chapter 7
Since witnesses who had agreed to testify often have had second thoughts, the staff invariably attempted to have more witnesses than necessary and occasionally brought in persons wishing to testify from areas where no hearings were scheduled. Thus, three of the five witnesses who testified in Glen Spey traveled substantial distances; two witnesses (out [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
The witnesses were divided almost equally between urban residents, mainly from Kiev Kharkiv, Odessa, and Poltava, and former villagers, who generally had resided within 30-60 kilometers from these cities. The age of the witnesses at the time of the Famine varied, with most between seven and fifteen years old, but occasionally the [...]

Chapter 7
bootstraps. Where we were, people grew mostly wheat and sugar beets. The state didn’t seize it but bought it. Taxes were very low. People would sell the beets and receive sugar and some money besides. 6
Mr. Danylo (pseudonym) noted that after the revolution the government took away 40 acres of his father’s land, [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
I recall that my father and grandfather had a large library. Both of them held degrees in agriculture and were interested in botany. They kept bees and conducted experiments in the grafting of fruit trees… One autumn night in 1929, on the feast of Mary the Protectress (old style), our house was [...]

Chapter 7
anyone who was singled out as not wanting to join a collective farm could not remain in the village. He had to leave. He left when he became part of the labor force. Many did so, because there was no discrimination against kulaks. People who had been dekulakized or people who had been wealthy [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
division of the police was called in to help village activists. Such was the fate of the estates of Pershyi and Druhyi Vosmernyk and of many others. 19
Wasyl Samilenko, on the other hand, experienced first hand the tragedy of exile:
It was the end of 1929, the fall. I was thirteen. It [...]

In 1932 the harvest was a normal one. It was brought in before anyone suspected what was to happen. It was winter when they came in to take the grain that had already been ground into flour and was sorted in bags. They came and seized ail of this grain, not only from us but [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
grain. Fisher began to tease my stepmother and to provoke her with various unpleasant jokes. My brothers and I cried. Once my stepmother was so furious that she grabbed one of father’s joiner instruments and threw it against the stove. The instrument rebounded and nearly struck Fisher in the head. After this [...]

workers discovered a piece of bread and a couple of handfuls of flour hidden away in the bed. These were confiscated, and the priest was arrested. The brigade went from farmstead to farmstead, and its method of confiscating grain never differed. Each protesting farmer was assaulted with a torrent of verbal abuse uttered in Russian.
The [...]

leader to let me go home and bury my baby. The brigade leader, who was on a horse and had a loud angry voice, refused. I didn’t understand him and started to leave the field.
He called after me in that loud and angry voice, saying that if I took one more step he would run [...]

In the village of Novo-Arkhangelsk, there was opposition to collectivization. The village resisted collectivization and the high grain taxes. A few activists were killed, and the police were unable to quell this revolt How many peasants were killed on the spot, I don’t know; but every day, toward the evening; I went down to the [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
In 1933, when the people in the collective farms had already died from hunger, factory workers like myself were mobilized to work the soil Four hundred young men and women, myself included, were drafted from Enakievo for this purpose. We were joined by 70 other individuals from the mining towns of Zverovka [...]

Chapter 7
rather than joint owners of a cooperative enterprise, the state was obliged to compensate them for their labor. Mr. Merkelo noted that
the situation on the state farms was not as terrible as it was in the villages. Laborers and other service employees received a salary and a ration, if only a poor one. In [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
Even in urban areas the food shortage was keenly felt, especially after Stanislav Kossior ordered the closing of communal eating establishments in early 1933. Margarita Borzakivska, then a student in Kamianets-Podilsk, said that
most of the students lived in dormitories and ate at the dining halls attached to the institution where they were [...]

Chapter 7
Stephen C noted, “People ate everything without bothering to cook it first. They ate grass meant for pigs, weeds; they even caught birds, killed them and ate them raw. 55 William Krewsun’s family survived by eating the branches of trees, “It is hard to believe, but some of those tree [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
Nicholas Chymych spoke of the seizure of canned goods by authorities during an attempt to take them to his sister in their native village:
At the time of the famine I was living in town, but had a sister who still lived in my native village of Verhuny. From her I discovered there [...]

Chapter7
I looked at the top of the hearth and saw a grotesque half-naked swollen body. Rags lay around it, and the stench was atrocious. I broke off a piece of bread for the man and ran back to the village soviet office.
The watchman was heating the soup, and I shared the rest of my bread [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
acquisition. The greatest quantity of food was available to the privileged few or functionaries employed by the administrative organs that determined food allot¬ments for the privileged. Tatiana Kardynalowska, the widow of Serhii Pylypenko, the founder of Pluh (Plow), a Soviet Ukrainian union of peasant writers in the 1920s, emphasized that Pylypenko, like [...]

Chapter 7
and fat was also given out. Today some people may say that 400 grams per day does not constitute a famine, but this is because we have other things to eat besides bread. 74
According to the ration system which had been in effect since 1929-30, Sviatoslav Karavansky “as a dependent, received [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
But others, like Motria S., were unable to make use of the torgsin, “I saw many hungry people in town. Those who had gold went to the store which was called a torgsin where they could buy flour, sugar, bread, bacon, and so forth. But I didn’t even know what it looked [...]

Chapter7
from the specialized College for the Study of Foreign Languages. To reach Kholodna Hora, an area of the city where I lived, I had to cross some railroad tracks. A glass-covered and unlit viaduct went over them. Masses of homeless villagers had been brought to this shelter. I had to watch each step carefully so [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
The number of rural refugees in Kharkiv grew with each spring day. Emaciated, with ashen faces, swollen limbs, and blisters all over their bodies, these creatures sat on each side of the bread hue, staring expressionlessly at the ground or into space. They had neither the money with which to buy bread [...]

Chapter 7
children and placed them on the hay in the cattle cars… The children … looked like skeletons. Filthy and torn, they cried out, ‘Bread, bread give me a little piece of bread, Mama.’92
The parents generally left their child on a street corner. Noted Mrs. Kardynalowska, “A typical picture I observed many times was of [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
imagine, its evening, and the children are all hungry. Someone starts a sad tune and all the rest begin to weep. 96
There was a concerted effort by the Soviet government to keep the Famine a secret from the population even in places where the Famine occurred. Mr. Merkelo explained that
in [...]

Chapter 7
The Soviet government told officials on the oblast’ and raion levels that they must never write on a death certificate that someone had died of starvation. Since the authorities had to account for every single death, even the people who died on the roads and streets, they would make up all sorts of illnesses—intestinal [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
It was quite possible for Soviet citizens in other parts of the USSR to remain unaware of what was taking place in Ukraine. Mrs. Kardynalowska recalled the astonishment of her Mends in Russia on her telling them that there had been a famine in Ukraine. 108
Regardless of whether the witnesses came [...]

Chapter 7
young classmates in the village of Horodetsko near the town of Uman’ wasting away as the seasons changed from Fall through Spring:
Those who were skinny in Winter swelled up now, the water went through their bodies, so much so that it was hard to recognize anyone. Then the skin started ripping in their lower [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
cannibalism, resulting from famine induced insanity, either as hearsay or as something which he or she had witnessed personally. Tatiana Pawlichka, for example, recalled, “On my farmstead, an 18 year-old boy, Danylo Hukhlib, died, and his mother and younger sisters and brothers cut him up and ate him. The communists came and [...]

Chapter 7
Another woman, her neighbor who was with her, I saw your son as he was playing with little Tolya, and Tolya called your little son into his home, and I did not see your son exit. This woman who lost her son immediately went to the head of the collective farm telling him that [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
the older ones together.” 130 After repeated questioning by Commissioner Mazurkevich and Mr. Roth, Stephen C said that the woman who ate her three-year-old son had not been subsequently charged with a crime, merely, Taken away and was never heard from again.” 131 Mr. Kasian was equally vague [...]

Chapter 7
Children emerged as the most pathetic victims of Stalin’s policy of starvation. Not only did they suffer extreme privation and the premature loss of childhood, but they were also the victims of a particularly insidious policy orchestrated by the government, a policy of turning children against parents. As Mrs. Pawlichka noted, They would come [...]

Summary of Public Hearings
market place. In 1933, my mother went somewhere with my oldest sister, Vera, leaving me and my brother in my father’s care. He took us to the market, sat us down on some burlap and told us, ‘Wait here until I return.’ By evening he still had not returned. When they took [...]

Chapter7
didn’t trust anybody any more. If somebody comes into your house and asks you questions, you were afraid to tell them because you didn’t know who they were.”144 On the other hand, witnesses like Dr. Helen K. noted an increased appreciation of life instilled in her by the horrifying tragedy of the Famine, “It was [...]

Chapter 8
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
The goal of the Oral History Project of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine (CUF) is to add to the historical record by taping, transcribing, and making available for research as many oral histories of survivors of the Ukrainian Famine as possible. The Commission currently has 179 oral historical accounts drawn from [...]

Chapter 8
in force. This law instituted what amounted to a hostage system in that the relatives of a “traitor,” a term very loosely defined at the time, could be punished even if they lacked foreknowledge of the treasonable act. 1 This has engendered a strong fear of reprisals against one’s relatives [...]

Oral History Project
No oral history project relying on emigrants from the USSR can claim to have found a representative sample of the Soviet population or of any subgroup within it, either at present or at the time of the sample’s emigration. This was recognized even by those who carried out the pioneer project in this [...]

Chapter 8
correlate almost completely. This would in turn tend to indicate that adherence to the organized Ukrainian-American community and the sharing of its perceptions and values did not to any discernable extent color the narrators’ memories of what they witnessed, though it might well have colored their interpretation of the events narrated.
The openness of the [...]

Oral History Project
In any case, the claim that nearly 200 witnesses, most of whom have never met each other and whose statements on tape reflect all the various dialects of pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine, could all be repeating the same inventions is a prima facie absurdity. After more than half a century, details are sometimes garbled, [...]

Chapter8
the interview and the most difficult, because only a relatively few set questions are appropriate to virtually all rural subjects:
What portion of the harvest was taken by the state?
Was this too much?
Who took the grain? What happened to them?
Was there active opposition to the state procurements?
Was there famine in your area? (following if [...]

Oral History Project
Preliminary results
From the testimonies we have learned that [...]

Chapter 8
employed were useless babblers, lazy good-for-nothings, the temnota (the ignorant), and smokers of makhorka (cheap tobacco).
As a personal experience, the Famine was a struggle for survival against incredible odds. The struggle to stay alive is moving for even the most hardened listener. Those who survived did so by fleeing the village to seek work [...]

Oral History Project
Some men who still had enough energy managed to travel to Russia to buy food and bring it back to their families in Ukraine. One narrator, originally from the Poltava region, told how his father, who had become a railroad worker after his lands were seized in 1932, was able to take a [...]

Chapter 8
meat there for fear that it was human. Parents also warned their children not to wander for fear of their being eaten.
This is but a sample of the information collected by the Oral History Project These testimonies have been transcribed, ten samples have been translated in full and form Appendix I, and all will [...]

GLOSSARY OF TERMS
administrative measures (administratyvni/administraticheskie mery) — brute force applied in an arbitrary fashion. The tendency toward overreliance on administrative measures is also called administruvannia/administruvanie).
aktyv (Russian aktiv)—the collective of active supporters of the Soviet system and Communist Party upon which the regime called to carry out its policies.
apparat/aparat —administrative apparatus or jurisdiction.
centner (tsentner) —100 kilograms.
collectivization—the [...]

Glossary of Terms
Right or “Left” deviation, allowing Stalin personally to avoid responsibility should something not work out or to turn on any Party group or individual at any time.
distortions (Ukrainian perekruchennia; Russian iskrivlenie)—”leftist deviation” consisting in an overreliance on administrative measures in dealing with the peasantry.
“Dizzyness from Success” (Golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov)—Stalin’s March 1930 speech condemning [...]

Glossary of Terms
MTS—Machine Tractor Station. Under Stalin, MTS owned the farm machinery, which was used to work the land, and also functioned as a basic instrument of control by the urban-based regime over the countryside. Disbanded in the 1950s.
Old Bolshevik- official Soviet term for a person who had joined the Communist Party before 1917.
pood (pud) [...]

Glossary of Terms
Soviet citizens. During the Famine private individuals and organizations could purchase valuta certificates for individual Soviet citizens which could then be redeemed by the recipient at a torgsin store.
Ukrainization (ukrainizatsiia) – the official nationality policy applied by the Soviet state to Ukrainians for a decade before the Famine and abandoned in 1933. Ukrainization [...]

PERSONS PROMINENTLY MENTIONED IN THE TEXT
Ivan Alekseevich Akulov (1888-1939)—Old Bolshevik of Russian nationality who spent most of his career in the political police. In 1931-32 he was First Deputy Chairman of the secret police. In October 1932, he was named secretary of the Donets Basin (Donbas) regional Communist Party Committee (Obkom Secretary) and a secretary [...]

Index of Persons
frequent trouble-shooting missions to Ukraine in 1932-1933. Removed from power for opposing Khrushchev in 1957. Lived as a pensioner and publicly supported Gorbachev after the latter’s coming to power.
Pavel Petrovich Postyshev (1887-1940)—Old Bolshevik of Russian nationality. Prominent in the Ukrainian party organization (1923-1930) and Secretary of Kharkiv party regional and city organizations (1926-1930). [...]

Appendix I
[...]

[...]

CASE HISTORY LH8
[...]

[...]

Case History LH8
And then [...]

Appendix I
The head of the administration had me included in the transport. So off I went with this transport to Austria, where I worked until 1944. Toward the end of 1944, in November or December, I fled Austria, because the Soviets had occupied it. I was fleeing the Soviets. I stopped in Munich where I [...]

Case History LH8
accept any kulaks, that kulaks only need to be dekulakized and banished. This was at the Conference of Marxist Agrarians held in Moscow from December 29-31, 1929. But throughout the year of 1929, kulaks were not banished, but rather sentenced; the punitive session would arrive and would issue an immediate sentence of five [...]

Appendix I
They had no grounds to do this anywhere—but they did it (This is from] Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy* No. 23-24, in November 1932. And there you have it-from the head of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, Chubar’. This took place November 20,1932.
Q: Did you read all of this during this time? You [...]

Case History LH8
Q: How many were there in your family?
A: There were seven in my family. And we had land according to the appropriate norm. They left us ten desiatynas- and confiscated ten in 1920. My father was dekulakized in 1929. And not only my father, but four others were dekulakized in the village soviet.+ [...]

Appendix I
A: We normally had a harvest of 50, that is, 50 poods of grain per desiatyna. We didn’t get higher yields in those days, since people weren’t interested in growing more, because the larger the harvest, the larger the grain requisition, the larger the assessment
And so this assessment was levied against my father, but [...]

Case History LH8
A: A desiatyna in Ukraine yielded up to 200 poods. And now I want to — aha, you see—from the region. This was Mirchuk’s plan… The quota was 356 million* for Ukraine. This was for 1932. And it had been higher in the previous year’s plan, 431 million poods for the year 1931, [...]

Appendix I
both the areas of Katerynoslav and Poltava. These two provinces. And I was assigned to Haichur as a bookkeeper. I only worked there for about a year, up to July of 1918, and in May of 1917, I was assigned there and worked there for more than a year, until my heart started giving [...]

Case History LH8
floodplain along the Dnieper River, you know, floodplain that was submerged in the Spring, and above water the rest of the year. Still, no one planted there. You can’t plant anything there-only where there’s no water will the grass grow… Well, the Hetman made this decree. Drain the floodplain along the Dnieper River, [...]

Appendix 1
was … if I’m not mistaken, be traveled there and issued an ultimatum that he be accepted into the Politburo.
Q: How did the Bolsheviks conduct themselves that they established themselves so quickly from the start?
A: In the beginning, in 1922, I think, the Bolsheviks had not yet established themselves locally. Nor did they appear [...]

Case History LH8
A: They had to obey because the orders came from above. They obeyed; they did not protest in this particular case.
Q: And up to the NEP era, were there uprisings against the Bolsheviks? I mean, did the boys…
A: Up to NEP, there were no uprisings in my area. Wherever there were forests nearby, [...]

Appendix I
A: They were from the poor peasants. None of the kulaks could be members, because they didn’t take kulaks, you understand.
Q: And were there Communists that came from outside your area?
A: From outside? Yes, there were a lot. They were called—what’s the word? —I forgot But there were a lot form outside. In my [...]

Case History LH8
In 1932, you know, there was already a foreboding, a certain foreshadowing, that the Famine was to come. Not just the Famine but other things as well: The All-Ukrainian starosta, Petrovs’kyi* began coming this way; and also at this time, you know, we had dekulakization and collectivization, and the train began making special [...]

father’s brother, namely, that he had been killed by a [felled] tree. They had sent him to a timber felling camp.
Q; Was this in Siberia?
A: No, this was in Durnyts’k, or perhaps in Mordovia.
Q; Was there resistance against collectivization?
A: I really don’t know about that. Well, yes, there was resistance, as one would expect, there [...]

Case History LH8
[and assumed] that there should be some linen—these people that gathered [at my house].
And this dekulakization was, well, pure robbery. Robbery. Do you know what I’m referring to? They carted everything away. My mother had a sewing machine, a “Singer”, a machine-operated “Singer” sewing machine. And they sold it for ten rubles; but [...]

Appendix I
Q: This was during the Famine?
A: This was in 1929 and in 1930—and yes, during the Famine.
Q: Did you yourself see starving peasants in the Donbas?
A: Yes, I did. But I didn’t actually witness scenes of people lying down and dying—that I didn’t see. The police, you know, kept track of that, of people [...]

Case History LH8
don’t show up in the village again.” But he had already served his sentence, and had a document to show that he had already done so. So he took my brother, named Alexander, who was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and went to the station. And there, they gave him [...]

Appendix 1
A: Yes, that’s it, The Living Church was already in existence. What happened to that priest at the time that the church was being dismantled, I don’t know. But the priest who had served in that church fled … somewhere to the … who really knows?
Q: When was this?
A: Approximately in 1928 or 1927.
Q: [...]

Case History LH8
Q: Osipov or Ogurtsov?
A: Ogurtsov. He’s been in prison for ten years already because of this journal. And this journal addresses Russian patriotism, not Soviet patriotism.
And you see, I know the difference between Russian and Soviet patriotism, but it’s common to confuse Soviet imperialism with Russian imperialism, to mix them up as if [...]

Appendix I
of] the Communist Party, without the signature of the Communist Party, the Soviet Government does not pass a single law, unless the Party endorses it.
Q: Do you remember the Ukrainization of the 1920s?
A: I certainly do. I was taking my examination at precisely that time. This was in 1926, or perhaps in 1927. I [...]

Case History LH8
immediately. And his partner began the dekulakizing—began hauling out coffers into the courtyard, bringing out sheepskin coats; but later he did show up and he said, That’s enough. Let’s go.” This happened after about half an hour. You see, he didn’t come to do any dekulakizing himself, because, you understand, he was a [...]

Appendix I

CASE HISTORY LH13
Translated from Ukrainian by Sviatoslav Karavansky
Question: When were you born?
Answer. May 7,1904.
Q: Where were you born?
A: Should I name the village?
Q: This is not necessary if you don’t want to.
A: Velykobahachans’kyi district, Poltava region.
Q: Can you recall the situation before the Revolution?
A: Before the Revolution? Yes, a little bit. The Ukrainians were as [...]

Appendix I
and then he began corresponding. So, my husband was arrested on account of this uncle. My husband was a deacon, he had a secondary education.
Q: Was he in the village?
A: Yes. He had a secondary education. At first he was a teacher. Then, in 1921, when the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was resurrected, he [...]

Case History LH 13
1917,1918-girls were admitted. So, I attended this school in 1917,1918, and 1920, too. But in 1922,1 got married.
Q: What was the Revolution like in your area?
A: Do you know how it was in the village? Some were happy, some wept. In our village nobody did anything to anybody. In our village, thank [...]

Appendix I
little beyond the railroad. Our village was located before the railroad, and beyond the railroad—was the Tkachenkiv farm.
So, I liked the church. It was a nice church! There was a nice choir; the service was nice! The church had five cupolas and was nice. Oh, very nice! Mr. Leonid, when I would go there [...]

Case History LH 13
sponsible positions in Ukraine objected to being forced to speak Ukrainian; they protested that it was hard for them to pronounce some Ukrainian words. It is clear that the Ukrainian language is difficult for a Muscovite. As for us, the Muscovite language was not hard for us, because we grew up with [...]

Appendix I
room, but not what happened long ago. I forget more and more. I buried my son eight years ago. He studied theology in Munich.
Q: When your husband was arrested, did he really participate in underground activities? Did a secret underground exist?
A: Yes, he did participate. The work was done in a very clandestine way. [...]

Case History LH13
A: But for them, only the civil marriage counted.
Q: So let it be on their conscience, not on yours.
A: That’s what I’m saying. It didn’t matter to me. All right, I’ll get a divorce. Let it be so. I didn’t renounce my husband in my soul or heart. I only got a [...]

Appendix I
the girls whose job it was to unwrap the sheaves and hand it to him to throw into the drum of the machine didn’t give him the sheaves in the right way he’d throw it right back in her face [gap in the narration follows].
A: …Revolution. There was such tension in the air that [...]

Case History LH 13
komnezam, who came from the poorest people. They thought, “We are in power, and we can do anything.” So they took. Young men, members of the Young Communist League, joined the tow brigades. What else could they do? They went, because otherwise they would have been expelled from school or they wouldn’t [...]

Appendix I
out of their homes. Only the poor people remained on the collective farm. Afterwards the Bolsheviks agitated so vigorously that almost all of the peasants joined the collective farm… But suddenly a directive was issued that called such methods too extreme. Whoever did not want to join the collective farm could leave. My God! [...]

Case History LH 13
potatoes or beets, especially with relatives or neighbors. But it was terrible. Terrible. So, now my story begins about the Famine.
In the cities, there were torgsins where one could get some flour, millet, and oil for gold and silver. In the torgsins one could get something to eat Six kilometers from us [...]

Appendix I
say, “Mama, I’m going to go—he made a fishing-rod—I’m going to go catch some fish.” In the meadows where we lived there were a number of rivers and lakes. He would go and catch some. But there was no oil, nothing. If there had been some kvass… One can fry food in beet kvass. [...]

Case History LH 13
because of the two ears, and she perished in the Lubny prison. My mother wanted to visit her there, but she had already died.
A second aunt, my mother’s sister also died; she, her husband, and four children died. They lived far from us—10 or 12 kilometers; all of them died from starvation. [...]

Appendix I
to the Kharkiv region. So, for a while, there was only the Kharkiv region. The Poltava region was formed only after the Famine. The district was Dykanka, near the city of Poltava. So, if you needed something, you had to go 60 or 70 kilometers to the regional capital. Why this policy existed, I [...]

Case History LH 13
So she left. There was somebody in the village soviet. I tell you, word of honor, I’ve forgotten what the name of the village was. Whether it was Obukhivka or Okhtyrka, I don’t know-near Kharkiv. “I was still alive,” she said, “and so were the authorities. The peasants had all died, but [...]

Appendix I
Q: When collectivization began, was there any resistance? Armed resistance?
A: There wasn’t I heard that there were some villages that resisted, so the authorities sent squads of soldiers who shot the villagers. This didn’t happen in our village. Our village did not resist. Well, you know how a hungry man is. The authorities first [...]

Case History LH13
when the young girl died and remembered it all those years. When I saw the unearthed grave, I told my mother, and she said, “That was done because of the coins.”
Q: Did they take the cross?
A: The cross wasn’t taken, because it was on a deceased person.
Q: But those who opened the grave, [...]

[...]

CASE HISTORY LIDO
[...]

Appendix I
such a small piece—only two bites. It was a very hard time. Only those who worked received this. Once a day one was given these 200 grams of bread.
So, our family had 10 members, and only I helped this family to survive, though I was a 15-year-old youth then. I [...]

Case History LH JO
sometime in 1930, I can’t tell exactly, I can’t tell exactly. So, when the church stood empty, the collective farm stored the grain there. And later on, after a couple of years, the church was ruined, and a club was built there. They took bricks and transferred them to some other place, [...]

Appendix I
they would not fall out It was very tough this oilcake, it was like a board, because it came densely packed from the factory.
And we brought them home. We couldn’t always do so, because these oilcakes were not always available. We brought them home, and my brother’s wife divided the oilcakes among the children, [...]

Case History LH30
to be locked up for the night, it was before he had joined the collective farm… People locked their dogs in stables, the peasants came, and he wrote them some permits to leave the village and go somewhere else. During the day, when the chairman turned off a little bit somewhere, he stamped [...]

Appendix I
very close to that time that be would be calJed up. He wrote this—I try to be correct—less than a year before he would be called up for military service, when he should go to the army. But Voroshilov wrote him that he should wait for his turn. But my brother changed our name. [...]

Case History LH30
cannot teach the younger,” and that meant that the elders did not explain anything to the young people. As for me, I don’t know this well… I cannot know this.
Q: Didn’t your brother or your uncles tell you anything?
A: No.
Q: For instance, about the Revolution, or…
A: No, no, nothing. They never said anything. [...]

Appendix I
other foodstuffs and so much in money. So, people had to enter the collective farm, there was no other way out So, they were kept, and kept, and kept there for three or four days, the men weren’t allowed to go home, until they would sign up to join the collective farm.
Everything was already [...]

Case History LH30
Q: Were there local communists in the village?
A: There was only one that I knew of.
Q: Only one?
A: There was one in the village, this I know for certain. He was the chairman of the village soviet I mean, I cannot say when he was there, because I don’t know. But he wasn’t [...]

Appendix I
something, then he survived. His family did not die from starvation. But everyone, to the last person, was hungry.
Once the Party organization from the district (raion) demanded that each head of the collective farm send a man from every team, a man who, as they said, was a Stakhanovite+ who worked himself and forced [...]

Case History LH30
remember being given anything, for I was still only a child! This, this… I don’t remember. I cannot say what they talked about then. I only remember that they said we were supposed to work… Beyond that—as far as what was going on there, or whether or not such workers asked some sort [...]

Appendix I
was given the parents. The rest of the food was apportioned, because they were afraid of the Famine. Even ripened tomatoes were dried out and stored in sacks, because after that famine, people were afraid of starvation. They were afraid of famine to such an extent that no food was wasted, everything was dried. [...]

Case History LH30
grade. Once, while slightly drunk he drove all the young people who were 18 years old to a collective farm meeting. What the agenda was there, I can’t recall. He was slightly drunk and took the representative who had come to this meeting. Hie representative was standing on a dais giving a speech [...]

Appendix I
“hooligan,” because this was not permitted. So, he served a year in prison. When adults stole something, they were also tried in court
Q: And your other brother who verbally abused a Young Communist Leaguer?
A: He was classified as a political criminal because he called him a bad word.
Q: Was this slander or what?
A: Yes! [...]

Case History LH30
and earn your living. But where could you go there when you were fed from the land for many generations? You inherited the land, you worked the land. And the farmers lived from their land. So it was like tearing out their hearts! Many peasants hanged themselves, poisoned themselves, committed suicide, because they [...]

Appendix I
herself. So, many orphans remained. As for the men, they were the first to perished. The men went first. Because, who was oppressed the most? The men. So, more men than women died. The children also perished in great numbers, because there was nothing to eat, and that was that! Nobody had—I mean—a dog, [...]

CASE HISTORY LH36
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: This testimony is given anonymously. Please state when you were born.
Answer: I was born on October 25,1914.
Q: Please state your place of birth.
A: This was in the Zhytomyr region, Korostyshiv district, the village of Berezivka (Berezy).
Q: What did your parents do?
A: Oh, my [...]

Appendix I
Why? It so happened that an administrator, that is, a leader at the district level from Zhytomyr Region came to our village. He was a genuinely good-hearted man. He saw that the people had swollen feet, that they were hungry, and he gave permission to have the green rye cut and dried and cooked [...]

Case History LH36
A: The situation was difficult. Food was available to those who had jobs. A distant relative of mine, Bukach by name, lived on Pushkin Street in a building of the Academy of Sciences and was in charge of the dining hall in the Academy of Sciences. Provisions were made for the Academicians and [...]

Appendix I
with the corpses, and they would all be taken out somewhere beyond the city limits and buried in common graves.
Q: Were there any explicit orders from the police as to how the residents of Kiev were supposed to act toward the starving?
A: I don’t specifically recall. I can’t tell you whether there were any [...]

Case History LH36
Q: Did you ever observe the peasants trying to exchange their belongings for food? Did they bring in their belongings from their villages to the marketplace?
A: Well, you see, the peasants didn’t own anything good enough to bring to market By 1932 and 1933, people no longer had such belongings. The urban dwellers, [...]

Appendix I
there was another professor at the University that I knew well, a professor of physics named Kravchuk. Both men were professors at the University and were capable men, very much beloved by their students. But because they insisted on conducting their lectures in the Ukrainian language, they were arrested by the NKVD and shot [...]

Case History LH36
I personally knew one particular Jew, an older man, perhaps 72 or 73 years old, who lived at No. 16, Lenin Street. The man was a tailor and sewed men’s clothes. He had made me a very elegant suit from very fine material for 1,000 rubles. I remember it quite well. He was [...]

Appendix I
They did the same thing with Ukrainian literature. At the Academy of Sciences, at the universities, for example, they burned the works of Hrushevs’kyi, Vynnychenko, Kulish. My uncle on my mother’s side was the head of the village soviet in my village. And once when he came to Kiev in his truck, his daughter, [...]

Case History LH36
destroy the cultures of the minorities. For example in places like Vinnytsia or Zhytomyr, there were entire Polish villages, and not only villages, but entire Polish cantons, where groups of eight or 12 villages were ethnically Polish. In the years 1937 and 1938, they started to deport entire regions like this. In the [...]

Appendix I
committed suicide and Liubchenko was shot [sic—Panas Liubchenko committed suicide in 1937], and Postyshev and Khrushchev came to Ukraine. After the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the culture of the Poles and Jews was destroyed.
Q: What had your opinion been of the Ukrainian Communists you just mentioned—such as Skrypnyk and Shums’kyi.
A: They were Ukrainian [...]

Case History LH36
same time everything that was ever written about them and all of their works is being destroyed in all the libraries. This is exactly as it is with the Jews. They pay special tribute to Shalom Aleichem, announce that henceforth a street in the Podil’ section of Kiev will be named after him, [...]

Appendix I
A: If you like, I could recount another story for you, although it’s a bit long.
Q: Please do.
A: I was studying at the conservatory in Kiev in 1938. The person in charge of developing the curriculum at the conservatory, Glezer by name, was a Jew. And he did not like Ukrainians. The actual director [...]

Case History LH36
And then the following occurred. A Jewish choir used to come to Vinnytsia to perform at concerts. It was a government choir from Kiev, a Jewish choir, the only choir in the entire USSR that did not require a subsidy. The hall was packed with Jews at every concert And they paid such [...]

Appendix I
chose some Soviet song, like, “Down the Long Road”+ or “How Spacious Is My Native Land. And once he saw that, he was satisfied. He had to accept the selection, because he had Professor Palatai fired, the one with the moustache only because he had sensed the Petliurist spirit in him. And I told [...]

Case History LH36
“Yes,” I told him, “because those women were supposed to die of hunger, but instead, they came up with the idea of trying to save their lives by gathering the wheat-ears.”
And at this point, he began hurling terrible insults at me and left. About half-a-year later, he called me over to him, “Come [...]

Appendix I
A: Oh, you see, the general terror and the persecution of the church was so great that only very courageous, pious people would meet secretly to pray and sing religious songs. They only did this if they had the utmost confidence in each other. And the circumstances were such that if a neighbor were [...]

Case History LH36
started passing it around. It was a photograph of a pogrom. I don’t recall the town where this pogrom is supposed to have occurred, but, according to the student, followers of Petliura and his Army carried out atrocities against Jewish women and children. One student, a Ukrainian, said, “I beg your pardon, but [...]

Appendix I
recommended that the theater group stage a production of the play. The students in our class got free passes, complimentary tickets, for opening night and a group of about 12-15 of us students went to the premiere of the drama written by Lesia Ukrainka, The Stone Master. And it was Abraham Moiseievich himself who [...]

Case History LH36
A: Thank you very much. You’ve asked me a very good question. My father was with the UNR Army; my uncle Ivan was with the UNR Army; and the oldest uncle among them, Iakiv, also was with the UNR Army. All three of them were with the UNR Army. Uncle Ivan was [...]

Appendix I
You’ve already asked me, whether my family had been patriotic or took part in the events of 1917? Well, from our village, much to my sorrow, there were no more than three or four families that took part Why, you may ask, were the three brothers such patriots, having served in the Army of [...]

Case History LH36
My father used to be friends with the teachers. He played the guitar and the mandolin, and they used to get together and play. And the teachers used to respect my father deeply for his active participation and helped in staging the perform¬ances. That is why my father was so familiar with literature, [...]

Appendix I
weapon would be left behind in the wagon with a note tied to it bearing the name, “Zh. B. Shvorin’.” A shvorin’ is a large bolt which joins the front axle of the wagon with the rest of the wagon. This shvorin’ is such a thick, massive object that a single blow was enough [...]

CASE HISTORY LH38
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: Please state your name.
Answer: My name is Oleksander Honcharenko.
Q: What is the year of your birth?
A: Nineteen hundred and thirteen.
Q: Where were you born?
A: I was born in the town of Smila in the Kiev area. Smila was formerly a Cossack enclave.
Q: What did your parents do?
A: [...]

Appendix I
Q: Do you know what your father and grandfather were sentenced for?
A: Yes, I do. They sentenced my grandfather for the following; He speared a wild boar during Lent. Normally, everyone speared male pigs during Lent, because the period during which meat was allowed was only a few days away. Since everyone was doing [...]

Case History LH38
destroyed them. During this period, no one admitted to being a descendent of the Cossacks, because were he to do so, he would certainly disappear the next day.
Q: And how did the descendents of the Cossacks take to the Russians in general?
A: This is a question that doesn’t even deserve an answer. Everyone [...]

Appendix I
took a dislike to the Communist Party. That’s one reason. The other reason was that at precisely this time his sister betrayed him for the sake of her career. Somewhere around these years, though frankly, I can’t recall the exact year, perhaps 1928 or 1929, we in Ukraine organized something called the League for [...]

Case History LH38
Smila, because my father worked as a guard at the sugarbeet factory there after returning from exile.
Q: So the events that you were describing actually took place near Bila Tserkva?
A: Yes, they did.
Q: It’s important to record this. Right after the Revolution, in 1922 or so, was there any uprising against the Bolsheviks?
A: [...]

Appendix I
Kiev where they normally jailed those people who were unable to pay their taxes, or for similar offenses.
Q: How much land did your father farm?
A: He had five desiatynas. This was the equivalent of about five hectares, perhaps four morgens, not more than about 20 acres of land. The land was divided up one [...]

Case History LH38
so he did nothing. Soon, a commission pays him a visit when he’s not home. The lock is torn off his door and his house is forcibly entered. The members of this commission sit down and begin to make a list of possessions, “This watch is worth one karbovanets’; the picture, two karbovantsi; [...]

Appendix I
lock was on the door. So they just tore the lock off. And when I came home for lunch, the commission was already there, making a list of everything we bad in the house. All I had time to do was get two suits, my sheepskin coat, my hat and hoots. This was in [...]

Case History LH38
ten-year prison sentence, and 72 hours to get ready. So, I cleared out of there and made my way back to Donbas.
Q: Where did this happen?
A: Near Bila Tserkva.
Q: Do you wish to give the name of the village?
A: I can give you the name. I was working in Sukholisy. It was Sukholisy.
Q: [...]

Appendix I
41 desiatynas. It was their land that went into the 41 desiatynas set aside for the commune. The men were told, “Go and work this land. Do whatever you like! Plant whatever you want! You’ve got your own agronomist. Whatever you produce is yours to keep. If you want, you can sell your surplus [...]

Case History LH38
A: The commune—this was organized in the village of Vil’shanka.
Q: That’s familiar.
A: You know it? This was one commune. Elsewhere in the same district there was another one, in Nastezhka. These were the only two communes in the entire district Out of 11 villages, there were only two such communes. At Vil’shanka and [...]

Appendix I
witness myself. I’m sure there are others who can tell you more about the GPU and the NKVD.
Q: Did any of you manage to avoid joining the collective farm, or, did everyone go?
A: Some resisted joining the collective farm. But when the time came, they were all sent either to Solovky or to Siberia. [...]

Case History LH38
Q: Did you have good teachers?
A: The teachers were genuine Ukrainian patriots. I can’t recall a single one who was a Communist. They were all Ukrainian patriots. They knew very well what was going on in the country.
Q: So the teachers were well-liked?
A: The priests and the teachers were revered without exception by [...]

Appendix I
A: With the priest? I don’t really know, but I do know he disappeared. He didn’t go of his own free will to Donbas or anywhere else. He was forcibly taken away.
Q: Was service said in Ukrainian or in Church Slavonic?
A: In Church Slavonic. In Church Slavonic. In our village the Ukrainian Ortho¬dox Church [...]

Case History LH38
kilogram of bread every day at the market Miners didn’t get that much a month. They got perhaps 80, or 90 karbovantsi, which in general was not enough. Such a person would have to sell some of his bread for money. I, who had the money but no bread, would buy it from [...]

Appendix I
even found bread that had been buried and took absolutely everything. They cleaned out the storehouses, left nothing.
And why? It was necessary to create an artificial famine. If you take a bird or an animal you can only train him through the use of hunger. Similarly, the authorities used hunger as a [...]

Case History LH38
in it I hadn’t personally seen it, but was told from reliable sources—the entire village knew about it—how one man butchered his two children and ate them, then killed his wife, and hanged himself. Those kinds of things did occur. And all of this was created artificially! My mother had distended feet which [...]

Appendix I
all been taken away. The soul exception was the Russians. But if you were to go to Russia, you would not find anything there either, because no one there would give you anything. In the cities, you could only buy a piece of bread with money.
Q: Were you ever in Kiev during the Famine?
A: [...]

Case History LH38
they would be able to survive by planting potatoes. When bushes appeared over where the potatoes were sown, people knew that tiny potatoes were ready to be eaten. That’s when people began to survive. After the potatoes came the tomatoes and the cucumbers. All of this was planted on any spare patch of [...]

Appendix I
A: I was in Sukholisy at the time working as a timekeeper on the railroad. The former head of the collective farm from our village was passing through Sukholisy and caught a glimpse of me standing on the platform, dressed in my railway uniform. He jumped off the train and inquired who I was. [...]

Case History LH38
A: Well, we had contact with this instrument from 1922. It began after the Revolution, when Ukrainians felt that Ukraine was a free country. They either wanted desperately to believe this, or they were fooled, or whatever. And it was only at this time that bandura players emerged from underground. They had been [...]

Appendix I
the lock off the church door, entered the church and began destroying it, as I told you. They destroyed the iconostasis and tore down the chandelier. There was one particular activist among them by the name of Kanars’kyi. He donned the priest’s vestments, took hold of the chandelier and started clowning around in the [...]

CASE HISTORY LH46
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: The witness is testifying anonymously. Please state your year of birth.
Answer: Nineteen twenty-three.
Q: Where were you born?
A: In the region of Dnipropetrovsk
Q: What was the occupation of your parents?
A: My parents were peasants. They farmed.
Q: Do you remember how much land your father had?
A: No. I don’t [...]

Appendix I
In our family there were seven children, a grandfather and grandmother and my mother. My father was no longer with us. He was somewhere in Siberia. My mother said to them, “Well, where can I go? I have seven children. There are two old people. Where can I go with all of them in [...]

Case History LH46
used to visit us often. He heard what had happened, came over to us and said, “Well, you’re obviously not going to spend the night standing in the snow! Come over to our house.” He took us into his small house. There was a kitchen and one other room of some kind, and [...]

Appendix I
It’s not that they were simply taking bread away. They were taking bread away from people who were literally dying. But we still managed to get food, for there were a lot of people who helped us. There were even some who helped us although they were afraid. Sometimes they would ask us not [...]

Case History LH46
him into the coffin with his two feet sticking out. They drove off with him and buried him in the pit.
All sorts of things were going on at the time. A corpse would lie in weeds along the street for months until someone happened to see it and take it away. They would [...]

Appendix I
walk around in their heavy boots and riding britches, and they’d make sharp cracking noises against their boots with their bullwhips or riding crops. They’d strut back and forth through the house, absolutely terrorizing us. What could children do? If you have nothing to defend or protect yourself with—no mother or father to turn [...]

Case History LH46
on Palm Sunday, when we went to church to get pussy willows. There was an air of festivity in our home. The house had to be spotless. All the children, regardless of age had to pitch in with the work. Each child was given a task to do during house-cleaning. Finally, in the [...]

Appendix I
perhaps half. Each time she got the bread, she would save some of it, which she would then pass on to us whenever she could get back home. On the way home, she used to stop off at the homes of some acquaintances of hers and help them out in some way. In return [...]

Case History LH46
A: How long? Well, we could feel the effects for a long time, a very long time. I recall that we were already quite weak in 1934, when we were accepted at the school after saying we’d make our own desks. First of all, we had been through the Famine, and second of [...]

[...]

CASE HISTORY LH52
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: The witness testifies anonymously. Please state your year of birth.
Answer: I was born October 5,1902.
Q: Approximately, in what area where you born?
A: At the moment, it’s known as Sumy Oblast’, but was formerly known as Chernihiv Oblast’.
Q: Do you come from a village or from a city?
A: [...]

Appendix I
A: Well, this was the work of the village Soviets—it was they who would conduct the inspections, summon you before the village soviet and ask you how many hectares of land you had; and then, of course, they would leave you with one hectare per person in the family.
Q: Were the people in your [...]

Case History LH52
and she was ill and had two little daughters to care for. So he did not return to his mother’s, but instead established himself somewhere else and got work. But I don’t know what his fate was after that
Q: Were there a lot of households, a lot of people, who were dekulakized in [...]

Appendix I
A: I beg your pardon.
Q: When did they resort to threatening the people?
A: Oh, you mean to frightening people? Well, yes, they began arresting and deporting and throwing those people out of their houses —those that wouldn’t voluntarily join the collective farms.
Q: Did anyone you know voluntarily join the collective farms?
A: Well, who would [...]

Case History LH52
Q: But I recall that in the other village, the neighboring village, there were instances that the Army would be called in to fight the so-called bandits.
A: Oh, yes. This happened in the third village, which we had occasion to travel through. There was a so-called group of bandits there, except that these [...]

Appendix I
Q: Spring of 1933?
A: Yes, of 1933.
Q: And what were the reasons for the Famine in your area?
A: Those peasants that were not members of the collective farms—they had everything taken from them—they were the first to die in the Famine; and then the next to die were the members of the collective farms, [...]

Case History LH52
could not work very hard, or who had a large family to support, well these usually died out; at first, they would swell up—it was mainly the old folks, and children of preschool age who were the first to go.
Q: Were there cases of the activists themselves dying of hunger?
A: I don’t recall.
Q: [...]

Appendix I
together a coffin to bury their dead, but later, they stopped making coffins alto¬gether, and just hoisted their dead onto carts, drove them over to the cemetery; at first, they buried their dead in separate graves, but later common graves would do. I saw how the wagons would carry the dead, and I saw [...]

CASE HISTORY LH57
Translated from Russian by Dorian Diachok
Answer: In 1931 and 1932 I was…
Question: Excuse me, be kind enough to state your name.
A: Mikhail Frenkin.
Q: Your year of birth?
A: Nineteen hundred and ten.
Q: Your place of birth?
A: The city of Baku in the Caucasus.
Q: Where did you live at the end of the 1920s and [...]

Appendix I
would get a bit of rotten flour and other foodstuffs. The lines in front of the torgsins were enormous. The name, “torgsin,” was an acronym for “trade with foreigners.” But there were no foreigners, just Ukrainian peasants and the local populace, who were giving up their wedding bands and crosses. Do you understand the [...]

Case History LH57
middle peasants. At the time, 65-70% of the peasantry were middle peasants. The rest were poor peasants. The so-called rich peasants, constituted only five percent of the peasantry. They didn’t use hired labor. The actual workers in these households were mainly family members… They had large families. That’s why the term kulak was [...]

Appendix I
Q: I have a few questions.
A: Yes,go on.
Q: You’ve described how the village where you worked was dekulakized.
A: Well, I haven’t really described it I began writing some historical pieces. Dekulakization will be part of my memoirs. But I was indeed a witness.
Q: But 1935 is relatively late.
A: No, there indeed was dekulakization in [...]

Case History LH57
down several times. The political terror was in full swing. Here’s what was going on. Many people didn’t agree with what was going on, but they were arrested and liquidated, unless they fled. Many were nothing more than civil servants by profes¬sion. And for the food rations they got, they were ready to [...]

Appendix I
left wing of the SRs, then had it liquidated. The peasantry was left fragmented and without any political leadership. As you well know, they were cut down, one section at a time as their turns came up.
Q: What’s your opinion of Makhno?
A: Makhno! He represented a typical peasant movement of the Southern Ukraine encompassing [...]

Case History LH57
like everyone else. What else would you expect?! By this time they’d already introduced the public disgrace lists. You had to have been literate to read things like: “Disgrace to such-and-such a village or village soviet for not having met the quota; these are the losses resulting from the failure of such-and-such a [...]

Appendix I
others, hundreds and thousands of them were deported. In the beginning of 1939 I was arrested once again and sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp, fol¬lowed by six to seven years of exile. You can say they took away 17 years of my life.
Q: On what grounds were you arrested that [...]

Case History LH57
of nationalism. They especially went after Ukrainians, Germans, and Jews. Huge
numbers of my acquaintances perished. Naturally, the Ukrainians, who comprised
the largest single nationality suffered the most But they got everyone! The Poles
and Germans were all swept away. And these particular Germans were not
followers of Hitler, but had in fact been born in the [...]

Appendix I
produced This land was especially fertile. The conditions were favorable; there
were long-standing traditions; and there was a well established system of agri-
culture. And this is where the Famine was engineered.
Q: And the nationalities question?
A: Well, as to the nationalities question, there is an attempt being made today,
especially among the Ukrainians, to prove that they [...]

Case history SW1
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: Please state your name.
Answer: Varvara Dibert
Q: Please state your year of birth.
A: I was actually born in the previous century.
Q: When?
A: Eighteen hundred and ninety-eight.
Q: And where?
A: In the Kiev area.
Q: In a village or in a town?
A: I was born [...]

Appendix I
.
.
time, all of the schools, high schools, [...]

Case History SW1
.
.
.
organizing the youth, especially the Orthodox youth. There was a Jewish woman.
They had sent this small woman who began organizing groups. She had arrived
with a machine that ostensibly wove stockings. And whether or not this machine
actually wove stockings or not, I really can’t say, but she most certainly was
organizing our youth into groups. [...]

Appendix I
translate the passages and explain their meaning in Ukrainian. But before 1905
even this was not allowed. The entire service had to be conducted in Church
Slavonic. Well, my father stayed in the village. He was the parish priest there.
Like everyone else, he conducted the services in Church Slavonic until 1921. No
Ukrainian was used. But in [...]

Case History SWI
happened to Hrushevs’kyi. Oh, yes. Another cousin of mine was also with
Hrushevs’kyi as a guard, and he was also injured in the accident I believe he broke
his arm. At any rate, they managed to get Hrushevs’kyi to his destination. When
the Bolsheviks came to power, my brother was working as a teacher in the [...]

Appendix I
was already getting dark and that someone was lying in the fields. And he stopped
to see whether the person was still alive. And what do you think? The driver was
my brother’s best friend. The two of them had gone to the agronomy institute
together, and here he had been working not far from the prison [...]

Case History SWI
A: Oh, I taught the beginning grades. Is that what you want to know?
Q: I’d like to know specifically what you taught during the 1920s.
A: Oh, I see. As soon as the [...]

Appendix I
At that time there was a student there, a Russian, whose sister had been working
at the sugar refinery. I don’t know how this particular family had got there. This
man went and reported my husband, saying that he was fostering nationalistic poli-
tics in his lectures. My husband was arrested. The students appeared at a hearing
with [...]

Case History SWI
In 1925 we arrived in Kiev. My husband was still working in the cooperative. In
1929 mass collectivization started. All those, like my husband, who had occupied
the highest positions in the cooperative, had been instructors, had traveled
considerably, but were not Party members, were dismissed from their jobs. My
husband was dismissed also. They dismissed 14 [...]

Appendix I
One day, the following thing happened: The capital was transferred to Kiev.
This meant that the entire Party apparatus was also being moved to Kiev. And
housing was aready (sic) very tight It turned out that the situation with housing became
even worse. So they instituted the passport system. They weren’t really passports,
as such, but certificates. This [...]

Case History SWI
A: To Kiev? Well, first of all, most of these were children of parents who had
been arrested. And if the parents were taken the children would be placed in
orphanages. But not all the children wanted to go to orphanages. And they would
try to escape in all sorts of ways. They would hitch rides [...]

Appendix I
And I said, “Well, see for yourself.” And I added, “You can look in my pocket if you want”
And a few moments later, he ran over to me and brought back the glove and the
three karbovantsi And he said, “Auntie, if it’s as you say, then we don’t need to hit
on people like you. [...]

Case History SWI
realty were enough potatoes, then we wouldn’t need this bread.” That’s what the
child said. So I really can’t say that we actually went hungry the way others did.
I remember once my husband, who worked as a mechanic, drove out to fix some
machinery at a collective farm. He brought back ten or 20 pounds [...]

Appendix I
resting in the typhus ward of the hospital that the tonsils in his throat burst
Apparently, they had not noticed his tonsils.
Q: Did you see a great number of starving peasants? [...]

Case History SWI
The people who were swollen? Yes, there were very many of them walking
about But they would be rounded up whenever possible and taken out of the city.
They would be caught and driven out Oh, here comes Mrs. X.
Mrs. X.: Isn’t this the lady? Hello.
A: Perhaps you could add something of interest I really [...]

Appendix I
they moved us out of there because a lot of people had been escaping to Poland.
Every morning, news came—three families just escaped; four families. But we
ourselves were afraid. So they sent us away from there. There was famine there
too in the city, but not as visible. Then they sent us to a state farm [...]

Case History SWI
about what I saw? Oh, there was so much. And when someone died, he wouldn’t
be buried individually. Corpses were thrown into common graves and trenches that
people dug. But I personally did not witness any burials myself.
That’s how it is with our poor country. However long it has existed, it has always
been unfortunate, and [...]

Appendix I

CASE HISTORY SW34
Translated from Ukrainian by Dorian Diachok
Question: Please state your year of birth.
Answer: Nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
Q: Where were you born?
A: In Stavyshche, in Kiev Province.
Q: In which district?
A: The Stavyshche District
Q: Where did you live during the 1920s and the 1930s?
A: In Stavyshche.
Q: What were your parents’ professions?
A: My father worked in a [...]

Appendix I
A: The precise time? When Spring came. People were wandering about the
gardens and hoping to come upon something left behind in the gardens; they would
dig and dig, and examine every dump of earth. If they came upon a smelly old
potato, they would clean it and take the starchy residue. They would also dry and
grind [...]

Case History SW34
where to find hidden grain. They looked especially in places like hay piles in barns.
They dug everywhere. And if they happened to find some grain that someone had
hidden away, well, that was pretty much the end of him. He would never see the
light of day again. That’s how it was.
Q: And who exactly [...]

Appendix I
can I tell you? About ten percent of our village died of hunger. It was terrifying.
Utterly terrifying.
Q: Were you yourself repressed during collectivization?
A: Well, in the beginning, you know, we had our own house, which later became
my uncle’s house. They evicted us and told us that they needed our house as part
of the new [...]

Case History SW34
than peels. Well, we planted these in our garden, and the potatoes grew
beautifully. Something so simple, it could only have come from God. It was just a
potato peel with some eyes on it We planted the peels and got perfectly good
potatoes that way. That’s how we did it
The greatest number of deaths from [...]

Appendix I
distance away from us. People who lived closer, did try to go, but the ones who
made it, never returned with anything. Everything they managed to get was
confiscated. By this time, the passport system had already been introduced.
According to this system, you would be arrested and in great difficulties if you
happened to be somewhere for [...]

Case History SW34
allowed to separate from the Soviet Union if it chose to. These men believed the
slogans, or at least I suppose they did. But later, when they understood the truth,
they shot themselves. They had to. And that’s how it was with our Party members.
And then came the Party purges. They were directed from Moscow. [...]

Appendix I
Hey, our harvest knows no limits or measures.
It grows, ripens, and even spills over onto the earth,
Boundless over the fields; while the patrolling pioneers
Come out to guard the ripening wheat-ears of grain.

And now here’s the refrain:
We’ve hardened our song in the kiln’s fires
And carry it aloft like a banner, offering it to you;
And in [...]

Case History SW34
Q: Thank you very much indeed for this most interesting testimony.
A: I was quite young, but I saw a great deal. In fact, I can recall the events of
those times better than I can recall what I did yesterday.
Q: Oh, yes.
A: It was all so horrible.

Appendix I

Appendix II
ITALIAN DIPLOMATIC AND CONSULAR DISPATCHES
The following documents are verbatim translations of diplomatic reports from
the Italian State Archives in Rome: Archivo Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri
d’ltalia, Affari Politici- URSS, Busta 8 (1933) and deal with the Ukrainian Famine.
The documents were obtained by the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee in
Toronto and by Ivan Hvat’ of Munich, [...]

(This page blank)

Vice-Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
May 19,1932-X
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No…
Embassy of His Majesty, the King of Italy, MOSCOW
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome
RE: The food situation and the rise in the cost of living; armed bands in the
countryside.
We now know that for every hen the peasants keep, they still have to pay either
R. 3.50 a month in duties to the [...]

Appendix II
around the market by hand, although it frequently comes from animals that have
died of hunger or disease, when it isn’t cat meat or dog meat Some months ago,
the director of a hospital bought some smoked pork on the market, and after eating
it without having cooked it, he contracted trichina and is still in serious [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
YEAR V-NO. 56 [...]

Appendix II
Moscow: July 25,1932-X
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome
RE: Ideas, admissions and deliberations of the III Conference of the All-Ukrainian
Communist Party in Kharkiv,
The III Conference of the All-Ukrainian Communist Party has taken on special
importance inasmuch as its three main speakers, Kossior (Secretary of the A-UCP)
on the one hand, and Molotov and Kaganovich (both hailing from [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
caused by poor organization or sabotage by the kulaks, have been surmounted
thanks to assistance from the Central Committee of the Union’s Communist Party
and from the Council of the Commissars of the People, which have sent foodstuffs,
seeds, and tractors.
The unsuccessful production quotas and the problems of the Spring sowing were
further attributable to [...]

Appendix II
Noteworthy in Kaganovich’s speech was his emphasis on the mechanization of
agriculture. He claimed that the Union possessed 29,000 tractors and 1,800
automobiles as at the 1st of January 1929. No mower-threshers were available.
By the 1st of July there were 146,000 tractors, 10,000 automobiles and 10,500
mower-threshers. In Ukraine alone the tractors had gone up from 9,200 [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
EMBASSY OF ITALY
in the U.S.S.R.
Moscow: November 10,1932-Year XI
TELEX No. 5573/2258
ROYAL MINISTOY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
RE: Food crisis in Ukraine
The food crisis in Ukraine is becoming increasingly critical. Supplies to the city
of Kharkiv are taking place only with difficulty: meat and fats are in short supply.
The hopes placed in the annual market, which [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv; December 6, 1932-XI
Ref. No. 586/136
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: THE CONSEQUENCES OF COLLECTIVIZATION IN THE VILLAGE
OF LUSTDORF, NEAR ODESSA.
I have sufficient figures at my disposal to illustrate the situation in the village of
Lustdorf, near Odessa, before and after collectivization of the countryside.
Lustdorf is [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
part onto the Solovky Islands, in the old monastery. My informant spent a month
in Archangel under a large root formerly a furniture factory, previously burned
down, the roof of which had been remade in wood. There were five beds on
superimposed bunks. Four thousand and five hundred people were there at first,
children included, [...]

Appendix II
Needless to say, no-one has been raising any horses, as these have no place in the
family life of the collectivized person. Only the independent peasants in their few
remaining holdouts still have any interest in keeping horses to work on their land.
The Lustdorf Kolkhoz inherited 150 pigs from its original constituent peasants.
Yet already by 1931, [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
market, at normal prices proportional to the purchase value of the ruble. Today a
Collectivist receives around five rubles a day as his personal share, and even if he is
unable to purchase everything he needs, and which the factories aren’t managing to
produce on schedule, or else are producing at too high a [...]

Appendix II
1 Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
January 6,1933
Ref. No. 17/9
EMBASSY OF ITALY
and for the information of the FOREIGN MINISTRY
RE: BANDITRY IN KHARKIV
Misery has generated real forms of banditry in Kharkiv and the surrounding area.
Already some weeks ago the Polish Consul in Kiev discovered in the [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
officially investigated. In Odessa a physician and Mend of Dr. Rose, suspicious of
the meat which his relatives had bought at the market, called a veterinarian who
excluded the possibility that this meat had come from any animal, and through him
it was easy to conclude that the meat in question was of human [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: January 6,1933—XI
Confidential
Ref. No. 21/110
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: THE SOVIET GOVERNMENTS RECENT DECREES AND THE OUT-
LOOK FOR THE NEAR FUTURE
In recent decrees the Soviet Government has adopted a number of decisions
which are worth coordinating on the basis of any further information, in order to
gain some [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
have requisitioned everything. In Odessa they have even been requisitioning flour
in private houses, room by room. Out in the countryside they have requisitioned all
the flour they could find, both from free peasants and from collective farm workers,
even to the point of taking away their half-baked bread from out of their household
ovens.
The [...]

Appendix II
the Bank, and by dumping agricultural products on the market at increasingly low
prices, something which ought to increase the ruble’s purchasing power.
Last but not least, Ukraine, which still remains the region that has by far most
openly sabotaged its collectivization and even industrialization (stagnation and re-
cession in production in the Donets, in the metallurgical and [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy 1
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: February 24, 1933-XI
Confidential [...]

Appendix II
tee, directly under Kossior. However, it is Postyshev who has been taking the chair
at the latest Communist Party meetings, and not Kossior.
It is likely that the change that has been heralded for months within the
Ukrainian government, and on which I have reported in coded telegrams, as early
as last November, has elicited a response from [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
in the U.S.S.R.
February 27,1933-Year XI
TELEX No. 979/427
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ROME
I am enclosing for Your Excellency a number of reports sent by the Royal
Consul in Kharkiv to our Royal Embassy, which have to do with conditions in
Ukraine. By comparing his news with the news gathered one year [...]

Appendix II
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
in the U.S.S.R.
Moscow: April 7, 1933-Year XI
TELEX No. ["1649/766"?]
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome
RE: Riots in front of bakeries
Riots recently occurred in Kharkiv in front of bakeries, where people gather for
hours and hours on end to buy bread. In one of the suburbs, 3500 people attacked
the policemen who were trying to [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Vice-Consulate of Italy
NOVOROSSIISK
■ [...]

Appendix II
heaviest penalties. Note also that no distinction is made between collectivized and
non-collectivized peasants; membership of the latter group does however constitute
an aggravating circumstance.
But the persistence, indeed the exacerbation of the difficulties point up the
futility of all effort The peasants’ revolt (it cannot be described otherwise) is too
widespread to be stifled, suppressed or kept within [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
rather than giving them up spontaneously. It’s a fierce struggle for grain and all
other fruits of the earth, and the adversaries are quite literally living from hand to
mouth, and have been driven to this above all else by hunger in the literal sense of
the word.
It would be no exaggeration to describe [...]

Appendix II
Cossacks, whether due to their more ‘Southern’ blood, or because of the tradition
of the privileges they enjoyed in other times, the memories of which die very hard,
were to be able to some extent today to stand at the forefront, if not of an
opposition movement (which would be unsuitable term), then at least of the
expression [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
At a garbage dump which stands by way of an embankment beside the public
road which links the port to the city, a number of quintals of rotten potatoes
originating from military warehouses were recently thrown away. Hundreds of
people pounced on the spot like crows, most of them port workers as this was [...]

Appendix II
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
in the U.S.S.R.
Moscow: May 16,1933-Year [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ground by means of suitable belts. If they were to lie down, they would never get
up again, so enfeebled are they by lack of food. The livestock population is
decreasing rapidly. Beasts are slaughtered when just a few days old as it’s impos-
sible to feed them, or else through fear of seeing [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
May 31,1933
Ref. No. 474/106
Embassy of Italy, Moscow
RE: THE FAMINE AND THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION
The famine continues to wreak havoc among the people, and one simply cannot
fathom how the world can remain so indifferent to such a catastrophe and how the
international press, which is so quick to bring international condemnation upon
Germany for its [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
This calamity, which is claiming millions of lives, is destroying the infancy of an
entire nation and is really affecting only Ukraine, Kuban, and the Central Volga.
Elsewhere it is felt much less or not at all.
Renowned professionals of every persuasion, who hold the tsarist regime in such
low esteem and who have been [...]

Appendix II
the other two gathered the soup in the mud with their hands and swallowed it.
They then put some of it in a cap for the third one.
On this same Pushkin Street, 20 or 30 meters from the consulate, a peasant
woman spent the whole day with her two children curled up on the corner sidewalk,
like [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
those thrown in the pit reawakens and moves in a final flash of life. But the grave
diggers’ work is not interrupted and the unloading continues.
I have received these particulars from the sanitation workers and can vouch for
their authenticity:
In the Holodna Hora prison an average of 30 people die each day.
The village [...]

Appendix II
o
Royal Consulate of Italy 1
KHARKIV
May 31,1933
Ref. No. 478/106
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
RE: THE SUICIDE OF MYKOLA KHVYLOVY AND THE UKRAINIAN
SITUATION.
On the evening of May 13th, the Ukrainian writer and poet Mykola Khvylovy
committed suicide with a shot to the head.
In order to convey the impression [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
Moscow: June 6,1933—XI
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ROME
RE: Scarcity and famine in Ukraine and the USSR
The food situation in Ukraine, in all its horror, is similar to the situation in the
Northern Caucasus as reported by our Royal Embassy (see our telex of the 27th of
last May, No. 2433/1242).
Reports [...]

Appendix II
from Moscow, people can be seen wandering around already bloated from the state
of malnutrition.
I have been getting letters from fellow countrymen living in remote regions of
Russia, in which they say they no longer have any bread and are Irving off green
vegetables cooked in water.
In Moscow and Leningrad, major labor centers, the conditions are comparatively
speaking [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
o
Royal Consulate of Italy
[...]

Appendix II
One can often see in the fields the ruins of factories, probably abandoned by
kulaks, whose homes have been demolished.
Thus the agricultural situation could better be described as very good rather than
good. The uneven plowing will definitely affect the Spring sowing. For certain
crops the lack of weeding, which one could say has not yet begun [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
o
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
June 22,1933
Ref. No. 546/71
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL ITALIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: THE FAMINE.
It is a dreary subject in itself, [...]

Appendix II
In Valky district, in an unnamed village (secretly disclosed by a university pro-
fessor), once inhabited by some 3,000 people, since last fall there have been 800
‘official’ deaths and another 800 who have ‘disappeared’; there is not one pregnant
woman in the whole village nor one baby. One woman fled, because her relatives
told her, half-jokingly, that [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy
[...]

Appendix II
knows that at some moment it will need to rely on the support of all these
embittered Ukrainians, notwithstanding how they are mistreated today. Our own
hopes now amount to little more than dreaming about a Japanese invasion…”
As seen in my other reports on the famine, the countryside has been stripped of
around 50% of its population, [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
o
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
July 10,1933
Ref. No. 569/73
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL ITALIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: THE AGRICULTURAL SITUATION
In Ukraine the agricultural situation currently presents two distinct facets: Grain
crops, such as wheat, rye, barley, and corn, appear good almost everywhere. Storms
have done some damage but [...]

Appendix II
into real devastation because these inexperienced people have difficulty distinguish-
ing the crops from the weeds (especially during the first weeding of certain crops).
On top of that, they always come to work having walked from the nearest railroad
station, 7-10 versts, often (from what I know) 15 versts, and in one case even
25 versts! No wonder [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
July 10,1933
Ref. No. 570/74
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL ITALIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
RE: THE FAMINE AND THE SANITATION SITUATION
Today Ukraine presents one of the saddest of portraits. Except for regions that
are in the immediate vicinity of cities, within a 50 km. radius, and [...]

Appendix II
taken, still hungry, 50 kilometers or more out of Kharkiv, and dumped into gullies
formed by the torrential rains. Many lie their motionless and die, others manage to
get up, and some even manage to make their way to the city once more, where alms
can sometimes be had. From one of them I learned that one [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
■ in the [...]

Appendix II
sometimes die on the job, but they produce just enough with the strength of their
own despair to assist the endeavors of the masses.
Still according to Herr Schiller, no less crucial to the success of the harvest will
be the work of the political sections in the sovkhozes and in the kolkhoz motor
transportation sections. These sections, [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy
[...]

Appendix II
among the greenery. I observed a Sunday marketplace. There were farmers with
about 30 carts but not many vegetables and several jars of beet marmalade. There
was a total dearth of everything, of people, animals, and goods. No chickens, no
geese, no piglets, no pots, no clothing, nothing. I asked myself what the purpose of
such a market [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
which is really a state farm, not far from Poltava. As for the rest, I saw medium
sized fields flattened here and there, often overrun with weeds. The corn every-
where disappeared amid a forest of weeds as tall as I am. It was really all I could
do to pick out the corn [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv, July 19,1933-XI
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. 608/88
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: AFTER THE SUICIDE OF MYKOLA SKRYPNYK
I can now add the following details on the death of the above-specified
individual:
Before taking his life he is said to have told his wife over the telephone: [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
courage, they all reply that they’ve studied it against their will; thus, this is a
prelude to the total abolition of Ukrainian as ah office language.
Even Gen. Guilio Douhet’s book The Dominion of the Air which is being
published by the Ukrainian Military Publishing House, is being translated into
Russian and the Ukrainian translation [...]

Appendix II
O
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
July 20,1933
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. 616/89
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
RE: FORCED LABOR IN THE COUNTRYSIDE.
The mobilization of urban inhabitants for work in the fields has assumed
enormous proportions. It is estimated that everyday this week no less than 20,000
people have left for two to three [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
of bread a day. The work was arduous, and often she could not pull out the weeds
because they were so big and sturdy. The beets seemed tiny, scarcely a couple of
clumps of dirt. Many of those sent neither understand nor were familiar with the
work and ruined everything, but later they learned [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
July 31,1933
Ref. [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
June 25 and the rest on July 12, those who were in the camps. They have probably
been assembled just in case the forced labor should happen to encounter some
resistance.
Sincerely yours,
The Royal Consul
Gradenigo

Appendix II
Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: August 16, 1933-XI
TELEX No.
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. [illegible]
Reference: My reports of the 15th of this August, No. 75/104 (To the above
Ministry) and No. 74/148 (to the Royal Embassy in Moscow)
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: CONDITIONS IN THE UKRAINIAN COUNTRYSIDE.
I [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
serve as an example, because the Red Army’s sovkhozes have had to face neither
deaths from starvation nor any shortage of resources, and as such they are in a
privileged position that is above average.
Sincerely yours,
THE ROYAL CONSUL

Appendix II
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
i in the U.S.S.R.
Moscow: August 29,1933-Year [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
the in-depth article devoted to Herriot by the unofficial Izvestiya (sent in translation
with Press Release no. 46-Ref. 36 23/1752 of the 28th of the current month). This
concludes with “Herriot, a far-sighted bourgeois politician, rightly appreciates the
USSR’s role as a key international player” and the “Soviet public opinion fully
shares Herriot’s stated desire [...]

Appendix
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: October 1,1933-XI
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. 907-116
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ture (tractors, combines, etc.) and forcing city dwellers to do agricul-
tural shiftwork. [...]

Appendix II
portion of this 80% is still lying in collectives’ warehouses, and railroad stations,
and is fermenting, rotting away, etc., and it is certain that it was no better treated
earlier on in the proceedings. The newspapers are forever sounding the alarm, and
making accusations and appeals on behalf of the THOUSANDS of tons of wheat
and the THOUSANDS [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
will be ‘deducted’ from the entry recorded in his name, as his share for the days of
work done—a share which for now has been left on paper, until full payment has
been made to the State; a share which as yet nobody, other than Party members, as
yet set eyes upon except [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: October 1,1933-XI
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. 911-118
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: TWO DOCUMENTS CONCERNING THE CONDITIONS IN THE
UKRAINIAN COUNTRYSIDE.
Enclosed herewith are two documents illustrating the present situation out in the
Ukrainian countryside.
With [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
water, in such a way as to be able to excuse the nondelivery by the need to dry the
wheat off.
We cannot accordingly rule out the possibility that the usual methods will be
used for the Spring sowing next year as well, i.e., the pitiless requisition of anything
that can still be found among [...]

KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: October 1,1933 -XI
Ref. No. 913-119
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: PUBLIC EDUCATION IN UKRAINE.
I am enclosing translations of three articles which have appeared in local
newspapers, specifically one dated the 14th of last August which was carried in the
Kharkiv Proletarians: “Without Oars and without a Rudder;” [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
In these primary schools, the parents, guardians and ‘those responsible for’ the
pupils pay a fee corresponding to 2 to 4% of their earnings; those who can also
afford to pay a monthly room-and-board of 15 rubles (something which for a
worker is either impossible or very difficult) get to receive a glass of [...]

Appendix II
themselves right back at square one, and in desperation and in fear of the Party,
they have no longer known which way to turn. These people have produced (when
they’ve produced them) the most inferior professionals out of all the substandard
output of Soviet colleges. There have as yet been no exceptions.
Colleges for all science specialties are [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
According to the interview granted by Comm. Zatomski, all teachers and pro-
tessors known for their attachment to Skrypnyk’s ideas or who had at any rate
compromised themselves or who were under suspicion, were eliminated, in such a
way that higher education in Ukraine is short by several hundred professors. An
appreciable portion of the [...]

Appendix II
Geology/Geography; Economics). Admitted up to the age of 35 are those who can
prove their proletarian social origin or Jewish nationality and can pass an
examination which recapitulates the syllabus established by the Technicum. Also
admitted are those people coming from the Rabfak or the FSU, provided they can
pass the exam. However, graduates of the Rabfak [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
city, and there is an accommodation market under this clause). He accordingly had
to ask for a ‘place’ at the boarding school. His wife was able to rent a ‘comer’ in
her sister’s room, her sister living at 24 Liebnecht Street. She was able to put down
a bed in that ‘corner’, upon which [...]

div class=”docbox2″>

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
Kharkiv: December 12,1933-Xn
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. [illeg.]
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
Classic epidemic typhus, which usually starts spreading in October, has held back
until the second half of November this year. This delay fueled hopes that the
plague was on the wane and that the [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
that is also true of the countryside—which is tantamount to saying that the peasants
are getting no help at all in this area.
Yet in general, we are witnessing the same decline in the field of sanitation that
we have had in all other services. I might mention the case that happened two
weeks ago [...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
LENINGRAD
Leningrad: January 2,1934-XII FASCIST ERA
CONFIDENTIAL
TELEX No. [illeg.]
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: Arrest of students, professors, and intellectuals.
I have the honor to report to Your Excellency that several students connected
with the All-Union Academy of Sciences were recently arrested for reasons as yet
unknown [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy
i [...]

Appendix II
agricultural districts, still a stronghold of the counterrevolutionary nationalist con-
tingent which is causing a slowdown in the growth of the agricultural economy. I
have had confirmed to me that the territory on the Left Bank of the Dnieper will
shortly be transformed into a federal autonomous industrial territory.
No. 5. The autonomous territory mentioned in my [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
lation of the number of people who need to have food in order to survive, has
calculated a reduction of those present out in the countryside equivalent to 11.5
million individuals. I have also learned from my usual informants that there are
countless villages in which “an old person” is a young boy who [...]

Appendix II
blowing. Consequently, my interpretation of this is that in Poland there are fears
that in its proximity to the frontier, and surrounded by fortifications that are said to
be similar to the fortifications at the French-German border, Kiev could well
become a center of attraction for Ukrainian irredentism and that the USSR, spared
of any fears of potential [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
ROYAL CONSULATE OF ITALY
ODESSA
February 19,1934-XII
Confidential
Ref. No. 262/42
Dear Ambassador:
I recently had occasion to confer with the Diplomatic Agent of the People’s
Commissariat Mr. Gailiunski who confirmed to me regarding my query—whether
transferring the Ukrainian capital to Kiev signified an increase in the unitary con-
cept of the Ukrainian state -that this is not the case.
[...]

Appendix II
Royal Consulate of Italy
KHARKIV
U.S.S.R.
KHARKIV: MARCH 5, 1934-XII
Confidential
Ref. No. [illeg.]
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: AUTUMN SOWING IN SERIOUS JEOPARDY; THE FAMINE.
As I have previously had occasion to report, the famine, after a brief respite in
the Summer and Fall, has resumed its decimation of the rural [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
that they were begging the Committee to send thousands of hungry people to
Ukraine in shifts to satisfy their hunger, and that at any rate they should spend the
marks they had been sending on these people, in view of the fact that there were
people dying in Germany (although not in Ukraine). So [...]

Appendix II
General
Royal Consulate / of Italy
KHARKIV
KIEV [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Kossior, the Secretary of the CPU, is supposedly intended to take up the post of
Chief of the USSR’s Professional Unions in Moscow, and to join the fledgling
Commission of Inspections within the Communist Party. [...]

Appendix II
General
Royal Consulate / of Italy
(KHARKIV)
U.S.S.R.
KIEV
Kharkiv: May [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
The situation out in the countryside in the aftermath of collectivization is quite
different ever thereafter, because there are no reserves of any kind whatsoever. No
animals for slaughter, no supplies, no farmyard animals. Even human resources are
in short supply and hard to come by, decimated as they have been by the shortages
of [...]

Appendix II
cows left. In all the 80 houses in Lokitsa, the best collective farm in the vicinity of
Kiev, there are just three cows left.
The kolkhozes are trying to take it out on the independents, who are being
harassed in every possible way and hit with extremely heavy contributions to all the
various causes and institutions. But they [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Royal Consulate of Italy
[...]

Appendix II
I actually heard myself being asked on approval for a mere dozen propagandist
books, printed either here or in Moscow in recent years or months. Upon inquiring
as to why they wanted to see these books in particular, the person employed in the
Office told me quite openly that apart from the dust-jacket, inside there might well
be [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Still in the same group we find Ozersky, head of the Ukrainian printing works
and the Ukrainian Board of Censors, and Kechinsky, professor at the Institute of
Agriculture in Kharkiv. The latter has been held responsible for putting too tight a
squeeze on the peasants during the Summer of 1933, when he was sent [...]

Appendix II
General
Royal Consulate / of Italy
(KHARKIV)
U.S.S.R. [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
to demonstrate that the role of the GPU as it currently stands is essential to the
State’s integrity.
Sincerely yours,
THE ROYAL CONSUL

General
Royal Consulate / of Italy
(KHARKIV)
U.S.S.R.
KIEV
KHARKIV: May 15,1934- XII
CONFIDENTIAL
Ref. No. 575/73
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY, MOSCOW
and for the information of the
ROYAL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ROME
RE: CONDITIONS OUT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE AND PROGRESS OF THE
SOWINGS.
With reference to my reports of the 3rd of the current month No. 476/37 (to the
Royal Embassy in Moscow) and No. 506/63 (to [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
The forage is now down to nothing. I have heard reports that horses and oxen
are dying of starvation. Miscarriages among cows are at 30%.
Just 5% of the beetroot has emerged to date. We don’t know whether the rest
has already died or whether it’s still hanging in there.
Of the new sowings, carried [...]

Appendix II
General
Royal Consulate / of Italy
KHARKIV
KIEV
[...]

Consulate-General of Italy
KIEV
Kharkiv: December 18, 1934 -XIII
Status. U.P.1.
Ref. No. 1533/162
RE: Crackdowns in Ukraine. Executions in Kiev. [...]

Appendix II
Most of the above were not arrested during the days following the murder of
S. M. Kirov, but had already been held in custody for several months pursuant to
administrative proceedings on grounds of pure suspicion: They are writers, stu-
dents, teachers, engineers and workers, and they are almost all young people.
(…) Minsk and in other locations [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Consulate-General of Italy
KIEV
Kharkiv: December 21, 1934-Year XIII
Status U.P.1.
Ref. No. 1537/163
RE: News on the Kiev executions.
Further to my report of the 18th of the current month, I have the honor to advise
you that most of the people recently executed in Kiev (pursuant [...]

Appendix II
Consulate-General of Italy
KIEV
Kharkiv: December 24,1934- XIII
Status: U.P3
TELEX [illegible number]
Royal Embassy of Italy, Moscow
and the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome
RE: Soviet rural elections in Ukraine.

The elections to the rural councils were recently completed after intensive
propaganda efforts by the authorities and the party organizations. According to
information at my disposal, voter turnout reached 88% compared with [...]

MM
Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Consulate-General of Italy
KIEV
| [...]

Appendix II
the work has ground to a halt owing to the shortage of managers, engineers, and
personnel. The families of the detainees are being singled out for the same old acts
of tyranny, reprisals and pointless cruelties in vogue during the early years of the
Bolshevik Revolution: Withdrawal of documents and ration cards for buying basic
necessities, the loss [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Consulate-General of Italy
I [...]

Appendix II
pursuant to a classification list, in view of the fact that riots in the cities would be
far more difficult to quell.
This well-documented grain shortage in a bread basket like Russia, which used to
export millions of quintals of grain before the war, simply serves to demonstrate
that: Either the Soviet Government is quite deliberately taking grain [...]

Secretary of the Party, Kaganovich, who is known for his vigor and intelligence. We
might add that Stalin wanted him out of the post of Vice-Secretary because of the
influence as a Jew which he held over the Jewish community, which has managed to
gain a privileged position in many managerial offices, and Stalin has simultaneously
handed him one [...]

Appendix II
ROYAL EMBASSY OF ITALY
in the U.S.S.R.
Moscow: June 13, 1935-XIII
TELEX NO. 2763/1105
Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda, Rome
1 Enclosure
RE: UKRAINE, POLAND, AND GERMANY.
One year after the declaration of the ‘Bolshevik victory’ over Ukrainian particu-
larism and the transfer of the capital from the industrial district (Kharkiv) to the
agricultural district (Kiev), then supposedly a [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
The new socialist Ukraine, a nation of peace-loving endeavor, cherishes no dreams or war to unite the Ukrainian people, because it knows that sooner or later Socialism will triumph throughout the world. Fifteen years after its liberation, Ukraine will allow nobody to enter its territory. Those who wish to maintain friendly [...]

Appendix II
THE KIEV SOVIETS MESSAGE TO STALIN
Today—on the 15th anniversary of the day on which, under your direct guidance,
the army of the Polish property-owners was crushed and Kiev and Ukraine were
liberated from the Polish landowners and capitalists—the Ukrainian people’s first
words of greeting are for you, our Lord and Master.
Fifteen years ago, implementing the plan prepared [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches
Long live the free and prosperous Soviet Ukraine, a secure and invincible
outpost of the mighty USSR.
Long live our mighty Socialist fatherland, the great Soviet Union.
Long live our Party of Lenin and Stalin and its Stalinist General Committee.
Long live our most virtuous Leader, the beloved friend of all the inhabitants of
the Union [...]

Appendix II
Consulate-General of Italy
ODESSA: June 19,1935.XIII |
My fellow countryman Carlo Masnato (father of five) and brother of my fellow
countryman Masnato Giovanni (recently sent home), in addition to Masnato
Giovanni (son of the latter) who has been unable to return home because the
formalities pertaining to his wife’s Italian citizenship have not yet been fulfilled,
residing respectively in the [...]

Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches \
the numerical population) worked normally, and the local authorities were not
simply gangs of thugs and dimwits. Warehouses of reserve wheat were available in
the various regions, and private relief could perform its work to supplement aid
from the State, in such a way that weather-related production differentials over
such a vast territory could [...]

Appendix II
The magnificent Cathedral of St. Sophia has been shut down and is in a state of
neglect; it used to contain famous mosaics in the Byzantine style, but these are no
longer on view to the public. Soviet youngsters are now almost all atheists: The
churches are attended only by old people, and by women in particular.
If [...]

Appendix III
Final Meeting
of
THE COMMISSION ON THE UKRAINE FAMINE
April 19, 1988

MEETING
Tuesday,
April 19,1988
Rayburn House Office Building,
Room 2222
Washington, D.C.
The commission met at 3:40 p.m.

COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:
HON. DANIEL A. MICA, Chairman
HON. WILLIAM BROOMFIELD
MR. BOHDAN FEDORAK
HON. BENJAMIN GILMAN
HON. DENNIS HERTEL
DR. MYRON KUROPAS
MR. DANIEL MARCHISHIN
MS. ULANA MAZURKEVICH
MS. ANASTASIA VOLKER
DR. OLEH WERES
OTHERS PRESENT:
DR. JAMES E. MACE, Staff Director
DR. OLGA SAMILENKO, Staff Assistant
MR. WALTER PECHENUK, Staff Assistant

(This Page Blank)

PROCEEDINGS
Congressman MICA: The Commission on the Ukraine Famine will come to
order.
We are nearing the close of our business with this commission and the work that
has been done, I think, has been a fantastic job. I have had an opportunity to
review in great detail the executive summary, and in lesser detail the balance of the
work. We [...]

Appendix III
7) The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procure-
ments quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to
extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.
In the Fall of 1932, Stalin used the resulting procurements crisis in
Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to [...]

Meeting, April 19, 1988
ing Minority Member, Bill Broomfield indicated that he would come right over as
soon as that debate is completed.
I want to commend you for the good work done on the report, and for all the
work done by our commissioners. I would hope that we are going to be able to ex-
tend the time [...]

Appendix III
I cannot imagine any member of this commission being opposed to such
legislation, or supporting it in a half-hearted way. Given the significance of our
report, such an attitude would be difficult to understand.
The commission has just begun its work, ladies and gentlemen, and there can
be no talk of termination, regardless of how warm and fuzzy [...]

Meeting, April 19,1988
STATEMENT PRESENTED BY DR. OLEH WERES
I greet the Final Report of the U.S. Government Commission on the Ukraine
Famine with great satisfaction as a big job well done.
I wish to thank and congratulate our government members for bringing this
Commission into existence and securing its budget appropriation. I wish to thank
our many supporters in the [...]

Appendix III
mentary on Ukrainian history in the Soviet Union. This concession will enable
honest scholars and publicists in Ukraine to conduct serious research and discussion
on the Famine, until very recently a totally forbidden subject.
While our original mandate from Congress is almost at an end, I have no doubt
that we will receive an extended mandate and will [...]

Meeting, April 19, 1988
This is a difficult story. It was heartrending for those of us on the Commission
who heard the details of this genocide for the first time. It was painful for those
who survived this tragedy to call up memories that many had buried with friends
and loved ones so many years ago.
The Ukrainian Famine and [...]

Appendix III
Since the commission began its work, there have been many interesting develop-
ments in the Soviet Union, including an increasingly open discussion of the so-
called “blank spots” of Soviet history. I am gratified that the Soviet media has
made progress in discussing aspects of the Famine, although I must say that all too
many “blank spots” remain, [...]

Meeting, April 19, 1988
Ukraine Famine began its work did the story of these victims have the opportunity
to be fully told.
At the start of the hearings I often referred to the Famine as a footnote in
history. Today, thanks to the efforts of the Commission, the Famine has received
considerably more attention, and in time this notorious event [...]

And I have served on I don’t know how many different commissions and groups
here over the last 10 or 20 years, and that is rare. Very often before it ever gets to|
a point when you sit down, somebody has gone through with a black marker and
said, “We can’t get into this, we can’t get into [...]

that within the Foreign Affairs committee budget that there may be some money
that could be allocated for finalization or termination of the commission, and the
report, the mailing, and so on.
Congressman BROOMFIELD: Could we get an idea, Dan?
Congressman MICA: We have approximately $30,000 left at this time, is that
right?
Dr. MACE: That is over and above what [...]

Appendix III
Congressman MICA: It is moved and seconded.
Any discussion on the resolution?
Mr. MARCHISHIN: Yes. I think it would be helpful for the coming year for at
least a broad based budget, or an agenda, if you will, of what the commission would
hope to do in the coming year, also could be prepared. [...]

Meeting, April 19, 1988________________________________
the Ukrainian community. The work was carried out by the members of the
commission and the staff. And we are proud to be supporters and contributors in
the process, but the work was done by the people here. [...]

Appendix III
524
U.S. Government Printing Office

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