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: Summary of Public Hearings………………………………….185
Chapter 8: Oral History Project……………………………………………219
Glossary of Terms ………………………………………………………….229
Persons Prominently Mentioned in the Text……………………………..233
Appendix I: Translations of Selected Oral Histories…………………….235
Appendix II: Italian Diplomatic and Consular Dispatches……………….395
Appendix III Final Meeting, April 19,1988…………………………………507

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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 Soviet role” in it Its duties, as mandated by federal law, are
(1) to study the Famine by gathering all available information about the Famine, analyzing its causes and consequences, and studying the reaction of the free world to the Famine;
(2) to provide interim reports to Congress;
(3) to provide information about the Famine to Congress, the executive branch, educational institutions, libraries, the news media, and the general public;
(4) to submit a final report to Congress on or before April 23,1988; and
(5) to terminate 60 days thereafter.

The Commission on the Ukraine Famine has held hearings throughout the nation and heard testimony from 57 eyewitnesses to the Famine of 1932-1933. Thus, the hearings have in themselves collected an impressive body of material documenting the tragedy which befell Ukrainians. Full texts of these hearings have been published as interim reports and are available to the public. 1

The Commission has also transcribed and is preparing for publication a supplement of over 200, in-depth interviews with eyewitnesses. Unlike the statements made in public hearings, which must be brief because of time constraints, the oral histories were as necessary for the narrators to tell their stories. Some have lasted over two hours. The majority of the oral histories were collected directly by Commission staff; others were collected by Leonid Heretz as part of a pilot project which James Mace directed in 1984 under the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Professionals and Businesspersons Association of New York and New Jersey. In addition, the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee in Canada and a number of private individuals gave the Commission additional tapes which they collected. The full text of these interviews and statements in the original language will run to over 2,000 pages, constituting an invaluable source for future scholarship on the Famine. The transcripts will be published and made available to the public Ten sample oral histories were translated in full and appear as an appendix to this report
Important aspects of our mandate are to make the Famine more widely known and to provide information on request to government agencies and private individuals. Dissemination of information about the Famine was facilitated by the forging of links between the Commission and the scholarly community through the participation of members and staff in various conferences, lecture, and publications.

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1 First Interim Report of Meetings and Hearings of and before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Held in 1986 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1987); Second Interim Report of Meetings and Hearings of and before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Held in 1987 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1988).

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 conducted conferences in Wisconsin and
Colorado. In order to better provide information to educational institutions, the
Commission produced a teachers’ guide to the Famine. It was written by Dr.
Kuropas with staff assistance and published in cooperation with the Ukrainian
National Association. This guide was first introduced in 1986 at a teachers’
conference in Chicago and has been widely used elsewhere. In addition, the
Commission worked with curriculum officials interested in developing their own
units on the Famine in California and Pennsylvania. Similar guides were published
by the New York State Department of Education and by the Connecticut-Western
Massachusetts Branch of the National Council of Christians and Jews. Unlike the
soft bound New York guide, the Kuropas curriculum package used a folder format
to facilitate the addition or deletion of materials. The guide prepared in
Connecticut under the auspices of the National Council of Christians and Jews also
adopted this flexible format.

Findings

Based on testimony heard and staff research, the Commission on the Ukraine
Famine makes the following findings:

1) There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the
Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in
a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932
crop by Soviet authorities.

2) The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.

3) Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage,” upon which all
“difficulties” were blamed during the Famine, are false.

4) The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought

5) In 1931-1932, the official Soviet response to a drought-induced grain
shortage outside Ukraine was to send aid to the areas affected and to
make a series of concessions to the peasantry.

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2 Myron Kuropas, The Forced Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933: Curriculum and Resource Guide for
Educators (Washington and Jersey City, Commission on the Ukraine Famine and Ukrainian National
Association, 1986).

3 Walter Litynsky and JoAnn Larson, compilers, Case Studies: Persecution/Genocide, The Human
Rights Series: Volume HI (Albany, Bureau of Curriculum Development of the State Education

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 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 intensity grain seizures further.
9) The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.

10) Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.
11) Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.
12) In January 1933, Stalin used the “laxity” of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.
13) Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: To intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.
14) While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin’s interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are paralleled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
15) Attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available.
16) Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.
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2 Department at the State University of New York, 1986). Eve Soumerai, The Ukrainian Terror-Famine’ a Case Study in Stalinist Communism (Hartford, Connecticut-Western Massachusetts Center for Human Relations of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1987).

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 to deny the existence of the Ukrainian Famine.
19) Recently, scholarship in both the West and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union has made substantial progress in dealing with the Famine. Although official Soviet historians and spokesmen have never given a fully accurate or adequate account, significant progress has been made in recent months.

The Commission’s reasoning is as follows:

1) There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
Hundreds of eyewitness accounts were published before the Commission ever came into existence, which were confirmed by both testimony heard at the Commission’s hearings and hundreds of oral histories. They are in complete agreement on the fact that the Famine was caused by the extraction of produce from the farm population by the authorities.4 Dispatches from the Royal Italian Consulate in Kharkiv, then capital of the Ukrainian SSR, provide an exceptionally detailed description of daily life there during the period in question.5 Additional evidence supporting the Famine’s historicity is found in Soviet Ukrainian samvydav (documents published without official sanction, samizdat in Russian) as well as in officially published historical fiction and, more recently, the press.6 On Christmas Day, 1987, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, acknowledged that the “severe food supply difficulties” of 1932-1933 had included “famine in some localities.”7 Yet, although Soviet spokesmen have recently frankly admitted the existence of the Famine, attempts to distort is scope and cause continue.

2) The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions.9

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4 These are analyzed in Chapter 8 in this report.
5 See appendix 2 below.
6 See Chapters 3 and 4 below.
7 Pravda Ukrainy (Communist Party of Ukraine daily newspaper), December 26,1987.
8 See chapter two below.
9 Sec chapters one and two below.

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, but the 1939 Soviet census—the basis for all such calculations—is
untrustworthy. In 1937 the Soviet Union conducted a census which “after
correction” counted just under 164 million people living in the Soviet Union. This
was so far below the number anticipated that it could be explained only by millions
of premature deaths. Consequently, the officials in charge of the census were
arrested—many were shot—and the results of their work were suppressed.
Although some scholars believe that the census conducted at the beginning of 1939
was unaffected by political concerns, this particular conclusion is highly
problematic, for if the top Soviet census officials were shot for not finding enough
people in 1937, it is sensible to assume that their successors, who were not shot, did
find enough people. Given the Stalinist propensity for inflating statistics in other
realms, it is reasonable to assume that the officials in charge of the 1939 census
followed suit

Moreover, the natural rate of population growth in the Ukrainian SSR declined
from 2.25% in 1927 to 1.45% in 1931 (the last year for which figures are available),
the 1939 Soviet census showed 3.1 million (9.9%) fewer Ukrainian inhabitants of
the Soviet Union than did the previous census of 1926. 11 This leaves little doubt
that millions perished. Various scholars have given estimates ranging from three
million to over 8,000,000 Ukrainians who perished in the Famine.

3) Official Soviet allegations of “kulak sabotage,” upon which all “difficulties” were
blamed during the Famine, are false. 12

If the term “kulak” is understood in its official Soviet meaning of a rural social
stratum recognizably better off than other villagers, no kulaks existed by 1933.
Wave after wave of the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” each one reaching
poorer and poorer peasants, had destroyed any identifiable upper socio-economic
stratum in the village. The state implicitly recognized as much by virtually halting
dekulakization by 1932. 13 The official proclamation that the kulaks had been
defeated but not yet eliminated thus can only be interpreted as an act of political
…………………………………….
10 See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 299-300. The issue was also recently discussed in the
Soviet press by Mark Tol’ts, “Sfcol’ko zhe nas togda bylo?” (How Many of Us Were There?), Ogonek
(a leading Soviet weekly), 1987, No. 51 (December 19-26), pp. 10-11

11 V. I. Naulko, Etnichnyi sklad naselennia Ukrains’koi RSR: stutysiyko-kartohrafichne doslidzkennia
(Ethnic Composition of the Ukrainian SSR: a Statistical -Cartographic Inquiry) (Kiev, Naukova
dumka, 1965), p. 84. V, L Kozlov, Natsionai’nosti SSSR: etnodemograficheskii obzor (Nationalities of
the USSR: an Ethno-Demographic Survey) (Moscow, Finansy i Statistika, 1982), p. 285.

12 See chapters two and three below.

13 N. A. Ivnitskii, Klassovaia bor’ba v derevne i likvidatsiia kulachestva kak klassa (1929-1932 gg)
(Class Struggle in the Countryside and the Liquidation of the Kulaks as a Class, 1929-1933) (Moscow,
Nauka, 1972), p. 297. N. I. Nemakov, Kommunishkheskaia partiia—organizator massovogo
kolkhoznogo dvizheniia (The Communist Party, Organizer of the Mass Collective Farm Movement)
(Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1966), pp. 239-241,

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 diverted to private channels or hoarded by peasant speculators. Were grain being diverted to the private market in any substantial quantities, it would have been more readily available for private purchase than in other years. Yet, the reverse was true. Had the peasants hoarded much grain, they would surely have eaten some of it, thereby preventing the mass starvation which, in fact, occurred.

Subsequent Soviet historiography maintains the myth of “peasant sabotage” merely by repeating the charges made at the time in order to justify continued efforts to seize grain. Soviet authorities under Stalin deliberately inflated harvest figures as proof that non-existent grain was being hoarded. They suppressed accurate figures and replaced them with spurious calculations based on the “biological yield,” i.e., replacing the actual amount of a given crop harvested with an arbitrary estimate of what was ostensibly in the field.16

4) The Famine was not, as is often alleged, related to drought.17
Shcherbytsky clings to the customary explanation that a drought in 1932 strongly contributed to the Famine, but Soviet historical meteorologists have never found such a drought There were droughts in 1931 and in 1934 but not in 1932. 18 In February 1932 Molotov officially acknowledged that the 1931 drought in the Volga Basin, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan had damaged the grain crop. 19 No such acknowledgement was made in connection with any drought that may have affected Ukraine in 1932. The closest allusion to a drought was Stalin’s statement in January 1933:

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14 The January 1933 Communist Party Joint Plenum and the Soviet government both officially adopted this formulation. I. E. Zelenin, “Kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR v 1931-1932 gg. (k itogam sploshnoi kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva)” (Collective Farm Construction in the USSR in 1931-1932: Concerning the Results of the Crash Collectivization of Agriculture), Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR), 1960, No. 6, p. 32.
15 This latter idea, which became an idee fixe of Stalinism, can be traced back to the initial wave of forced collectivization. See, for example, Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, Norton, 1977), p. 25.
16 In December 1932 the actual measuring grain crops was proscribed, and a special government
commission was set up to determine the “biological yield,” which was the unmeasurable crop standing
in the field. I. E. Zelenin, “Kolkhozy i sel’skoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1933-1935 gg.” (Collective Farms
and Agricultiure in the USSR in 1933-1935), Istoriia SSSR, 1965, No. 5, p. 13. This meant
institutionalizing the systematic overestimating of grain crops and was in 1958 denounced by
Khrushchev as being fundamentally dishonest. Adam Ulam, Stalin: the Man and His Era (New York.
Viking, 1974), p. 356.
17 See chapter three below.
18 A. I. Rudenko, ed., Zasukhi v SSSR’ ikh proiskhozhdenie, povtoriaemost’ i vliianie na urozhai
(Droughts in the USSR: Their Causes, Recurrence, and Influence on the Harvest) (Leningrad.
Gidrometeorologicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1958), p. 168.
19 Pravda (All-Union Communist Party daily newspaper), February 6,1932.