produced. Collectivization was carried out “on the basis of the liquidation of the
kulaks (so-called village exploiters but actually anyone the regime considered
unreliable) as a class.” According to official Soviet figures, 200,000 Ukrainian
farm families or about one million people were “dekulakized” or expropriated.
The true figure is a matter of speculation. At the same time Stalin began to chip
away at Ukrainian autonomism with the “discovery” of anti-Soviet conspiracies
among Ukraine’s leading scholars and cultural activists. As early as 1920
thousands were arrested in connection with the first such conspiracy, the so-
called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Whole departments of the Ukrainian
Academy of Sciences were closed after their members were arrested, and
Ukrainian Orthodox autocephaly (church independence) was brought to an
end in 1920, ostensibly because of church involvement in this alleged plot.

Genocide

The essence of collectivization was the compulsory delivery to the state of
whatever quantity of produce the state demanded. The so-called first com-
mandment of Soviet agriculture enshrined the principle that all obligations to
the state, as the state set them, had to be met before anything could be given
to the peasants. Production declined while the state’s demands remained far
in excess of what the peasants had ever sold voluntarily. By the beginning of
1932, collectivization in Ukraine was virtually complete: 69 percent of all rural
households and 80 percent of all farmland had been collectivized. Repeated
extraction had exhausted Ukraine’s agriculture, and by the summer Ukraine’s
Communists spoke openly of “food supply difficulties” and lobbied unsuccess-
fully for relief from the exactions demanded by Moscow.

After the 1932 harvest the Ukrainian Communists carried out the grain
seizures that brought about the mass starvation of which they had warned. The
famine was created on a territorial basis, and its victims included members of
Ukraine’s minorities as well as Ukrainians.

In late 1932 measures against the so-called tight-fisted became ever more
severe. Local officials who were found insufficiently resolute in what the press
daily called “the struggle for bread” were arrested. As early as October, Stalin
began to appoint his own men to “strengthen” the Ukrainian apparatus by
occupying high posts in the UkSSR In December whole districts (raions) were
subject to economic blockade, and both the food for current needs and the seed
for the next year’s harvest were seized in the course of exacting house-to-house
searches. Many people died, and outbreaks of cannibalism were reported.
Officials in Ukraine kept Moscow fully informed of the situation.

Stalin’s response came in the form of two resolutions of the Central
Committee of the Ail-Union Communist Party. On December 13, 1932, the
Ukrainian authorities were ordered to purge all “national deviationists” (i.e.,
nationally minded Communists) in their midst. On January 24,1933, a second
decree found the Ukrainian authorities criminally negligent, and Stalin sent
his own satrap, Pavel Postyshev, to take direct control of the Ukrainian Party
organization and to occupy with new men virtually every important post in the
country. The new regime under Postyshev condemned the old for wavering in
the struggle for bread, ordered the grain seizures intensified, and combatted
the “serious evil” of produce being diverted from the state procurements for
such unauthorized uses as food and seed. As a result of this policy of intensified

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