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 was a manifestation of Moscow’s lack of confidence in local provincial functionaries, in this case the Union Republics’ Prosecutors’ Offices…
Among the measures enacted against the Ukrainian peasants, there is the significant decree of August 22, 1932, “On combatting speculation in goods for general consumption.” The importance of this measure lay in the fact that peasants living in the villages were permitted to purchase their essential necessities in official stores only on fulfillment of their full quotas of surrendered crops and produce… It was only natural that those who were not granted the privilege of trading with the official local store would absent themselves from work on the collective farms and walk to the dries in search of these goods. This decree classed them as speculators and provided sentences of from 5 to 10 years confinement in concentration camps, without the right to any amnesties.
A very large number of peasants working on collective farms were sentenced under the provisions of this decree. 41

In fact, there is no evidence of discriminatory application to Ukrainians of the above All-Union anti-peasant measures, but they were adopted at a time when the focus of Soviet agricultural problems had shifted to Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The only measure of centralization cited, the creation of an All-Union Procurator (Prosecutor), was actually adopted only in June 1933, after the Famine and Pavel Postyshev had succeeded in breaking the Ukrainian Soviet government’s capability to stand up to central authorities. The author’s case could have been strengthened by citing other earlier measures of centralization. The fact that the anti-peasant measures were not applied in a discriminatory fashion does not necessarily mean that they were not directed at a specific area. The anti-peasant course adopted in mid-1932, when the central authorities were warned of impending famine in Ukraine, contrasts sharply with the earlier relative liberalism with which those same authorities responded to lesser problems in the Volga Basin and Western Siberia. This does not mean that Stalin necessarily had a preconceived plan to create a famine, as Sosnovy maintained, but it does provide strong evidence indicating that Stalin, upon learning that his policies would lead to famine in Ukraine, decided to refrain from measures which could have averted it, took measures to exacerbate it, and used it to neutralize Ukrainians and Cossacks as politically troublesome groups, thus making possible political centralization and Russian national primacy within the Soviet Union.

Sosnovy was on firmer ground in describing the situation in Ukraine after the harvest: The campaign of compulsory procurment of agricultural produce through house-to-house searches for food; the various editorials in the Moscow press in September and October 1932, demanding that Ukraine meet its grain quota; and the simultaneous visits from Moscow of leading figures to purge local Ukrainian authorities for their alleged laxity. No serious student of the period can quarrel with his finding that

The authorities and their local representatives knew that when they took food away from the peasants, they were condemning them to death by starvation. Towards the end of 1932 it was no longer a secret that there were many cases of death by starvation. But the collection of food

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41 Ibid,pp.31-33.