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 January 1933 which was based on charges against the Ukrainian leadership of “national deviations” and “inaction in carrying out the procurements.” He also pointed out that Soviet sources confirm that the 1932 crop was neither exceptionally affected by weather, nor more than slightly below average. 43 The Famine may not have been created according to a preconceived plan, but it was clearly artificial. It would not have occurred were it not for the state’s seizure of produce and could easily have been averted by moderating those seizures, instead of using them for political ends. One of the most influential books on collectivization for many years was also published in 1955. This was The History of a Soviet Collective Farm, a memoir by a Ukrainian former collective farm chairman given the Russian pseudonym of Fedor Belov. In the autumn of 1932, he wrote,

the “red broom” (popular slang for agricultural procurement brigade, brought in from the outside to seize produce—JM) passed over the kolkhozes and the individual plots, sweeping the “surplus” from the state out of the barns and the corn-cribs. In the search for “surpluses,” everything was collected. The farms were cleaned out even more thoroughly than the kulaks had been. As a result, famine, which was to become intense by the spring of 1933, already began to be felt in die fall of 1932.

The famine of 1932-1933 was the most terrible and destructive that the Ukrainian people have ever experienced. The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, grass—anything they could find. Incidents of cannibalism were not uncommon. The people died like wild beasts, ready to devour one another. And no matter what they did, they went on dying, dying, dying.

They died singly and in families. They died everywhere—in the yards, on streetcars, and on trains. There was no one to bury the victims of the Stalinist famine. People travelled for thousands of kilometers in search of food—to Siberia, to the Caucasus. Many perished by the wayside or fell into the hands of the militia (police-JM). To protect what little grain they had from the raids of the militia, the peasants often banded together in groups of thirty or forty persons and defended their gleanings with sticks and knives.

I was thirteen years old then, and I shall never forget what I saw. One memory especially stands out: A baby lying at his mother’s breast, trying to wake her.

A man is capable of forgetting a great deal, but these terrible scenes of starvation will be forgotten by no one who saw them.

He added that the peasants were unable to harvest the “bumper crop” of 1933 so that people had to be brought in from the cities to do this. 44

Both the fact that the Ukrainian author was given a Russian pseudonym and no notice was taken of the national and geographical specificity of the events related only obscured the issue of whether the Famine also had a nationality aspect

An important collection of district archival documents taken from Krynychiansk near Dnipropetrovsk, were published in 1955. Strung together by a less than

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42Ibid, pp. 34-43. Quotation from pp. 41-42.

43 Ibid,pp.44-58,62-65.

44 Fedor Belov, The History of a Soviet Collective Farm (New York, Praeger, 1955), pp. 12-13.