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 Review. 46 Most important of these were documents from another district archive, this time from Chornukhy district, Poltava region published by P. S. Lykho (pseudonym). 47 As in the Krynychiansk collection, few documents bear directly on the Famine, possibly because Lykho already published several documents directly related to the Famine some years earlier. The first such document was a January 20, 1933 order from Moscow to the CP(b)U committees down to the district level in Ukraine, ordering that individuals guilty of theft, unnecessary expenditure or other malfeasance regarding collective farm grain be immediately brought to justice under the law of August 7, 1932. 48 The second, dated May 22, 1933, was sent by the Soviet Ukrainian procurator and the UkSSR vice commissar of the OGPU (secret police) to their district subordinates. It dealt with cannibalism and declared:

Whereas the present criminal code does not cover punishment of persons guilty of cannibalism, therefore all cases of those accused of cannibalism must immediately be transferred to the local branches of the OGPU. If cannibalism was preceded by murder, covered by article 142 of the Penal Code, these cases should be withdrawn from the courts and from the prosecution divisions of the Peoples Commissariat of Justice system and transferred for judgement to the Collegium of the OGPU in Moscow.49

The third document was a June 17 order signed by Stalin, forbidding local officials from using grain stored in state granaries to feed the population.50

Pavlo Lutarevych also made use of the Chornukhy documents in an article published by the Munich Institute in 1955. Criminal files showed that during the famine theft became so common that the authorities were virtually powerless to

45 Olexa Kalynyk, Communism, the Enemy of Mankind: Documents and Comments (London,
Ukrainian Youth Association in Great Britain, 1955), pp. 111-116. This is actually only excerpts; the
full notebook and related documents are available on microfilm at Columbia University as “Ukrainian
Famine of 1933.” The original documents are in the possession of the Shevchenko Scientific Society
in New York and may be consulted with the society’s permission.
46 The Institute for the Study of the USSR existed in the 1950s as a clearinghouse for scholarship on
the USSR carried out by those who had fled the Soviet Union. Like Radio Liberty, with which it was
associated, it was discreetly subsidized by the US government but published any scholars formerly
from the USSR who were not either members of the Communist Party or its sympathizers. Those
who published monographs with the institute or in its various journals represented the entire spectrum
of political opinion in emigration, including the noncommunist left.

………………..

47 P. S. Lykho, ” ‘Sovetskaia vlast’ na mestakh’: robota komunistychnoi partii Chornus’koho raionu
na Poltavshchyna (Soviet Power on the Local Level: the Work of the Communist Party of Chornukhy
district, Poltava region),” Ukrains’kyi zbimyk (Ukrainian Review), Book 8, 1957, pp. 99-172. Unlike
the Krynychiansk documents, the fate of the original Chornukhy documents is unknown.

48 Idem., “Soviet Documents on the Famine in the Ukraine,” The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: a
White Book, S. O. Pidhainy et al, eds. (Toronto, SUZERO-DOBRUS, 1953), vol I, p. 229.

49 Ibid, p. 230.

50 Ibid, pp. 231-232.