Chapter 1

population- though fully aware of the unfavorable climatic conditions in the Ukraine In 1931 and 1932, and though conscious of the decrease of the sowing area—not only forced the peasantry en masse into collective farms, but also, without defining what constituted “surplus,” arbitrarily intensified the requisitioning of foodstuffs and grain surplus from the peasants. At the same time, it fully enforced the August 7, 1932 decree for the protection of “socialist property.” As a result the entire peasantry—in addition to the kulaks—was left with no means of support
Another factor which points vividly to the deliberate administering of the famine was the government’s prevention of all attempts and efforts on the part of Ukrainian as well as non-Ukrainian organizations and agencies abroad to aid the famine-stricken population, and its labelling of all references to the famine as “lies circulated by counterrevolutionary organizations abroad.” At the same time, however, the Government of the USSR barred all foreign newspaper correspondents from entering the famine-stricken Ukraine and Northern Caucasus until the harvest of 1933 was brought in. This was designed to prevent the spread of news to the outside world of this great human tragedy. If the famine were the result of climatic conditions, and not deliberately engineered, there would have been neither need nor cause to hide it from the outside world—especially since some charitable groups expressed their unconditional willingness and readiness to aid. However, since the famine was a man-made disaster to “teach the peasants a lesson,” the Government of the USSR was unwilling to let the truth become known.
The scope of that gigantic tragedy, which is today acknowledged by all observers, except Communists and their sympathizers, is beyond comprehension. 55

That same year the Institute for the Study of the USSR also published in Ukrainian Fedir Pigido’s Ukraine under Bolshevik Occupation: Materials on the History of the Struggle of the Ukrainian People in the 1920s and 1930s. 56 Pigido wrote:

The famine of 1932-33 was not an isolated phenomenon, separate from the general policy of the occupying power in Ukraine. The famine of 1933 was only one stage in the struggle which Bolshevism carried out against the Ukrainian peasantry, the nationally conscious part of Ukrainian workers, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and Ukrainian revolutionary youth, not excluding even a certain segment of nationally conscious Ukrainian communists, those whom Moscow called “counterrevolutionaries with party cards in their pockets.” What the Ukrainian peasants called Stalin’s famine was only the culmination point, the most dramatic act in the struggle of the Ukrainian people for the right to live freely in their own land, for the right to their mother tongue, for their national existence…

Pigido also claimed that

In the Kremlin palaces was created the plan for the greatest terrorist act in the history of humanity—the plan to organize a massive, artificial famine throughout the entire Ukrainian SSR and in the Kuban, territories populated by Ukrainians.

…………………………

55 Basil Dmytryshyn, Moscow and the Ukraine, 1918-1953: a Study of Russian Bolshevik Nationality
Policy (New York, Bookman Associates, 1956), pp. 201-202.

56 Some years earlier Pigido also published a memoir on the famine: F. Pravoberezhnyi (Pigido),
8,000,000: 19334 rik na Ukraini (8,000,000: the Year 1933 in Ukraine) (Winnipeg, Kultura i osvita,
1951).

57 Fedir Pigido, Ukraina pid bol’shevytsrkoiu okupatsiieiu (Materiialy do istorii borot’by ukrains’koho
narodu v 1920-1930 rokakh) (Ukraine under Bolshevik Occupation: Materials on the History of the
Ukrainian People’s Struggle in the 1920s and 1930s) (Munich, Institute for the Study of the USSR,
1956), p. 103.