Chapter 1

Timoshenko, like Dmytryshyn and Pigido, was able to take a certain amount of knowledge about the Famine for granted. In fact, he was able to state in reference to the Famine and the state procurements which brought it about:

We all now know that this enforcement of grain collection resulted in the horrible famine in the Ukraine and North Caucasus which took the lives of millions of people. The crop yield was not large, according to official statistics, but, of course, it would have been sufficient to feed the local population had it not been for the excessive targets of grain deliveries mercilessly enforced on the hungry population. 61

Timoshenko’s rather unjustly ignored paper, “Soviet Agricultural Policy and the Nationalities Problem in the USSR,” was read at the Seventh Conference of the now-defunct Institute for the Study of the USSR, held in New York on April 28-29, 1956. Timoshenko pointed out that the Soviet government’s excessive demands on grain from Ukraine and the North Caucasus was “one of the principal causes of the conflicts between the Ukrainian peasantry and the Cossack groups in the South in 1927-1928, ending the NEP and bringing in its wake a new agrarian revolution in the 1930s.62 Simultaneously, the “extraordinary measures” of seizing grain were first applied to these same groups, and even in the late 1920s Ukraine’s share of the amount of grain taken by the government was of record size and far in excess of its share of the total Soviet harvest. It was also at this time that Moscow began its witch hunt for “national deviationists” in Ukraine.63 As a result of the “violent forcing of collectivization in Ukraine” the Ukrainian steppe region completed collectivization in June 1931 and the Left Bank forest-steppe region in August. Particularly large amounts of grain were seized from Ukraine in 1931-32. In some areas 80% and in others all of the total crop was taken. “Collective farms which fulfilled their obligations received fresh orders for deliveries.’ 64

Timoshenko related how Stalin overcame opposition within the Party to proclaim the establishment of politotdely (political sections) in all Machine Tractor Stations and state farms. These were staffed by 15,000 tried and true urban communists with a dual mandate: “To enforce the grain deliveries and to purge the membership of the collective farms of unreliable elements.” The fact that the decision to create the politotdely in January 1933 was concomitant with the appointment of Postyshev as Ukraine’s ruler indicated that “it was the stubborn resistance of the forcibly collectivized Ukrainian peasants to the excessive deliveries of grain required from the collective farms that was mainly responsible for the decision … to create the politotdely.65 The political sections were in turn

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61 V. P. Timoshenko, “Soviet Agricultural Policy and the Nationalities Problem in the USSR/ Report on the Soviet Union in 1956: a Symposium of the Institute for the Study of the USSR (Based on the Seventh Institute Conference), April 28-29,1956, ed. Jaan Pennar (Munich, Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1956), p. 47. I am indebted to Dr. Lew Havryliv for this reference.

62 Ibid, p. 39.
63 Ibid, pp. 40-41
64 Ibid, pp. 45-46. Quotation from p. 46. 65Ibid, p.47..