Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

responsible for overseeing the grain procurements, and the procurements caused the Famine which resulted in a population deficit of 8,000,000.

A. P. Philipov accused Timoshenko of artificially linking agricultural policy to the nationality question. Yet, Philipov also conceded:

Unquestionably, there is some connection between the Soviet government’s attitude towards die various nationalities and its agricultural policy. For example, it might be shown how enforced collectivization and excessive levies on the kolkhozes caused the terrible famine in the Ukraine, how the Soviet government gave absolutely no help to the starving peasants, with the result that several million died of hunger, and, finally how it resettled peasants from Great Russia in the depopulated Ukrainian villages. Only those who personally witnessed the dying off of the Ukrainian peasants can fully appreciate the disastrous consequences of forced collectivization. For one, I visited the Poltava region five years after the 1933 famine and saw many villages where, despite colonization from the north, not a soul was living. 66

While denying that the Famine had anything to do with nationality policy, Philipov also criticized Timoshenko’s claim that the Famine was responsible for a population deficit of 8,000,000. According to Philipov the figure was too low and ought to be between 14 and 15 million. 67

Yet, despite this exchange, which reflected a joint acknowledgement of mortality in the millions because of the Man-Made Famine, Sovietologists published nothing more on the subject until 1964. No reference to this particular discussion is found in scholarly literature.

With Ukrainians it was a different matter. In 1958, Vsevolod Holubnychy also published an essay in Ukrainian on what had caused the Famine. Editor of Vpered (Forward), organ of the left wing of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party, Holubnychy represented the farthest left current in the Ukrainian emigration of the day. His knowledge and ability to use Soviet sources critically was unrivaled, and his work has deeply influenced virtually all serious students of Soviet Ukrainian affairs. Anticipating much later work on the Stalin period, Holubnychy began by pointing out that the first Five Year Plan “was, in every respect, an improvisation.” The Soviet planners of the period were obstinate and over-enthusiastic. There was an acute shortage of capital. Too many projects were begun simultaneously, and sufficient resources to finish them were lacking. The price of wheat, which the USSR exported in order to pay for its imports of foreign machinery, fell from 8.63 rubles per hundredweight in 1929 to 2.57 rubles in 1933, while prices for the machinery Stalin purchased rose by 55%. At the same time, Ukraine’s agricultural burden was out of proportion to what it produced. Holubnychy wrote:

That Ukraine was being exploited directly at this time can be seen from the fact that, while the total grain harvest in Ukraine amounted to only 27% of the All-Union harvest in 1930, the consignment of grain in Ukraine accounted for 38% of the grain consigned in the entire Soviet Union in 1930. 68

66 A.P. Philipov, “Comments of Professor Tismoshenko’s Report,” Report on the Soviet Union in 1956, p. 209.

67 Ibid., p. 213.

68 Vsevolod Holubnychny, “The Causes of the Famine of 1932-33,” Meta, II:2, Winter 1079, pp. 22-23. The original appeared in Vpered, 1958, No, 10.